A/N: We're back!
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The final mission coordinates took some time to arrive.
In the meantime, Tarrah brought the Ebon Hawk back to Manaan and handed in Vorn's commlink at the docking bay, earning her an uncharacteristically savage grin from Hulas. In return, he'd handed over her latest prize: a pair of highly sophisticated set of combat gloves and gauntlets fitted for Tarrah's arms, each one equipped with a heavily modified set of repulsorlift emitters. They looked quite similar to Eriadu Strength Amplifiers, but with the amplified output and improved shielding mechanisms, these were much more powerful.
"They're GenoHaradan power gloves," Hulas explained. "The property of only our very best agents: you will find that they will serve you well as tools of assassination – or of brute force combat."
Pity you didn't give me the damn things before you pitted me against Vorn, Tarrah thought irritably, but said nothing as Hulas vanished back into the corridors of Ahto City.
When no broadcast had been forthcoming from the GenoHaradan after about twenty-four hours, Tarrah had decided to busy herself with all the work that Manaan had to offer her, partly out of obligation but mostly because she desperately needed to do something that didn't remind her of all the assassinations she'd just had to commit.
Thankfully, Roland Wan still had his mission for the Republic that needed to be completed, so she'd made her way back to the Republic embassy for the first time in days and presented herself to the ambassador without delay: she'd taken part in the interrogation of the Sith prisoner, dosed him with enough drugs to leave the poor bastard's brain orbiting Coruscant, and managed to successfully wring the needed information out of him.
Tarrah hadn't even minded that the next thing on the agenda was a visit to the Sith Embassy, which was guaranteed to end in chaos, bloodshed, and probably some very tense negotiations with the Selkath. Frankly, as long as it was a distraction from the nerve-wracking assassinations and the equally nerve-wracking secrecy of her work for the GenoHaradan, she'd gladly fling herself into that particular nest of vipers. Besides, with Carth and Bastila having volunteered to join her and T3 tagging along as tech support, this particular mission was guaranteed to be a thousand times easier.
It took almost an hour to make her way through the base's defenders, kill any Dark Jedi that tried to stop them, rescue the captive Selkath children, resolve an absolute catastrophe of plumbing that made Tarrah want to hunt down the designer of the godawful base and have T3 repeatedly reverse over their bare toes, and finally uncover the probe data that they'd been sent after. Next to all that, being put on trial by the Selkath and having to experience the tongue-chewing irritation of Manaan's courts from the opposite angle was easy street by comparison. After all, the trial was over from the moment she was allowed to present the evidence that she'd looted from the base.
Of course, the Republic embassy had asked her to wait until next morning before presenting herself with the data, if only so the political atmosphere had at least enough time to settle – because everyone liked making her wait, it seemed. With little else to do but retreat to the Ebon Hawk for a few hours of shut-eye, Tarrah checked her datapad for any sign of Hulas' broadcast that evening and the morning that followed, only to be once again met with a stubborn wall of silence, unintentionally proving her point.
Fresh out of ideas on how to advance the agenda of the month, Tarrah shambled back to the embassy with the probe data in tow. Next thing she knew, Roland Wan was telling her all about the Republic's secret plans to harvest kolto straight from the source, about how their base in the Hrakert Rift had gone silent, along with the Republic troops sent after it, the mercenaries sent after them, and the probe droid that had been sent after them before being picked up by the Sith. Most importantly, he told her of the ancient ruins that had been discovered by the base personnel in their harvesting efforts, ruins that could have only been the ancient Star Map – for what other ancient artefact of non-Selkath design could have been found so deep beneath the waves?
And when Roland Wan finally explained that, if the situation was to be resolved and the Star Map found, he needed her to descend to the Hrakert Station aboard a submersible with only the crew of the Ebon Hawk to support her – with no backup, no official presence, and no chance for rescue without violating plausible deniability – Tarrah just smiled despairingly and remarked, "I'm in."
After all, it wasn't as if she had any better ideas.
So, fantasizing about all the things she could do with a crack squad of GenoHaradan killers at her back, she'd descended into the depths of Manaan's darkest ocean abyss, hoping it would all be over in the space of an hour.
