A/N: And we're back with the latest of several horror-themed chapters for October and Halloween!

Also in this chapter I begin warping canon out of shape!

Read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Blargh.


The last of the hunters was in full flight by now. It took a lot to terrify a Wookiee beyond all sanity, but by now, this one had finally crossed the threshold: there was no chance to recover from this, to rally his spirits, back himself against a tree and go out fighting – there was only blind panic, terror, and the inescapable knowledge of imminent death.

He was a young hunter, this one, too young and too callow to have been dispatched on such a hunt. He knew the Shadowlands enough to have completed his initiation rites, but he obviously hadn't seen combat against anything sapient: he was too young to have joined the battles against Trandoshans, slavers, Czerka, or anything else that could think and plan and torment. He'd known of animals that were cunning enough to set trapes and lure in prey, of course, but the prospect of being up against another sapient being hadn't occurred to him when he'd set off a few short days ago. To be fair, it hadn't occurred to the other young bravos or to the experienced hunters, or anyone on that ill-fated hunting team.

They'd simply descended into the stygian depths with the heedless courage of heroes of old. Then, as soon they'd finished clambering down from the treebound paths that only Wookiees could use, the hunting party began following the alien tracks that their quarry had left across the Shadowloands, none of them noticing the conspicuous lack of native animals hounding their footsteps, none of them realizing that every step they took was one too far.

When they finally saw their target feasting on kinrath carcasses, they'd attacked with great ferocity and cunning, with the youngest blasting it from a distance with bowcasters and the eldest charging into the fray with blades at the ready. They'd covered every possible escape route, even keeping their best shots watching the scene from the nearby tree-trunks, ready to shoot the monster down if it tried to fly away. But it didn't. Instead, it had distended into a long, sinuous worm and slithered away between their ranks, and the hunters had been left with no choice but to give chase before it escaped their reach entirely. Needless to say, they hadn't been expecting their quarry to lead them on such a cunning dance through the Shadowlands that even their best trackers had found themselves lost, nor had they expected the fleeing beast to seemingly vanish around a corner – a corner that terminated in a dead end.

Of course, they'd only known that the shapeshifter could mimic the forms of other animals; the thought that it could become a tree simply hadn't occurred to them – until later, when it was much too late for the knowledge to be of any use to them.

The hunting party had searched the area at length, heedlessly peering into the darkness for any sign of the creature's tracks. Finding none, they stormed off in a huff, intending to plant a trap that could lure their target out into the open… only for their target to reappear, darting fiercely across every potential exit from the shadowed glade they'd tracked it to, lashing out violently at any one of the team that tried to escape.

The more experienced hunters had known what to do: as soon as they'd realized that their prey was counterattacking, they'd made camp, set up shifts, readied their bowcasters, and waited for the attack. But of course, they hadn't been expecting for two of their sleeping hunters to turn up butchered and half-eaten in their sleep with the sentries on duty none the wiser.

And they certainly hadn't been expecting one of the sentries to turn on them with glowing orange eyes and erupt into its sinuous worm-like form again, slithering away into the darkness before any of the hunters could so much as reach for their weapons.

For a time, the hunting party had turned on itself, every hunter frantically accusing another of being the beast in disguise – only to be proved wrong when a tree behind them had flung itself through their ranks in a flurry of newly-formed appendages, wounding several of them but never killing any of them before the shapeshifter vanished back into the darkness.

In desperation, they'd sent three of the very best warriors among them out into the depths of the Shadowlands with the best weapons the team had at hand, hoping that surprise and brute force might win out over time-worn tactics. The plan had been for them to wait in hollow in a tree-trunk just above the campsite until the beast attacked the camp again, then lunge from the darkness and deal enough damage to cripple the monster before it could flee again, giving the rest of the hunting party enough time to surround and kill it once and for all.

