Chapter 15: Apex Predators

Grievous beheld the unfolding landscape beneath them as the escape shuttle, battered now despite its heavy armour, emerged through the thick clouds of Ryloth's equatorial atmosphere. Their viewport was dominated by lush forest with a singular break in the canopy denoting a small village. Grievous had read countless frustrated reports from the Imperial occupiers of their spice-mining slaves escaping to such settlements.

"If we wish to illustrate our intolerance for rebellion, my Lord…"

The Emperor noted the remote settlement with only mild interest.

"We will pay the village a visit before we leave the planet," he agreed. "But as a matter of first priority, General…"

His gaze turned to the impenetrable forest.

"There is movement," he observed. "Beneath the canopy."


"Lyleks are the apex predator on Ryloth," Hera explained. "More dangerous than gutkurrs by a long way. They hunt in packs of hundreds and their armour is impenetrable to blaster fire. Or lightsabers," she added, with a glance back at Korkie. "You have to hit them right in the eye to hurt them. And that's no easy feat because they move about twice as fast as any humanoid."

"This sounds like a plan that will end in our gruesome deaths," Korkie observed.

"I'm not done yet!" Hera protested. "Have some faith. Twi'leks have survived alongside lyleks for millennia."

Cody had seen the blaster doors in the cave cities of northern Ryloth on his last mission to this planet. They had been so heavily fortified that Cody had assumed they had been erected against the Separatist invasion and had been surprised to learn that they pre-dated the Clone Wars, installed to keep out the fearsome lyleks. He didn't see any scope to construct such a defence amidst the jungle.

"The tribes indigenous to these equatorial regions found that the lyleks tended to avoid the very low-lying areas of the forest, particularly in the wet season."

She had been leading them steadily downhill into a misty gully.

"They realised that it's the mito-fungus that repels them. It's toxic to them. And they have an excellent sense of smell so they know to steer well clear of it."

Korkie frowned.

"It's toxic to humans too, you know. Lethal even in very small amounts."

Hera looked surprised at his concern.

"Well, yeah, I know that. Twi'leks too, sort of. But that's alright. Just don't get any in your mouths, okay?"

Hera trooped a few steps further, eyes fixed intensely on the forest floor, before halting abruptly with a cry of triumph.

"Found some!"

The fungus was a vivid orange – a blatant warning, difficult to ignore – clinging to the underside of a fallen tree.

"It used to be just as toxic to Twi'leks as humans. But the indigenous forest tribes micro-dosed it until they built up a tolerance, and then the lyleks wouldn't go near them. I've got equatorial ancestry so I should be able to tolerate a little bit orally, but there's no need. We can just use it on our skin."

Korkie flinched as Hera grasped the fungus with her bare hand and cracked it from the decaying wood.

"Are you sure it isn't absorbed through skin?"

"As long as you don't have any cuts," Hera informed them, rubbing the fungus over her own arms as though applying nothing more noxious than sunscreen.

Korkie eyed his own chest with caution.

"You probably shouldn't get it on your hands, either," Hera reasoned. "In case you touch your mouths. Let me apply it."

Cody and Korkie shared a grim look. Cody might have raised some further protest if not for the crash, then, that could only have been the escape shuttle landing in the nearby forest. Korkie checked his arms several times over, found no blemishes, and proffered them to their diminutive poison-branding Twi'lek leader.


Cham watched the landing of the Imperial escape shuttle with a twist in his gut. He had never meant to allow it to come to this. They'd had one shot, one good shot to kill the Emperor, and it had been the secretive sabotage of the Perilous. They'd never truly had the air forces to compete in a shootout with Imperial technology and it showed; he'd lost half of his starfighters on this treacherous journey down into atmosphere. And now this would become the land battle they had never prepared for. They had no troops stationed on the ground. Only a remote settlement of escaped slaves that they would endanger.

"Boss, we're going to wheel around north and take out the regional Imperial communications tower," Isval reported over the radio comms. "See if we can get them stranded here. Happy for me to proceed?"