She'd emerged roughly twenty-four hours later, pale, weary, shark-bitten, and still trembling despite her best efforts to claw her way back to the serenity of the Light. Yes, she'd somehow managed to resolve the situation without poisoning the environment or doing any permanent damage to the facility and had even managed to avoid triggering an intergalactic incident, but that didn't mean she was in any hurry to look back on anything that happened down there with anything other than a mixture of cringing horror and immediate alcoholism. Force only knew she needed a few large ones before she could explain herself to both the Republic and the local court.
Between the talking lockers, hordes of poison-clawed Selkath gone mad, the claustrophobic corridors, the suit-soiling jaunts across the ocean floor, the swarming firaxan sharks, the scientists trying to kill her in fits of paranoia, the giant sea monster, the near-overwhelming temptation to take the poisonous shortcut, the unnecessarily complicated mechanisms for overloading the harvester, and the nagging visions of everything that could have gone wrong, Tarrah would have been very happy if she'd never had to set foot in anything deeper than a puddle ever again. It was like the aftermath of her visit to Tatooine, only in reverse.
Frankly, once the pissed-off Selkath judges had started demanding answers, it had taken every last drop of willpower in Tarrah's body not to start claiming that she'd committed an obscene act on something culturally significant, just so that she'd never have to put up with Manaan ever again, though that may have been the fourth glass of hooch in her system talking.
But against all expectations, everything had gone well: the Republic was satisfied with the results, the Selkath remained on the side of the Republic, and the Sith had been made to look as evil as possible thanks in no small part due to a series of escapades that were entirely their fault. Plus, Tarrah had managed to walk away from the mess without being banned from the planet… but frankly, she'd have been much happier if she'd pissed off the wrong judge and gotten herself exiled from Manaan forever.
She was tired of Ahto City, with its barely restrained hostility and nerve-wracking instability, with its pomposity and pretentions to peacefulness, with its secrets and skulduggery, and above all else, its utter lack of tolerance. She never wanted to see Manaan again until such time as she grew gills and met the Selkath who weren't involved in the kolto trade, if only because dealing in kolto seemed to turn everyone working with it into a complete and total scumbag.
So, when Hulas' broadcast finally arrived and pointed her in the direction of Kashyyyk, Tarrah let out a strangled cry of joy and relief, and immediately buried her face in her pillow to stop anyone from wondering about the noise.
It didn't matter that Kashyyyk was an untamed forest infested with monsters, or that the planet had seen more than its fair share of exploiters and bureaucrats thanks to Czerka Corporation. Anything, including the hostility of the Wookiee villages, the colonial smugness of Czerka's outposts, or even the lightless hell of the Shadowlands would have been better than spending another day labouring in the diplomatic maelstrom of Manaan. At least nobody had been telling her to mind her manners on Kashyyyk in case it jeopardized the Republic war effort.
As soon as the last of the supplies had been loaded onto the Ebon Hawk, Tarrah had set the coordinates directly for Kashyyyk, not even caring that both Carth and Bastila were looking askance at her for not heading to Korriban as intended. That could wait until the last of her work for the GenoHaradan was done and she had an army of spies and assassins to scout out the Sith planet well in advance.
It probably wouldn't take too long, and certainly wouldn't be too difficult. After all, she'd already spent the last few days caught in the endless thornbushes of Selkath politics or the nightmarish realm of the Hrakert Rift. What could possibly be worse than that?
When the mission briefing finally arrived, Hulas looked even more anxious than ever before. It was hard to accurately read his emotions over a hologram, given that the Force rarely interacted well with technology, but if Tarrah's experience with people from all over the galaxy was any judge, the Rodian looked excited, both with eagerness and with apprehension. By now, the familiar smile on his face was maintained only through reflex, and his usual affability was at its most brittle and superficial.
All things considered, it was a wonder that the spindly bastard could even sit still long enough to deliver a briefing, but sit still he did.