That night, though, the monster hadn't taken the bait and hadn't attacked the camp. Instead, there'd been a great chorus of howls and screams from above them, followed by the all-too-recognizable sounds of something eating, and not one member of the hunting party had been able to find a minute of sleep that terrible night. The following morning, the last surviving member of the ambushers had stumbled into the half-light, now missing one arm, both eyes, and most of the flesh on his back, his remaining fur soaked in blood and a trail of shredded flesh in his wake.

"I saw it," he'd gasped through bloodied lips. "I saw the one who hunts us. I was close enough to see it when it was between forms. It had no face, I tell you. No face."

And then he'd died. Less than a minute after they'd taken their eyes off him, his body was gone. But the name had stuck, and before they knew it, the entire hunting party had started calling the monster "The Faceless One," as if hoping that by giving the nightmare a name they might be able to sap its power somehow.

It hadn't worked.

The Faceless One had only grown more voracious in the nights that had followed, and more determined to cut off every avenue of escape. Every time they'd tried to clamber up the trees to the safety of the light, the Faceless One had lunged out of nowhere and dragged them screaming back down to the ground. Every time they'd tried to make a break for the nearest basket, the Faceless One had emerged from the undergrowth in some hideous new form and warded them off with teeth and talons and tentacles and spirits only knew what else. And at night, when the hunting party had no choice but to sleep, the Faceless One had crept past the sentries in the form of a friend and butchered another of them in their sleep. They'd tried to take note of the first few victims out of respect for the dead and a rapidly-fading hope of returning home alive, but after they'd discovered the chewed remains of Grarwwaar's upper body smeared against the roots of a tree one lightless morning, they'd realized there wasn't much point in keeping score – and they'd lost their only datapad not long after that, anyway.

Eventually, there'd been only two of them left: one experienced veteran and one novice hunter barely more than a boy. They'd given up on making camp, instead trying to remain hidden against all odds, creeping through the dense undergrowth in the dim hope that the Faceless One wouldn't be able to find them there as they painstakingly crept towards the nearest basket. For a time, it had almost worked: the veteran had been a perfect father to the terrified novice in that moment, spurring on the young Wookiee with soft entreaties and reminders that his ancestors were still expecting him to be strong, that the spirits of the forest would want him to seek an opportunity to make things right, that his family needed him to live so that they could be safe from the Faceless One's hunger.

And then, less than half a mile from the basket, the veteran had inexplicably vanished. He could have been snatched by the Faceless One's talons from above, or he could have been dragged into the monster's gaping maw from below, or perhaps he had been the Faceless One all along and been playing the young hunter like a puppet ever since the real veteran had been killed.

After that, the young hunter had broken. What else was there to do? His friends were dead, he was lost in the Shadowlands, his only friend had been killed and eaten, and he was almost certainly doomed to die. All he could do now was run and cry and beg all the spirits for a chance to escape this terrible fate, fleeing blindly through the Shadowlands in a panic – too afraid to stop running, too afraid to look back.

And after perhaps an hour of terrified flight across the lightless forest, he heard a great screaming from the forest ahead of him, the scream of another Wookiee – a female. He wasn't sure if the sound was real until she finally crashed into him, too afraid to be a real threat, too clumsy to be the Faceless One; she begged for mercy, promising him her hand in marriage, everything her tribe possessed, and anything under the sun if he would only save her.

He was quick to prove himself to her as a hunter and warrior of his tribe, promising to protect her even though he had no idea how to protect himself in this moment, all but flexing his muscles in the moment. For the next few minutes, the scrawny post-adolescent fuzzball had squarely positioned the young female behind him and took a stand against the darkness, bowcaster in his hand, sword in readiness, fully prepared to bring down the Faceless One and (more importantly) impress this mysterious female who'd appeared out of nowhere…

He had just enough time to realize his mistake before a pair of huge jaws had surged out of nowhere and bitten him clean in two.