Cham felt a pang of gratitude then for his greatest soldier and ally. Isval was the fiercest fighter he knew. And he needed to find her ferocity within himself again.

"Go ahead, Isval."

The fight was still alive. They had the advantage of home terrain if not in weaponry. Perhaps the lyleks would do the job for them. Cham pressed his finger to his radio comms.

"Pilots, we target their landing site from the air," he instructed. "That escape craft isn't capable of an atmospheric launch. And they're not going to get far on foot. Not on our planet."

And it should have been a simple military task to kill two footbound humanoids with an aerial attack force of ten starfighters, shouldn't it? A lightsaber, Cham had reasoned, no matter how expert the duellist, could not repeatedly repel starfighter-calibre blaster bolts. But he also knew, quietly, that he was kidding himself. He had fought alongside Mace Windu and had known that the brilliant soldier feared few. He knew that the shrouded, withered Emperor was stronger than any opponent he had ever faced.

But he could never have imagined this.

Cham swooped low for his attack and caught a clear view of the Emperor and his General standing amidst the felled trees and wreckage of their escape craft. Grievous wielded blades of blue and green but the Emperor nothing at all. Cham fired out a barrage of bolts and watched the Emperor raise his decrepit hands, and all of a sudden his viewport was filled with his own blaster fire, turned back at him. He swerved to avoid them but did not have even a moment of reprieve to exhale his relief at the near miss.

In nauseating defiance of every known law of flight, Cham's unscathed fighter was listing, badly, down and to his left. The Emperor's hands worked like a grotesque conductor. Cham grappled with his controls but could do nothing. The thoughts flashed uselessly through his mind. He and Hera had mended this fighter, readied it for battle. His daughter. His beautiful daughter. Who'd worked on this failing engine well past her bedtime. Who'd just wanted to bring him home safe.

His beautiful daughter.

Cham saw the grey of the sky then the green of the trees and then he saw nothing at all.


The humming and buzzing of the life within the rainforest were drowned out as they walked by the far-too-near cacophony of battle. As the drone of engines came nearer there were rumbles and crashes as though of a thunderstorm and rising pillars of smoke where starfighters had gone down. And then, Hera began to hear the insects again.

"I think they've all been-"

-shot down.

She couldn't say it. Her footsteps faltered.

"We have to focus on keeping safe," Cody stated.

But behind his firm words there was some tenderness; his hand found Hera's shoulder.

"And if we can put a lylek nest between us and the Emperor then that's a good start," Korkie agreed. "You said it was this way, Hera?"

Hera nodded, falteringly. Her eyes were stinging.

"One foot after the other," Korkie told her.

His hand, too, came to her shoulder. She walked between the two men and for the first time that day felt a child. They did not promise her that everything would be alright.

"The lyleks will be nesting in the caves, just up here," she managed.

She turned her gaze up to Korkie.

"Do you think the Emperor will follow us this way?"

The teenager shrugged.

"Honestly, Hera, I hope he doesn't follow us at all. But if he does, you've set us on the right path."

Hera nodded. One foot after another. But there was a jumping feeling and a tightness in her chest that she could not contain.

"Maybe some of them flew out to a safe landing zone," she ventured. "We've got a base a couple hundred klicks east of here where they could regroup. I didn't hear exactly how many went down…"

Her company said nothing. What was there to say?

When the first lylek appeared over the ridge Hera was grateful to see it; even with their fungal armour, it was impossible to behold a lylek without a racing heart. Hera's thoughts of crashing starfighters and the prowling Emperor melted blissfully away. Both hands tightened on her shoulders and Hera knew that Cody and Korkie felt the same thundering in their chests that she did.

The lylek stood comfortably taller than them all and broader than the three of them standing abreast. It clicked and hissed in displeasure as its frontal tentacles flickered and writhed in the space between them, reaching out ascertain their scent and withdrawing again. It took a few tentative steps back on its knife-sharp legs and curled its barbed tail defensively overhead.