"Welcome to Kasshykkk, Operative," he said, his voice terser and harsher than ever. There was no smile on his dial this time around, and despite the typically professional tone of voice, he looked so nervous that Tarrah half expected someone to start searching his luggage for drugs in mid-conversation.
"This will be your final mission before the Overseers grant you the privilege of membership," he plunged on, "but I wouldn't celebrate just yet if I were you, as this will undoubtedly be the most arduous of them all."
He took a deep breath, sparing one last nervous glance around the room before continuing.
"Your target is Rulan Prolik, one of the deadliest and most enigmatic assassins in the galaxy. His true appearance, past, planet of origin, age, and species have yet to be determined. Even his sex remains ambiguous, and we only loosely classify him as a male because he seems to prefer male identities. What we have been able to confirm is that he is single-handedly responsible for some of the most brutal gangland killings in the last hundred standard years. The fatal mauling of Grottugura the Hutt by a rabid beast from his personal menagerie, the slaughter of an entire Czerka garrison and its rogue commander on Ord Ibanna, even the extinction of an entire House of Alderaan… they were all committed by Rulan."
As if not trusting Tarrah to believe that any of this was possible, a series of crime scene holographs flickered onto the datapad's screen next to Hulas' increasingly pallid face, many of them quite old and well-preserved. Most of them seemed to depict a huge number of sapient beings killed or even torn to bloody shreds as if by some rabid animal, and after the fifth or sixth grisly shot, even Tarrah had to admit that it would have been difficult to accept the evidence of a single killer at work if she hadn't been so involved with both the Force and the GenoHaradan over the course of the last few months.
"Rulan's effectiveness as an assassin is due entirely to his ability to shapeshift," Hulas continued gravely. "We don't know if this is an ability inherent to his species, a mutant trait unique to him, or the result of rare alien technology. However, all the evidence agrees that he's capable of assuming an incredible range of shapes: his known human disguises alone could easily crew their own flagship, and he's been observed impersonating Jawas, Paaerdugs, and even Hutts. In the field, he has become an impressive array of animals from hawk-bats to kath hounds, though thankfully never anything rancor-sized… that we know of. At times, he's even been observed taking the forms of inanimate objects like furniture, household decorations, shrubbery, boulders, trees, sometimes even the ground beneath his target's feet. We still don't know the full range of his powers, though we can only hope that there is some limitation on size and strength… but unfortunately, we can confirm his limitations don't lie in his acting ability."
That anxious glance around the room again, followed closely by a quick montage of the various identities that Rulan had adopted over the decades. Hulas hadn't been joking, either: the confirmed human forms alone numbered at least eighty to a hundred people, and they were outnumbered by the many hundreds of non-human, non-sentient, or inanimate shapes that Rulan had assumed in his century-long career… assuming, of course, that his career really was limited to a hundred years. For all they knew, he could be even older than that.
"Under normal circumstances, we would have been inclined to either leave him to his own devices or recruit him… but unfortunately, analysis of his movements suggests that Rulan is no longer confining his career to the Outer Rim territories: seeking greater profits and greater thrills, he's set his sights on the Core Worlds in pursuit of the galaxy's wealthiest clientele. A near-limitless shapeshifting assassin would be nothing short of cataclysmic if ever unleashed on Coruscant, especially if he happened to acquire a senator of true ambition as a client. Nobody would be beyond his reach – not the Senate, not the Jedi, not even the Supreme Chancellor."
There was a pause, as Hulas appeared to brace himself for the worst.
"So, for the sake of the Republic, the hunter must become the hunted."
He glanced around the room, as if expecting Rulan to appear out of nowhere and attack him the moment he dared to issue a threat against him. Then, as if encouraged by the lack of a violent response, he plunged onwards.
"Fortunately, Rulan has a major limitation concerning technology, for though he can impersonate objects and even produce weapons from his own body, he cannot replicate energy weapons or engines, so he still requires the use of a starship in order to travel from planet to planet, hence how we've been able to track him down: one of his old identities turned up on an automated guest register at the Czerka colony on Kashyyyk, easily recognized by the fact that it hasn't aged in the twenty-seven years since it was last used."