The last thing the young hunter had seen, before his consciousness mercifully fled, was the female of his dreams looking on with hungry orange eyes as her lower body – now a glistening cluster of fanged mouths – began to slowly eat him one bite at a time…


And when it was all over, Rulan Prolik oozed and warped and rippled in delight at completion of such a glorious feast as he licked the gore from his assorted limbs.

But despite his joy, he couldn't help but wish above all else that it could have lasted just a little while longer. Alas, it was the nature of both a hunt and a feast to be transitory, but he always did his best to prolong his indulgence in whatever way he could, even if it meant prolonging his hunger as well.

It hadn't always been this way, of course, since…

How long had it been? A hundred years? Three hundred? Five hundred? It was almost impossible to tell how long it had been since Rulan had first learned to turn his meals into true games, because as much as he tried to recall all his glorious repasts in perfect detail, he couldn't keep them from blending, melding, merging, and becoming indistinguishable in the great cauldron of his thoughts.

But though his meals could not all be enshrined in memory, there were things he could remember.


He remembered Sh'shuun, its lush verdant rainforests, mist-shrouded mountains, and the secret glades where his people had gathered – places unknown even to the stalk-eyed explorers said to have visited the planet millennia before. He remembered growing up, learning to change for the first time, to alter the particulars of the humanoid form so that he could be shorter or taller, give himself tentacular limbs or skin like armour. He remembered hunting alongside others of his kind and wondering why they were so timid, even as others wanted to know why he was so bold.

"Why can't you hide, Rulan?" they'd asked him. "It's our way to conceal ourselves when danger looms, so why do you seem so anxious to meet it? What is it that makes you want to bait the deadliest hunters and steal the meat from their dens when it could bring disaster upon the heads of your family and people alike? Why is it that you don't seem to understand fear?!"

And Rulan had never found an answer for them, or at least, none that he could remember. Instead, he remembered the day when the hunts and games were no longer enough for him: neither the thrill of the chase or the meals he could win were enough to satisfy his desires… and like so many others of his kind, he'd turned his eyes to the stars.

Of course, visitors from other words had set foot on Sh'shuun before, and though most had crashed and left only useless wreckage behind, a few had been wounded in other incidents and landed on the planet in the hope of recovering away from the prying eyes of the galaxy at large – only to die of their injuries anyway. In their wake, they left their ships undamaged, just waiting for someone to take a seat in the cockpits. Over the centuries, a handful of his kind had left the planet aboard such vessels with the blessing of their elders and scholars. After all, they could not understand boldness, but they could certainly understand curiosity – for curiosity was every bit as integral as timidity to a shapeshifter (or as boldness, in Rulan's case).

So, as soon as he was old enough to have mastered the art of assuming nonhumanoid forms – about two hundred and fifty years of age, if memory served – Rulan had slipped aboard one such ship and catapulted himself into the great unknown.

He remembered his travels across the galaxy only dimly, for his adventures in those days were worth so very little compared to the joys he knew in his new life, but he recalled visiting everywhere from Coruscant to Ando Prime and impersonating everything from human diplomats to wild animals. In fact, the only place he'd avoided was the Jedi Temple, and that was only because his people had learned the hard way that Jedi could see through their disguises sooner or later.

Truth be told, he didn't know what he'd been doing back then apart from sightseeing and scrumping, but it probably hadn't been important…

Up until the day he met the Sith for the first time.

The Sith of today were nothing but children and pretenders compared to those that had ruled over Korriban centuries before Malak's bastard brood had claimed the planet as their glorified training ground. In those days, it had been the seat of power for entire dynasties of warlords, sorcerers, and prophets of the Dark Side who had ruled that shadowy world and so many others, most of them known only to the current generation through the tombs they'd left in the Valley of the Dark Lords. Malak and his army of sycophants tried so hard to ape the glories of the past, but in truth, they couldn't even aspire to mimic Revan, and their efforts to style themselves as the natural inheritors of Ajunta Pall's legacy only made them look like infants clowning around in their parents' clothes.