Cody's voice was gravelly and uncertain.

"I know you said it won't eat us, Hera, but are you sure it won't…"

"This way," Korkie murmured. "Slowly."

They edged past the enormous insect, following Korkie in his cautious footsteps. Hundreds of lyleks were becoming visible now, their green carapaces blending with the glistening leaves. There was hissing and clicking and stamping but no pursuit.

"Did my father ever tell you about Draboon, Cody?"

Korkie's voice was soft and light but not entirely steady. Although he spoke to Cody, his eyes were fixed upon the lyle.

"My mother killed a venomite and a whole swarm pursued them. They tried to escape through the canopy but my father was bitten on the hand. He dropped her and she got this big scar on her hip that they never stopped arguing about their whole kriffing lives…"

They all flinched at a burst of sudden movement but felt no blow. Hera opened her eyes to see a frustrated lylek tear apart its smaller brother with its enormous mandibles, pincering its still writhing frame against the undergrowth as it tore the carapace from its back. Korkie gulped but carried on with his story.

"They had their first kiss that day, I'm told. It didn't go well. Dad tried to pass it off on some adverse effect of the venomite toxin but Mum of course knew that venomite toxin is only effective at the neuromuscular junction…"

Neighbouring lyleks were joining in on the carnage now. The number of eerie insectoid eyes trained on the trio was diminishing.

"If we get out of here alive," Cody vowed shakily, "I will kiss the mito-fungus."

"Only slightly less lethal than my mother after being lied to," Korkie reasoned.

They were so close, now. Slowly, slowly. One step after another. And the lyleks finally faded from view.

"Kriffing hell," Korkie breathed.

His forehead was dripping with sweat.

"The next time you choose to save all of our lives, General Hera," he breathed. "Could you please do it in a less dramatic fashion?"


Mace Windu returned to Ryloth's airspace to find the Perilous blown to pieces but no feeling of victory in the Force. He followed the flickering taillights of Imperial shuttles down to Ryloth's equatorial rainforest. The spectacular canopy was slashed ragged in several places by crashed spacecraft. The Force was tense like the clouds before an electrical storm. Sidious was not here. But nor was he far.

He landed his ship beside a starfighter that must have belonged to a soldier of the Free Ryloth Movement; its body panels were a patchwork of almost-matching replacements. The ship had crashed badly, ploughing a deep furrow into the earth. Mace clambered to find the pilot. The crash might have been bad but the pilot deserved a chance. Mace was only alive today because Ahsoka Tano had searched for him amidst the wreckage of the Anaxes. There was some faint pulse of life in the Force, spurring him onwards. He climbed the fighter's fractured wing to approach the cockpit and his breath caught in his chest.

Cham Syndulla.

The leader of the Free Ryloth Movement was slumped forward over the controls that had failed him in his violent landing. His forehead was slicked with blood and his breaths wet and ragged. Mace lifted his chin and was rewarded with the great inhalation as the Twi'lek's airway was tilted open.

"Cham, it's Mace Windu. Can you hear me?"

The Twi'lek gave a low groan. There was something reassuring about his Force presence; Mace had seen devastating brain injuries before and had felt the eerie smudging of thought and feeling as consciousness and then life slipped away. Cham wasn't like that. Mace saw glimpses of images, disjointed words, scattered but true. His hand lifted to find Mace's at his chin. He needed time to awaken but Mace was not entirely sure how much they had. He prised the roof from the cockpit with the Force and brought Cham's slowly waking body out from the wreckage, propping his body up against the own.

Fumblingly, Cham found his feet.

"Mace, I-"

He blinked his eyes open heavily.

"Where-"

"Ryloth. Equatorial forest. Pursuing the Emperor and Grievous, remember?"

Cham gave another groan and rubbed at his forehead, but managed a nod.

"Pulled me down," he mumbled. "Didn't shoot me, just pulled…"

He lifted his arm in feeble imitation.