A quick snapshot of the identity in question flickered onto the screen: a handsome, dark-skinned human, he looked as if he'd just walked out of a fashion catalogue, and for all Tarrah knew, he had. After all, there was no telling just where this shapeshifter got his shapes from.
"Much like Vorn Dasraad, Rulan enjoys hunting when not on assassination contracts, and the notoriously hostile wildlife of Kashyyyk's Shadowlands would have been irresistible to him. As you've visited this area before, I won't lie about your chances or pretend that your experience will make any difference to the mission: finding any target in a region as vast and dangerous as the Shadowlands would be a serious challenge, but finding a shapeshifter under the same conditions would be borderline impossible."
Hulas paused, and then exhaled very deeply, as if struggling to force pessimism out of his body with every atom of air leaving his lungs.
"Fortunately," he continued, "we have been able to assemble a psychological profile that may aid you in identifying the target: arrogant, manipulative, and entirely without empathy, Rulan possesses a hunger for stimulation and violence which he satisfies through crime, most commonly via highly sadistic games that exceed even Vorn's acts of torture in sheer cruelty. Surviving records indicate that he takes great delight in targeting groups so that he can observe their growing fear as he picks them off one by one, usually mangling the bodies so he can terrify the survivors even further. More worryingly, autopsies of the bodies suggest that he occasionally eats his victims, and not just for the purposes of psychological warfare, either.
"Bearing this in mind, you may want to ask the local tribes about any recent hunting parties that have failed to return from the depths. Once you've reached the Shadowlands, look for fresh corpses and keep an eye out for any life-forms straying close to the carnage with no fear of any of the hostile fauna. Though our sources confirm that Rulan is capable of dispatching targets with incredible displays of violence, his first preferred option is invariably stealth, so don't expect him to reveal himself unless you can unmask him. Remember, Rulan is a glutton for entertainment, no matter how grotesque or dangerous, so you want him to show himself long enough to fight you, he'll want you to be entertaining – and that'll mean proving you can see through his disguises. Once he's unmasked, unfortunately, the rest will be up to you and your commendable talent for violence.
"As soon as Rulan is dead, we'll need you to bring back as much of his body as possible: the Overseers wish to learn more about this unique competitor, ideally so that we can develop countermeasures that can prevent any of his kind from opposing us in the future. We've provided you with a stasis container to ensure that his remains are preserved until they can be properly analysed; you'll find it in your ship's cargo hold. Once it's occupied with Rulan's remains, leave the container with me: I will ensure his body makes it to the lab."
Hulas took a deep breath, seeming graver than ever before, and when he spoke again, there was a harsh edge to his voice, something sharp and vicious in his tone that made the jovial Rodian look downright menacing, to the point that even Tarrah couldn't help but notice the serrated blade half-heartedly concealed behind every word he spoke.
"This is our best opportunity to eliminate Rulan, operative," he said grimly. "He has his own ship docked at one of the quieter landing pads, and if he leaves the planet for a more densely populated area, we may never be able to find him again, so your first priority should be to ensure that he never makes it back to his ship, much less off Kashyyyk. Return to Manaan with his body – or not at all.
"Don't. Fail."
Frankly, Tarrah wasn't sure what was creepier: Kashyyyk at night, or the fact that the GenoHaradan had somehow been able to sneak the stasis capsule aboard without anyone noticing. It was doubtlessly a testament to the strength and reliability of GenoHaradan stealth field units, but it was also a terrifying reminder that none the Ebon Hawk's perimeter sensors, proximity alarms, and even the internal motion detectors had been able to pick up any sign of whoever had planted the capsule here.
She couldn't even figure out when it had happened: perhaps the delivery had been made while Tarrah had been scraping out the bowels of Hrakert station, or perhaps the capsule had always been there from the moment Hulas had chosen Tarrah as a prospective member of the GenoHaradan, hidden away amidst all the other crates and barrels in the hold and easily overlooked, just waiting for Tarrah to prove herself worthy of using it against the GenoHaradan's enemies.