In the last few years, when he'd been too sated for his own good, Rulan had almost been tempted to show himself to that mausoleum they called the Sith Academy, just to glut himself on their shock when he told them that he'd had the privilege of meeting one of the greatest Dark Lords in the flesh.

Yes, he remembered Naga Sadow all too well.

Drawn in by the chaos and treachery of the Sith court, Rulan had lived within that early Sith Empire, disguised as a humble functionary, one too low and nondescript for the notoriously brutal Sith Masters to use as a punching bag. From the shadows behind their thrones, he had borne witness to the funeral of the great Marka Ragnos, Ludo Kressh's first fall from power, Naga Sadow's ascendance to the role of Dark Lord of the Sith and even the great war between the Sith and the Republic. Most of this adventure had been driven by little more than a desire to observe the wonders and horrors of that strange, magnificent realm, though he had indulged a little in the war as well – but never enough to reveal the full extent of his powers to the Sith, of course.

Of course, the sanest option would have been to stay with Ludo Kressh when he'd forced Sadow out of power and claimed the mantle of Dark Lord. After all, Sadow had proved himself a failure in the art of conquest, more suited to intrigue and experimentation than warfare, and experience had taught him not to side with the losers in a Sith conflict, for even if one survived the attacks by the victorious rivals, the vanquished would not be shy about taking out their frustrations on their underlings.

But something about the glowering, goateed, near-reptilian sorcerer of the Dark Side drew Rulan in. And so, he joined Sadow in exile, disguised as one of his remaining Massassi workers, and settled with him in the wilderness of Yavin IV – a world that was to become Sadow's palace, monument, tomb… and laboratory.

It wasn't long before this proved to be a mistake, however. Rulan couldn't recall what he'd done to draw his master's suspicions, but it was enough for him to be captured the moment he let his disguise slip – though in this case "captured" meant being beaten to the ground by a horde of Massassi and dragged off to a cage in their master's laboratory.

And as soon as Naga Sadow realized the nature of the being he'd imprisoned, he became another of the exiled Dark Lord's experiments in Sith Alchemy. The pain had been nothing short of incredible, as was the humiliation of being imprisoned, not to mention the sense of distortion and bewilderment… but at least he retained his mind, unlike some of Sadow's experiments, and who could argue with the most positive of his results?

Sadow had sought to enhance much about Rulan over the course of his experiments, from the strength of his shapeshifting powers to basic matters of longevity, though Rulan could not say what the old sorcerer had hoped to achieve: perhaps he'd simply wanted to prove that he had the power to outdo what evolution had brought into being in Rulan and his people, maybe he'd hoped to improve Rulan until he could be used as a weapon against his rivals among the Sith, or perhaps he'd intended to build a template for an army he could field in some future war against the Republic.

But did it matter? The experiment had been a success regardless of intent, and Sadow had marvelled at how the intruder who had once only been able to become a Hutt only through sheer willpower could now become almost as big as a Rancor without even trying, his shapeshifting no longer like sinew and muscle, but like water.

Indeed, the only downside to the whole business was the hunger, for once the Dark Lord's newest infusions had taken hold, Rulan's stomach had burned to be filled just as his mind burned to be sated by sensation. Before long, the ravenousness had grown so great that his test subject's growing hunger had forced Sadow to sacrifice his less-successful experiments to ensure that Rulan's appetite was sated – if only because Rulan had gotten into the habit of eating bits of his cage when starved.

Oh yes, and he remembered how he left that cage.

When Sadow had finally given up on waiting for the political climate to settle and descended into stasis to sleep away the centuries, Rulan had taken advantage of the confusion on Yavin IV to slip away, steal a ship, and vanish off into the night, driven by a growing hunger that he could not explain or cure… nor did he want to. All he wanted was to indulge himself he never had before, for now he was so much more than an ordinary shapeshifter: he wanted to eat, to gorge, to be entertained, to be taken to the very limits of taste and adrenaline. He wanted to be an audience to the most refined of dramas to enrich the soul and seduce the senses, to be a gourmand of rarefied delicacies that would set the palate ablaze with delight and make the heart yearn for the absence of such sweetness. He wanted to be a jubilant spectator to massacres and atrocities that would shrivel the spirits of lesser beings, to devour flesh and blood and bone, be it from freshly unearthed corpses or from prey he'd hunted down himself with all the brutality he could muster.

