As deadly hails of laser fire went, Ayli had seen worse.

“Are they firing at pre-set positions?” she asked, skewing their makeshift dropship along the corkscrew path Nix had plotted out for her.

“Could be!” Nix said, working the baby nav-computer to feed Ayli a barrage-free trajectory to follow. “This might be from some kind of ancient automated defense system.”

“I can blow it up!” Goldie said over their comms.

“Not necessary,” Ayli said. “They’re not even tickling our deflectors yet. Let’s not blow up equipment we might want to sell later.”

“Gotta live long enough to sell it,” Sali said, though Ayli suspected the pirate was mostly unhappy about not being the one to fly the dropship.

“This isn’t automated,” Zindiana said. “Even ancient droid systems would keep up a steady cadence of fire. This is too sporadic.”

“Huh, you know, she’s right,” Sali said. “I’ve been shot at like this before. There are some panicking people behind those guns. Easy pickings if we can board them.”

“I point out that there are four of us here and only one of us is supposed to be carrying a blaster at the moment,” Ayli said.

The fact that everyone except Nix had multiple blasters on their person hadn’t escaped Ayli’s notice, but she still didn’t like their odds for overthrowing what she guessed to be multiple defensive bases orbiting Lednon Three.

“They’re just a distraction,” Nix said, strangely certain of that for someone who was a ship’s mechanic and not a fleet tactician. “I’m going to switch one of the power couplers over to the deflectors. Let’s just punch through and get to ground.”

“Won’t that leave us exposed down there?” Zindiana asked.

“Nope. I’m getting telemetry scans from the planet’s surface,” Nix said. “There’s definitely old structures down there. Big ones. We can hide in them. And I don’t think they want to blast their own city.”

“How do you know it’s theirs?” Sali asked. 

“The buildings are in good shape. Too good. Someone’s been taking care of it.”

“Anyone think we should try talking to these guys?” Ayli asked, raising the question solely so that no one could accuse her of not considering it sooner. She already knew the Sali and Zindiana would be opposed and Nix would think it was a good idea but that the hostiles wouldn’t respond.

“Definitely not,” Nix said, catching Ayli off guard.

“Wait, what? Why?” she asked, trying to work out where Nix’s headspace was on the matter.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about these people,” Nix said. “Apart from the whole ‘they started shooting at us with no warning’. These might be remnants of the Children of the Storm.”

“Does that mean we can blow them up?” Sali asked, sounding as excited as Goldie had been by the idea.

“No,” Ayli said. “We don’t need that kind of trouble, and we don’t know what they want.”

“The Children of the Storm had some odd beliefs,” Zindiana said. “They were big on reaching enlightenment through strife and domination over others. If this is a remnant group, and if they still hold to the ‘old teachings’, we’re potential slaves at best.”

“Probably going to get yelled at for stirring up this nest of them then,” Ayli said.

“Or a medal,” Zindiana said. “The old Children of the Storm were, among other things, raiders against anyone they could get away with attacking. Since there’s not exactly a lot of commerce out here, I’d have to imagine this lot kept the old traditions up.”

“I’d say their luck’s run out then.” Nix adjusted a pair of dials, reached under her seat and made a quick adjustment as a new trajectory appeared on Ayli’s screen. 

With the flick of another switch the dropship’s acceleration was cut in half and a visible corona of light appeared around it from the overcharged deflector shields flaring to new life.

Ayli wanted to say that it was her amazing piloting skills which brought them down into the less-ruined-than-it-should-be city, but the truth was the path Nix’s had laid out for her made the flight in a breeze. They screamed past the five orbital platforms which were failing miserably to draw a bead on them and punched into the atmosphere fast enough to be lost in a plasma sheath nearly the whole trip down to the ground. 

To her credit, Nix’s deflector shields handled the superheated air as easily as they would have dealt with the concentrated plasma of a ship’s gun, and aside from the excitement of wondering if the untested kit would fail spectacularly, the journey was as smooth as any other Ayli had ever made.

The viewscreen cleared to show they’d arrived on a planet with more than a little active weather in play.

“Did you navigate us into a hurricane?” Sali asked.

“I don’t know if hurricane’s normally get this big,” Nix said. “Do they become something else where they’re over a thousand kilometers across? And have that in them.” She pointed directly ahead of them where red lightning was crackling across the horizon.

“What the hell is that?” Sali asked.

“Nothing good,” Zindiana said.

“I did mention my bad feeling right?” Nix said.

“Yep. And I bet I know what you’re going to say next,” Ayli had bad feelings too, though usually she was smart enough to listen to them. Not this time though it seemed.

“If you mean, that we need to go there since that’s where the manufactured structures are, then yep, you nailed it,” Nix said.

“The less inviting the place looks, the less willing our friends up in orbit should be to follow us,” Zindiana said.

“Unless this is one of their Holy Places,” Ayli said. She’d dealt with fanatics before, usually by choosing to be in some other star system and leaving them to their pursue whatever self-destructive end their fanaticism would lead them too.

“The Children of the Storm didn’t really do ‘Holy Places’,” Zindiana said. “They were more about accumulating personal power than wasting it on shrine’s and such – their loot bank being the notable exception as shrine’s went.”