"I didn't know, I… I never should have…"

"Our focus must lie in the present," Mace told him. "The Emperor and Grievous are loose in this forest and so are a number of their soldiers. I need to find the other survivors and get you all off-planet."

Cham grumbled his protest but did not have the strength to resist as Mace eased him down to sit on the damp forest floor.

"Korkie and Cody," he muttered.

Mace's heart jumped and tightened.

"What of them?"

"They landed first," Cham managed. "Korkie had engine troubles. They must have landed safely. Before the rest of us arrived with all the TIE fighters and got shot down."

"Then we'll find them," Mace resolved.

"They sent me their coordinates, but…"

Cham gestured haplessly at his fractured starfighter. Mace shook his head.

"We don't need their coordinates. I'll find them."

He lifted his gaze and beheld the impenetrable forest.

Korkie. Cody. Palpatine. Grievous.

Mace took a long, deep breath and cast his awareness out all around him.

Korkie. Cody. Palpatine. Grievous. And another.

"Get to my ship," Mace instructed of Cham, indicating the nearby clearing with a point of his arm. "I'll go find them and bring them back."

Cham rose, unsteadily, to his feet.

"Let me help-"

"You're concussed. You'll not be able to keep up."

Cham grimaced but could not argue the point.

"I'll find any survivors I can from nearby crash sites," he resolved, instead. "Take out any loose Imperial soldiers. There shouldn't be too many. Isval bombed the Imperial communications tower."

Mace laid a hand on his shoulder.

"Thank you, General."

With great effort and perhaps some pain, Cham returned the gesture.

"Go well, comrade."


The intermittent hissing and clicking of the lyleks carried onwards long after the vicious insects faded from view. Cody thought aloud to distract from the unsettling sound.

"From here, our two options are either walking to the village settlement to find a way out of the jungle or looping back to the site of the air battle and looking for survivors. Trouble is, there'll be Imperial soldiers doing the same thing."

"Survivors then village," Korkie declared, without a moment's deliberation. "But we're getting ahead of ourselves. We've not lost the Emperor yet."

"Can you tell where he is?" Hera asked.

Korkie grimaced but did not argue with the implication of his Force sensitivity.

"Not exactly. But I worry that he's-"

There was a strange sound then that had Cody looking to the sky for rainfall. No drops met his upturned face. The pitter-pattering sound, he realised slowly, was the sound of an entire nest of lyleks stamping their knife-sharp pincer limbs against the damp forest floor. The steady stream of sound was punctuated by the hissing and clicking of the insects as they communicated with their giant mandibles.

Korkie looked as queasy as Cody felt.

"Is that-"

"The lyleks," Cody agreed.

But Hera did not share in their primitive terror of the nearby predator.

"This is good," she told them. "This means they've found the Emperor."

"This means the Emperor is following us," Korkie countered, quickening their pace. "Come on. Hurry up. We need more distance than this."

Hera sighed but obeyed without delay.

"Two humanoids can't kill four hundred lyleks, you know," she protested, as she fell back into step with the men. "That's unheard of."

Korkie gave a tight smile and walked faster still.

"I'd be thrilled to lose the argument, Hera."


Grievous had faced Yam'rii less vicious than the lyleks of Ryloth.

"This is hardly the diplomatic reception we were expecting, my Lord," he managed, fending off a gigantic insect with each of his four 'sabers.

"Consider this a welcome party if it pleases you, General."

The Emperor was almost laconic in his movements, sweeping a horde of lyleks aside with a push in the Force and spearing another through the eye with his lightsaber.

"Or perhaps a well-deserved training exercise, after your encounter with young Kenobi."

Grievous growled his displeasure at the insult. It had been Windu, not the child, who had challenged him. The young prince of Mandalore simply seemed to have inherited his insufferable father's good fortune and had been the one to remove the limb.

"You forget that I drove the Yam'rii from my homeworld," Grievous countered, clearing a lylek with a kick of his newly-replaced foot and finally landing his free blade in another's eye.