He wanted to experience. And so he had, smothering the hunger in his belly with the sweetmeats of so many highbrow worlds and smothering the hunger in his mind with wars and hunts and intrigues across the Outer Rim. And it had been wonderful. And it still was wonderful. Indeed, it was so wonderful that he couldn't quite recall when it had become so easy to kill; he'd been a thrillseeker before, a hedonist undoubtedly, but he'd never been this violent. It had only bothered him for a moment, and the moment itself was almost lost amidst memories of his next great hunt and the feasting that had followed.

Instead, Rulan remembered when he finally realized just how successful Sadow's longevity experiments had been.

When he'd been taken captive on Yavin IV, Rulan had been four hundred years old, a venerable elder by the standards of his people, at the height of his powers as a shapeshifter and capable of taking forms that the youngsters of his kind could only dream of. He'd expected to have one more century left before old age finally caught up with him… but to his surprise, his five hundredth year passed him by without him feeling an iota weaker. Then another century had gone by, and if anything, he'd grown even stronger, mastered even greater forms and learned to change with even greater swiftness. And the history he'd witnessed, the games he'd played, the banquets he'd enjoyed…

Was he immortal? If not, how long would he live? He didn't know, and frankly, he didn't care.

He was having too much fun.

Six hundred years after Rulan had escaped from Yavin IV, he found that Naga Sadow had emerged from stasis, found a new apprentice, taught him everything he knew, and then been murdered by said apprentice – for such was the way of the Sith. And before anyone knew what was happening, the newly ascended Freedon Nadd was ruling over Onderon. Out of curiosity, Rulan had visited Onderon perhaps a decade into the new dictator's rule, just to see if the new Dark Lord held any of the pulsating chaos that had first drawn him to the Sith, or perhaps the diabolical creativity that had lured him to Sadow's cause. Alas, while Freedon Nadd had more staying power than Naga Sadow, the attraction just wasn't there. So, after a brief sojourn on Dxun to numb the disappointment, Rulan had left out of boredom, and just under a century later, Freedon Nadd was dead at the hands of the Jedi.

Four hundred years after that, Freedon Nadd's ghost reportedly ensnared Exar Kun as his apprentice, only to be betrayed and destroyed once and for all, leaving Exar Kun to take his place as the next Sith menace in yet another war against the Republic. And in the end, Kun lasted exactly one year as Dark Lord of the Sith, though to his credit, he definitely left his mark on the galaxy in that short span of time – and he fell victim to his own ambitions long before he could be murdered by his apprentice, so he also got credit for originality. After that, the thousand-year chain of inheritance had been broken and any lingering connection Rulan had felt to the Sith was gone; the new Sith Lords that were to emerge forty years later had been strangers to him.

And what had Rulan been doing in that millennium of slumbering Sith and warmongering apprentices?

Well, if memory served, he'd been having the time of his life. So many magnificent repasts, so many games played with future meals, so many new forms to learn and master and exploit! So many great hunts in which he'd toyed with his opponents for days on end in more than a thousand different forms before finally devouring his prey one bite at a time.

And with all the powers at his disposal, he didn't need to seek work like the other denizens of the galaxy, or even as he had in the days before he'd met the Sith. If he needed a place to sleep, he could make himself comfortable anywhere, from a ten-centimetre air vent to a luxury apartment stolen from a previous victim. If he needed entertainment, he could sneak into any one of a million different arcades, galleries, theatres, auditoriums, arenas, racetracks, fleshpots, and indulge himself as if he'd been invited. If the amusements of others didn't satisfy, he could hunt beasts as they hunted – or he could hunt people as only a shapeshifter could. And if he was hungry, well… his biochemistry could tolerate meals from even the most wildly diverse peoples of the galaxy, regardless of whether it was a meal of their culture or of their flesh.