Just as well they're on my side, she thought. Or I'm on their side. Or whatever.
Strapping the barrel-sized stasis capsule to her back, she set off down the Ebon Hawk's ramp with her lightsabre and GenoHaradan gear at the ready, trying not to pay too much attention to the questioning stares of the crew.
By now, it seemed that just about everyone was aware of her inexplicable disappearances from the ship, especially after the catastrophe on Tatooine, though everyone apart from Juhani and Jolee had been tiptoeing around actually confronting her about it. All of them had their reasons, of course: Carth didn't fully trust her anyway, Bastila's confidence was faltering, the droids weren't programmed to question their master, Mission seemed to trust Tarrah to deal with her own problems, loyalty prevented Zaalbar from prying too deeply, and Canderous prized self-reliance too much to question Tarrah's need to wander the wilderness on secret missions.
Under normal circumstances, Tarrah would have left under cover of a stealth field, but unfortunately, she wasn't used to hauling cargo while in stealth, so the capsule was too bulky for her to carry without accidentally banging it against the bulkhead: it would have been about as stealthy as a drunken nerf. In the end, all she could do was slink out of the ship and do her best not to cast any guilty looks over her shoulder.
Before she left, though, a last-second bout of paranoia inspired her to order HK-47 and T3 to keep the ship's doors locked at all times and not to open it to anyone – not even Tarrah herself – if they didn't know the password (in this case, "meatbag"). It would have doubtlessly looked insane to the crew, but if Tarrah was up against a shapeshifter, she needed to keep the rest of the crew safe in case Rulan got any ideas.
Outside, the ruined Czerka landing pad was dark and deserted except for the few Wookiee guards left behind just in case Czerka tried to reclaim their colony. Some of them nodded at Tarrah as she passed, but otherwise, they paid her little mind, and Tarrah didn't bother them: after all, they'd been stationed up on the platform, well away from any new developments in the lower reaches of the forest. So, she strode right past them, occasionally glancing back along the walkway just to make sure that none of her crew had decided to follow her – until at last, the landing pad disappeared behind the trunk of the tree it had been built upon, and the Ebon Hawk vanished out of sight and mind.
Tarrah's first port of call was one of the other landing pads, where she could hopefully find Rulan's ship. Fortunately, it didn't take too long to find: after all, Czerka's employees and customers had run for their lives when the Wookiee revolution had arrived on their doorstep, and there was only one other occupied landing pad on the entire colony, a good two kilometres from Tarrah's landing site.
The ship docked on it was a crescent-shaped scouting vessel with a glossy pale-grey paint job, an eerily graceful scimitar of a sloop, clearly designed for speed and stealth above all else.
According to the registry information left in the dock's computers, it was called the Ashen Steed… and to Tarrah's surprise, the dock computer had flagged it as stolen property, having apparently recognized the name and ID from a holonews report of a Czerka starship stolen from a company space station above Mon Gazza about five weeks ago. In an amusing twist, the report noted that the unidentified thief had arrived on the station aboard another stolen ship, which had also been reported stolen from Taris early the month before that, and Tarisian authorities were still investigating claims that the thief had also arrived on a stolen ship. Apparently, Rulan got through starships pretty quickly.
According to the Wookiees guarding the platform, the Ashen Steed had arrived a few weeks after the revolution, and though they'd refused to allow the pilot to set foot on the Great Walkway, he hadn't seemed perturbed by the sheer number of guns pointed at him, nor by the guards' orders to leave immediately. Instead, he'd stayed just long enough for an automated camera to get a picture of him standing by the ramp of his ship, before inexplicably vanishing off the platform the moment the guards had taken their eyes off him, seemingly oblivious to the fact that a slicer had remotely hacked into Czerka's systems from orbit and sent the picture straight to Hulas.
The Wookiee guards had not known what to make of it, but though a few of them were experienced enough with offworld machinery, they'd decided not to meddle with the Ashen Steed, not once they'd caught the smell layering the ship's now-closed ramp. All were veterans of battles with Czerka forces and Trandoshan pelt-collectors and monsters from the Shadowlands and gods only knew what else… but there was something about the stolen scoutship and its pilot that terrified even them, something that went beyond even the reek of decomposition from within.