The Emperor only looked faintly amused. He leapt, spinning, from the path of an incoming lylek with impossible speed and lanced two with fatal wounds on his landing.

"I forget nothing, General."

The pointed limb of an attacking lylek struck Grievous's chest-plate and slipped down with a horrible metallic squeal. Grievous was wracked by coughs as he plunged his lightsaber into the unbalanced creature's eye. The Emperor had given him an all but invulnerable body and yet he rotted from within.

The Emperor was not the only one amongst them to boast a long memory. Grievous would never forget that day; he saw it unwillingly, in the midst of battle. The ship implosion that should have killed him. Jedi treachery – who else? Who else would sabotage the warrior who had liberated his homeworld, who had dealt bloody justice and defeated tyranny? He felt again that horrible sinking feeling in his chest, the sheer panic that followed, from waking in a body that was not his own.

Red flashed across his vision and a lylek collapsed before him.

"Your technique becomes ever-poorer," Sidious declared with disdain. "Need I send you for further modifications, General?"

Grievous blinked effortfully and refocused upon the rainforest and crowding insects around him.

"If you see it fit, my Lord," he demurred.

What did it matter? The body was not his. It had not been his for a very long time.


The lyleks were hardly a dangerous obstacle but one that demanded sufficient attention that Sidious lost his grasp on the evasive presence he had been tracking. The boy had received decent training, then, and had perhaps not regressed as much as Sidious might have expected since the death of his father and the Jedi Order. When the gleaming exoskeletons of four hundred lyleks lay at his feet – the idiotic creatures did not know to retreat when faced with a superior warrior – Sidious reached out but could not find it.

Slippery, insolent child.

He was nearby. Certainly no more than an hour ahead of them by foot. But where exactly…

"You are not to take another of your ridiculous trophies," Sidious tutted. "We have a job to do, General."

Grievous stepped back from the exoskeleton of the queen lylek with poorly-veiled indignation.

"The child of Kenobi?" he asked.

The cyborg had few talents of note but his ability to hold a grudge was worthy of some mention.

"The child of Kenobi will come to us," Sidious declared. "You will recall that we came to Ryloth, General, not to hunt children but to destroy their freedom movement."

Grievous bowed.

"Yes, my Lord."

"To make certain the absolute authority of the Empire on Ryloth."

"Yes, my Lord."

Sidious extinguished his blade and set off down the ridge.


The only sound eerier than a nest of lyleks beholding their prey was that of a nest of lyleks rendered silent.

"They can't have, they can't-"

Hera stopped herself in her useless ramble. For they must have. A nest of lyleks when feasting was far from silent. The thought of it was dizzying and terrifying. The apex predator of Ryloth, hundreds of lyleks against the ageing Emperor and his stupid cyborg…

"Slow down."

Hera looked to Korkie with alarm; they had been hurtling forwards through the jungle as per his own instructions. Now, the teenager slowed and then stopped in his walking entirely, crouching down to the ground and closing his eyes.

"He's looking for us," he murmured.

Cody back-tracked from his position at the head of their pack, a bewildered expression upon his face. The boy's fingers brushed the muddy earth as he breathed in slow, steady waves. It was effortful, Hera realised. She had seen breathing like this when Drim had been burned in an explosive accident, with blisters rising all over his skin, before the medic had arrived with her backpack full of pain medicines.

"Korkie," Cody pressed, "Get up, we have to-"

"No!" Hera hissed.

She grabbed the clone by his wrist as he turned, perplexed and perhaps somewhat irritated, at her.

"He's concentrating," she whispered.


One of Korkie's earliest memories was of hide-and-seek in the palace of Sundari, a place that had been so spectacularly massive in his childhood so as to seem a realm of magic. He would sit very still, knees tucked to his chest, in the grand library behind an armchair or within a cupboard in the kitchen, and close his eyes and make himself small. Invisible. His mother had begged him to go a little easier on his nannies, the more sensitive of whom were on occasion driven to tears by his talent for camouflage.