In fact, the only reason why Rulan became an assassin, perhaps a hundred and seventy-five years ago, was for the rare days where he grew tired of stowing away on freighters or stealing ships, when money was a necessity for a change. Of course, he could hardly pay tax in his status as an eternal outsider, so legitimate bounty hunting was out of the question, and besides, having to bring a bounty in alive would have been too tempting for Rulan's stomach. Only the free life of an assassin would do… and what an assassin he was! No job was outside his repertoire: he could kill so silently and subtly that it would look like natural causes, he could make it look like an accident, or even like the target had been killed by their own bodyguards… and if the client really wanted to send a message, he could kill not only the target, but their guards, servants, family, and even pets, sparing not even the birds on the windowsills. Frankly, Rulan hadn't expected his career to become so thrilling, but it had.

By his sixtieth year in the business, he was so comfortable as an assassin that he'd started using his real name with his clients – after all, it wasn't as if anyone could tie it back to a world or residence, and it wasn't as if he advertised in any publicly accessible directory.

No, Rulan Prolik was a dark fable shared by crime lords in the privacy of their shadowed offices, an anthology of whispered rumours all telling the tale of the one assassin that couldn't be stopped, the one monster that everyone in the underworld needed but nobody knew how to contact… but if Rulan happened to be in the neighbourhood when bosses looked for a means of contacting him and sent their minions out into the dark corners of their worlds to search for him, he would know. A few especially cunning and desperate underworld barons might even broadcast his name in coded sequences across space in the dim hope that he might answer the call. But regardless of how heard their call for help, some of those crime lords were visited in the night by a mercenary who'd somehow bypassed their alarms, evaded their guards, and slipped under locked doors just to offer his services. They never knew how he did it, because Rulan never revealed his secrets even to repeat customers, but in all the years he'd been known to the highest echelons of the criminal hierarchy, he'd never once failed a mission.

And it was thanks to the legend he'd built that, eight long decades ago, a wealthy businessman known to one of his Nal Hutta clients had reached out to him for a meeting via the usual channels. Rulan had thought it was just another contract to be arranged, but when he'd appeared in the prospective client's room, the stranger had been wide awake and expecting him – had sensed that he'd entered the room without even glancing in his direction.

She was a tall, lithe Anzat woman, her skin a sickly grey, her head shaved bald, her slender frame clad all in black… but it was her eyes that truly drew his attention: dark as space itself and every bit as cold, those two gleaming black pits seemed to slide under his flesh like syringes, leaving him transfixed with terror and awe at a hunger that seemed to eclipse his own. But then, even if he hadn't been paralysed by the woman's power, her species would have been more than enough to leave him frozen with shock: Anzati were almost as obscure as Rulan's people, known only as mythical vampires haunting the dark corners of the galaxy. Rulan himself had only encountered one or two of the brain-eating monsters by chance in the last hundred years, and that had been terrifying enough.

"Do you know what I am, Rulan Prolik?" she asked, her voice a glacial, echoing whisper.

He'd nodded.

"And do you know I have it in my power to kill you where you stand?"

As she spoke, her cheek pouches quivered and opened, proboscises unfurling from within, twin tendrils undulating hypnotically as they glided inexorably towards Rulan's undefended nostrils.

Unable to move anything other than his head, Rulan had nodded helplessly.

"Good. Then listen closely: you have proved yourself worthy of my attention. Now, I offer you something even more valuable than that: if you accept, you shall be the inheritor of power greater than you could possibly imagine, your appetites will always be filled, and you will never be bored. Refuse, and I will drink your Soup as I would any other sentient being."

Knowing the Anzati euphemism for brains all too well, Rulan had barely stopped himself from gulping. "What do you want of me?" he said at last. "Other than my consent?"