But Tarrah had always been too curious for her own good, so with the Wookiees keeping their bowcasters firmly trained on the ship, she'd sliced the door controls and crept inside.
The Ashen Steed's interior was surprisingly plush by scoutship standards: though the ship itself was only half the size of the Ebon Hawk, the crew quarters were large enough for at least two additional crewmembers, equipped with a row of heavily cushioned couches built into the wall, a king-sized cot with fiery-orange blankets, a carpeted floor, a top-of-the-line holo-entertainment system, a ludicrously powerful communications transmitter, a bathroom that would have looked more at home on a luxury starcruiser, and a small but capacious cargo hold on the lower deck. If this really was a scouting vessel, Tarrah could only assume that it had been modified to serve as a retirement gift for some Czerka executive with pretensions of pioneering before Rulan had stolen it.
But despite the luxurious trappings, there was no mistaking the fact that there was something horribly wrong with it all. The ship obviously hadn't been cleaned since Rulan had stolen it, and it didn't take long for Tarrah to find the first of many bloodstains…. and they were all over the place, splattered on the walls, dripped onto the bedsheets, pooled on the couch upholstery, soaked into the carpets, and smeared along the ladder leading down to the cargo hold, most of it only hidden by strategically placed throw rugs and wall decorations.
The only thing more omnipresent than the stains was the smell of decay that the Wookiees had mentioned: every centimetre of the ship's interior reeked of rotten meat and old blood, like a neglected abattoir roasting in summer heat, like an abandoned hospital overflowing with putrefying corpses. And there was something else beneath the stink, something that could have only been detected through the Force, a deep and malignant sense of playfulness and appetite that made Tarrah think of the Dark Side more than anything else.
The smell was even stronger on the lower deck, and as Tarrah stepped into the cargo hold, it became almost overpowering; the final source of it turned out to be from the back of the hold, behind the dwindling supply crates, where several human-sized cages hung from the ceiling, all of them absolutely caked with gore. Though no bodies remained in the cages, shreds of decomposing flesh littered the floor of each one, either removed deliberately over the course of some hideous act of torture, or accidentally peeled off while Rulan had been dragging the prisoners from their cages by brute force.
Behind them, a huge chest-style refrigeration unit sat against the wall. Tarrah could already tell what it contained long before she opened the lid: after all, even the most voracious predators tired of eating rotten meat. What briefly took her aback was the fact that quite a few of the carcasses inside were still wearing Czerka uniforms, and one dismembered torso even wore the remains of an executive's suit. Perhaps this was the intended owner of the ship, kidnapped, killed, and butchered so that Rulan could assume his identity and make off with his retirement present a few years early. Tarrah couldn't know for sure, and frankly, there was only so much she wanted to know: she'd seen enough already.
So, sidestepping the depleted crates of five-star ration packs, she clambered back to the deck and made for the exit. However, as she left, she couldn't help but spare a glance in the direction of the comms unit: machines as powerful these usually had a remote access module so that their overprivileged users could broadcast out into the galaxy from virtually anywhere in the planet… but the slot where the remote should have been had been left empty.
Either Rulan was planning to call for help if anything went wrong on his hunt… or this was part of a more complicated gambit: perhaps he could remote control the ship itself, trigger the autopilot to pick him up? Or had he been calling someone out there in the cosmos? It was impossible to tell, and despite Tarrah's best efforts, the Force offered no insights. All she knew for a fact was that Rulan couldn't be allowed to call for a rescue or to escape the planet.
As soon as she'd left the ship, she disabled the ship's communication dish and engines with a few brisk swings of her lightsabre, then plunged onwards, eager to get the mission over with as quickly as possible.
Thankfully, her next port of call was Rwookrrorro, and though the village was still understandably chilly towards offworlders, they gave her permission to move around the area at will, and Freyyr was at least grateful enough for her past assistance to help in whatever way he could… and as luck would have it, he had exactly the eyewitness report she'd been hoping for.