The game had become more difficult hiding from his adoptive brother. They were restricted to the private wing, for starters, lest a member of the palace staff discover Obi Wan Kenobi's young Padawan running amok in brotherly antics with the Prince of Mandalore. And Anakin had not been so easily persuaded to look the other way as his nannies had been. It was his father who had first articulated the skill to Korkie.

You must build a cocoon about yourself in the Force. A blurring of your presence. And then you must drift freely away. If you can truly detach yourself, all of your focus and your energy from this place, even a Force-sensitive will be unable to find you.

Satine had bemoaned Korkie's growing prowess in becoming invisible. Obi Wan had shaken his head solemnly.

It is an important skill. We teach it to all of our younglings.

And his mother had been very upset at that, at the thought of a world in which all children must be taught to hide, and she had demanded again why the galaxy could not lay down its weapons and the usual argument had started. Korkie had come out of his nest within the linen cupboard and solemnly embraced his mother at her calf, his head leaning heavily against the woollen skirt at her thigh.

Today, Korkie might have stood taller than his mother. He couldn't be sure. She had been just marginally taller than him when he had last seen her. She had kissed him on his forehead and told him that she loved him. He had told her that they would meet again. He had perhaps known that they never would.

Korkie's fingertips brushed the rainforest floor but his soul drifted in the cocoon of his mother's arms. He reached out, wrapped Cody and Hera up with him. Gone from this grieving land. Drifting. A world away.

He had never received his Temple training. He was no Jedi. But Korkie had his tricks and he knew that the Emperor would not find them.


"He's lost us," Korkie murmured, rising to his feet.

Hera wrapped the teenager as he rose from his crouch in an ungainly embrace.

"Soldier Kryze, you're a genius!"

Korkie gave a wistful half smile as he stood to his full height. Cody could see the sobriety in his eyes.

"What is it, Korkie?"

The young man chewed at his dry and flaking lip, his eyes darting through the forest.

"The village."


Drua was making a highway for the ants, scratching a deep gorge into the earth with a stick, when the hooded figure approached. He was a human. Drua had only distant memories of humans from when she was very young in the spice mines. Those humans had been loud and angry and that's why they had run away to the jungle.

This man did not look like those humans. He was old, perhaps the oldest human she had ever seen, and he did not wear the uniform of the soldiers that she had known. Behind him stood a hulking droid. Drua had never ever seen a droid even half so big. He looked to have the eyes of a living sentient even though his body was metal. Drua did not know how that could be possible. Her heart thundered in her chest. She scrambled to her feet and clutched her stick against her chest and began to cry for her grandfather.

"Mala! Mala! Mala, come, hurry!"

The hooded figure watched her patiently, saying nothing at all. Drua heard footsteps in the silence and her grandfather was by her side, scooping her into his arms. There was the flapping of wooden doors as the neighbours came out to investigate the source of all the fuss.

The man said something in Basic. Drua didn't know much Basic yet. Her grandfather Mala said that he was too old to learn Basic and she could learn it from someone else if she ever lived in the city. Ryl was a better language, he told her. Basic was harsh and had no music to it. A Twi'lek need only speak Ryl. The language of the rainforest all around them was Ryl.

Ryl was the language in which her grandfather whispered to her now.

"I love you, Drua. You are my sun and my moon and all of my stars."

Drua didn't know why her grandfather might be telling her that. She was going to tell him that she loved him too, that he was her every flower in the rainforest. He was teaching her to name all of the flowers but she still had many to learn. Grandfather Mala said she still had hundreds to learn but Drua could not quite believe that there were so many different types of flower. She was going to tell Grandfather Mala that he was the best mother and father she could ever have asked for. But there was a flashing of red in her vision and the words never made it out.


Korkie is a hero but this chapter is heavy - I'm sorry.

Next chapter, our heroes come face to face with our villains. Drama abounds.

Thank you all for reading as always!

xx - S.