The Anzat had stepped forward, and for the first time since he'd met her, he noticed the weariness in those hungry dark eyes.

"I am old, Rulan Prolik," she said. "I have been the very best at what I do for more than a century and I have been killing my way across this galaxy for eight times that sum. But I am old, the hunger is growing too great to contain, and I will not be of use to those I have chosen as my allies for much longer; our mission is too important to jeopardize with madness. So, I seek a successor – someone who every bit as invisible I was in my prime, with the same hunger that drove my path to victory and with greater control. I need an heir, Rulan Prolik. Do you accept?"

And without hesitation, he'd done so.

She'd taken him in, showed him the hidden secrets of the galactic underworld, tutoring him in the shadows unknown even to the Hutt Clans, testing his mastery of death and silence. And a few months later, once she was certain that Rulan was ready, she'd slit her throat and allowed her chosen heir to devour her. And so, Rulan took her place, her responsibilities, her privileges, and her power.

The job itself was easy, as were the secondary duties like recruiting new personnel and ensuring that they were fully trained, and the fact that he was allowed enough free time to indulge his appetites and hobbies was more than enough for him. It even allowed him to occasionally fill out the odd independent contract, just to keep his legend alive.

Indeed, that was how he'd met one of his more famous clients, embarked on some of his most entertaining missions, even got to know her better than any of his past associates outside of the firm… though of course, that had been back in the days before that customer had showed her true face and became too dangerous to do business with. No doubt that was why she'd preferred to employ indoctrinated cultists and assassin droids instead of organic professionals from then on – but that was a moot issue for now.

In fact, the only thing about the position that got on Rulan's nerves was the fact that his partners kept changing – either dying of old age, being killed by ambitious rivals, or simply falling foul of the dangers inherent to their trade: one way or the other, they died and were replaced by new partners. True, they never allowed him to see beyond their heavily disguised hologram avatars, but Rulan could tell from the subtle shift in mannerisms that their positions had changed hands.

Only Rulan remained eternal.

The current batch of partners were still insultingly fresh: their Muscle had only been with the firm for eight years, while their Treasurer was only three years into his tenure… and as for their resident Snooper, he'd been with the firm for just shy of thirty years, but even he was a stripling next to Rulan.

Of course, Rulan had been careful not to place too much trust in any of them, least of all the Snooper, and he'd spent many years trying to figure out who they were – but alas, their disguises and scramblers protected their identities too well… initially. From miniscule titbits he'd gathered over the years, he'd learned that the Treasurer was probably a Quarren or some other aquatic being, and the Muscle had once been famous enough for one of their security grunts to ask for an autograph. The Snooper spoke Durese in his communications and had an accent to match, but with a peculiar vocal quality that suggested he wasn't a Duros himself, and judging by his tone, he was somewhat resentful of the Treasurer's success – maybe even a little prejudiced against his species.

Recently, though, things had changed.

There'd been movements in the old firm, signs that someone was using its resources to delve too deeply into the secrets of the other partners; only Rulan, the oldest and the most experienced of the partners, had seen the ripples and known them for what they were. He'd followed the trail back to its source and realized that there was a traitor in their ranks; the identities of his partners had been revealed to him, just as they'd been revealed to the traitor. And at once, Rulan knew that it would only be a matter of time before assassins were sent after him for a change.

So, after sending a few warnings to the treasurer and the security chief, Rulan had made his excuses and left for Kashyyyk for a well-deserved vacation in the Shadowlands. If the traitor wanted to find him there, good luck to the scheming bastard: unless Rulan wanted to be found, the traitor would be lucky if he could escape being eaten by the local wildlife before he got within a mile of his target.

Rulan knew that he would never meet his end through natural causes: he'd been alive for close to fifteen hundred years, and the Sith's greatest masterpieces never died of old age. A violent death had always been in his destiny, just as it had been so for his predecessor… and just as it had been for his predecessor, he would meet death on his own terms. If this traitor wanted him dead, it would only be through the most glorious of hunts, one that could only conclude with either the hunter or the prey being consumed in one last magnificent feast.