Around the time that Rulan had arrived on the planet, three hunters had seen "a beast of many forms" somewhere on the lower reaches of the Great Walkway, sometimes flying on batlike wings, sometimes crawling the trees on clawed limbs, sometimes scuttling across the Walkway itself like a millipede. However, its forms were all instantly distinguished by their glowing orange eyes.
When the hunters had tried to approach it, the creature had made an about face and snatched up one of the Wookiees in its talons, eating the unfortunate hunter alive before diving towards the Shadowlands far below. The survivors had immediately returned to Rwookrrorro and gathered up as many able-bodied hunters as they could for a hunt to avenge their fallen brother – to the point of gathering additional teammates from other villages when Freyyr had balked at sending too many Rwookrrorro's best warriors on a reckless mission to the Shadowlands when they needed them to keep watch for slaveers.
The final head count had been ten – six from Rwookrrorro, four from other villages. By all accounts, most of them were young, and eager to prove themselves against a legendary foe, the few experienced veterans tagging along to ensure that a potential threat to Rwookrrorro's safety would be eliminated, but neither youngsters or elders had any idea what the monster was. Nonetheless, they set off as soon as Freyyr had given them his consent to leave and descended into the depths of the Shadowlands without so much as a backward glance, promising to return with the beast's head as proof of their heroism.
That had been less than four days ago, around the time that Tarrah had been in the middle of her duel with Vorn Dasraad. None of the hunters had been seen since, and most of Rwookrrorro already feared that they'd become a victim of the very beast they'd sought to slay. Freyyr agreed with them, though he couldn't spare the hunters to retrieve their bodies, not with security so paramount.
Of course, what with the need to keep the matter a secret, Tarrah didn't tell Freyyr anything about the monster's true identity or that she was planning on assassinating him as soon as she could find him. All she could do was offer her sympathies and wish him all the best in keeping Czerka off Kashyyyk, before leaving the village as nonchalantly as she could.
After that, there was only one place to go – and by then, Tarrah was almost wishing that Freyyr had stationed a new guard on the basket elevator, if only so she'd have some company on her way down into the Shadowlands.
By that point, she wasn't afraid of being attacked by the monsters of the forest floor; after one nerve-jangling expedition to the Shadowlands, during which she'd spent half the time jumping at every noise louder than a whisper and the other half being attacked by everything from giant bugs to legendary Jedi-killing monsters, there wasn't much that was left to be afraid of down there. Besides, after nearly a full day spent scuttling around in the near-lightless depths of the Hrakert Rift with only a sonic emitter between her and a very messy death, her sense of fear was pretty much worn out by now. She wasn't even scared of being ambushed while lowering the basket, if only because she knew that the worst-case scenario was for the rope to snap, in which case she'd die on impact and wouldn't even be aware of assorted monsters eating her corpse.
No, what scared Tarrah more than anything else was the prospect of being alone in the darkness. The Undercity of Taris, the Kinrath Caves, Hrakert Station, these very Shadowlands – all of them had been a trial to deal with, but at least Tarrah had been in the company of friends at the time. Now, she'd be facing the same lightless void alone, with nothing for company but her thoughts… and after everything that had happened in the last few weeks, she really wasn't comfortable being alone with those quiet, nagging doubts.
Still, she couldn't delay this any further. After all, Tarrah had been warned that Rulan wouldn't stay on the planet forever, and even though she'd done a thorough job of wrecking his ship, there was still the Ebon Hawk… and just because she'd locked the door and given the droids a password system didn't mean that the ship was safe, for the ever-helpful Hulas hadn't mentioned if the shapeshifter's gifts extended to ripping through the hull of a starship with whatever limbs he could conjure, or worse, becoming small enough to sneak aboard via the heating ducts or some other impossible entrance.
Whatever the case, she had to be quick.
So, bracing herself for the worst, she took up her post by the elevator's controls and began slowly turning the crank, lowering the humble wooden platform down the side of the colossal tree-trunk into the darkness below…
A/N: Up next... the Faceless One.
Also, canon goes completely off the rails.