Either way, the Faceless One would have his due.


Somewhere in the distance, there was a rustling – not the Shadowlands' usual beasts creeping through the undergrowth, but the more distinctive sound of a humanoid making its way into the darkness.

Startled from his reverie, Rulan looked up in confusion, wondering if he'd missed one of the hunters by mistake, or if another Wookiee had been sent to look for the missing hunting party. But then he caught the distinctive scent: this was a human on approach, and unless he was deeply mistaken, he'd encountered this human before.

Launching himself skywards with protean fluidity, he latched onto the side of a tree and crawled across it until the interloper below came into view. At once, Rulan knew that he'd seen this human before.

Many weeks before he'd learned of the betrayal, he'd been scouting out Kashyyyk as a possible hunting site, hoping to confirm that it would be every bit as entertaining as he hoped, only to find a small band of interlopers blundering through the Shadowlands: two humans and a Cathar. To his surprise, all three were Jedi, so he'd given them a wide berth; after all, Force Sensitives were among the few beings in the galaxy that had always been able to see through the trickery his people employed, and his people were immune to the Jedi mind tricks, so both tended to tread carefully around each other. Given his Sith background, that went double for Rulan, who'd been careful not to make too much of a spectacle of himself when he'd had cause to visit Coruscant or Dantooine. True, he'd killed a generous handful of Force Sensitives in his career, either through trickery or absolute barbarism, but even with his hunger, he only committed himself to a contract on a Jedi or a Sith if he could subtly stack the odds in his favour… and right then, he hadn't been ready for a fight.

However, there was something about the lead Jedi, the bone-thin woman with the pale blonde hair and the harsh grey eyes, something that immediately set Rulan's teeth on edge. But it wasn't until she'd finally spoken that he recognized her. He'd fled the area immediately, flitting silently back to the nearest landing pad and stowing away aboard a freighter bound for anywhere other than Kashyyyk. He hadn't known what she was doing back here or why she was still alive, but he knew enough about her to be wary.

Now, here she was again: no Jedi companions – no wise hermit with years of experience living in the Shadowlands, no fiery Cathar who stank of yearning for love and companionship, and certainly none of the mixed bunch that Rulan had seen waiting for her back at the colony during his earlier escape; no spunky Twi'Lek teenager, no stoic Mandalorian thug, no human Jedi awash with self-doubt and self-reproach, no curiously familiar-looking assassin droid, no blandly average Republic pilot, nothing, zip, zilch. She was alone, and every line in her wiry little body spoke of alertness and readiness to kill – and not in self-defence… and all at once, Rulan knew that this was the traitor's chosen assassin.

It was almost too much of a coincidence to be true, but perhaps the needs of the traitor and the needs of this not-quite-Jedi had coincided. And with nobody responding to Rulan's hails on the commlink, it was safe to assume that she'd already killed the other partners.

Now, Rulan was all that was left.

A slow, easy smirk crept across his shapeless face, human teeth mingling with Whiphid tusks and Devaronian fangs. The traitor had been cunning indeed to choose a Jedi as their assassin of choice, and perhaps a little respectful of Rulan's need for stimulation. A Jedi opponent – a Jedi meal – would be most welcome, especially one as powerful and as familiar as this one.

Gliding down from above, he let his form turn as shapeless as water as he readied himself for the game and the feast to follow…


A/N: Rulan was easily my favourite of all the GenoHaradan characters, and I couldn't help giving him an impressive history, partly because I wanted to give him an extraordinary backstory to justify his powers (beyond even ordinary Shi'ido, incidentally), but mostly because I found it hard to believe that someone as powerful as him didn't get more involved in galactic history.

And yes, Rulan is Gluttony.

Care to guess who Envy and Lust might be?