“This seems like a weird place to put a treasure trove,” Sali said. “Storms aren’t constant enough to make for good defenses and even with it blowing like that, we’ll still be able to get through even in a ship like this, no offense Nix.”

“That’s okay, you just don’t know Droppy well enough yet,” Nix said.

“You named?….of course you did,” Sali said. “Is this one sapient too?”

“No. But all ships have a heart to them,” Nix said.

“Assuming there’s no objections, I’m taking us in before the orbital folks figure out how to turn their targeting computers on,” Ayli said and punched the ship’s engines up to their in-atmosphere cruising velocity.

The red lightning didn’t abate as they approached.

If anything it grew more intense.

That wasn’t going to be a problem while they were in the ship.

Probably.

Red lightning was weird, but planet’s had all sorts of odd things in their atmospheres that produced all sorts of odd effects. From the ship’s scans, it seemed like this atmosphere was a little thin but rich enough in oxygen to be breathable without a respirator. The scanners weren’t designed to do a full bio-analysis and trace element sweep, but what they were able to report looked promising, which made sense given that people had apparently lived here.

The interplay of the lightning and the shadows was evocative, Ayli had to give it that. The tableau should have been threatening but there was an allure to it as well that went beyond the promise of treasure. Each flash of light screamed that there was something here. Something precious. The treasure she’d been searching for, even if she’d never known that she needed it.

That was just wistful dreaming though, she told herself. It was entirely possible the place had been picked clean already. In fact if the orbital fanatics had access to it, it had probably been picked clean decades ago, or more.

Ayli gripped the flight control hard enough that she thought she was going to twist the metal into knots. The thought of someone else making off with her treasure filled her with the sort of rage which demanded pain and suffering until they repented their sins.

“Are you okay?” Nix asked and the touch of her hand on Ayli’s arm snapped Ayli out of the angry daydream that had swept over her.

Why had it swept over her in the first place though? Maybe because she’d been working towards this goal for a while and it was disappointing to think of it all falling through. Especially if the ‘someone else’ who got the treasure was as awful as Zindiana was making the Children of the Storm out to be.

“Yeah, just thinking evil thoughts about our friends in space,” Ayli said. “They better not have taken our stuff or maybe we will have to board them.”

“Nah, if anything they should have added to it,” Sali said. “This is supposed to be their hidden vault right?”

The complex they reached did not look like a vault though.

It wasn’t a giant temple either, which was what Ayli had been expecting.

“This is a fortress?” Sali asked, gesturing to the high walls and the force dome which still covered the compound.

“Shouldn’t there’d be guns here too if so,” Zindiana asked.

“Depends on what the storms would do to them,” Ayli said. “At the very least, they might be retracted or recessed to protect them when they’re not in use.”

“Or there are no guns here at all,” Nix said, her voice slightly distant. “This isn’t a fortress. It’s a tomb.”

“Oh, well that’s excellent then!” Sali said. “Tombs have all kinds of neat stuff in them.”

“It shouldn’t be a tomb though,” Ayli said. “This is supposed to the Temple Ravas Durla founded.”

“Oh, wouldn’t that be interesting,” Zindiana said.

“What?” Ayli snapped, harsher than she had any need or intention to be.

“You’ve read the story, or myth, of Ravas Durla’s reign right?” Zindiana asked and continued on knowing that at least two people in the ship probably hadn’t. “The story the Children of the Storm spread was that Ravas Durla had returned to them after passing through the “Three Gates of Enlightenment” which was why she was still around a thousand or so years after her myth is set. That’s where the whole Eternal Life thing comes from.”

“What does that have to do with this place being a tomb?” Sali asked.

“Nothing,” Ayli said. “The Three Gates are supposed to be mental states, or symbolic trials you can pass through. The myths never speak of them as being physical places.”

“They don’t,” Zindiana agreed, “But as Trials they would, or could, have had different sites where the tests were endured, or undertaken, or whatever.”

“So this is, what, a testing ground?” Sali asked. “What’s the first trial supposed to be?”

“Seething,” Zindiana said. 

“It’s also translated as ‘Passion’,” Ayli said, recalling the myth Zindiana was speaking of.

“This isn’t a place of love,” Nix said.

“Not that kind of passion,” Ayli said. “The translations are difficult, but the sense of the word they use is more fiery, more aggressive. It’s the kind of passion that burns you up. That forces you to act, beyond your limits, beyond reason.”

“Is that why we’ve got red lightning here?” Sali asked.

“Possibly,” Zindiana said. “If this was the location of the first trial, they may have picked it for the ‘charged atmosphere’ as being conducive to the mental state they were trying to achieve.”

“You think the Children of the Storm built this place as a reference to Ravas’ myth?” Nix asked, sounding uncertain.

“They might have,” Zindiana said. “It certainly puts on a good show for new converts.”

“Wouldn’t that mean they wouldn’t keep their treasure here?” Sali asked.

“No. There’s treasure here,” Ayli said, almost able to picture it waiting for her.

“And death,” Nix said.

“Sounds like my usual stomping grounds,” Zindiana said. “Is there anywhere with an overhang you can put us down? Even if there’s nothing else here, we might be able to find the location of the second gate.”

“Yeah, I can see just where we should go,” Ayli said, an enclosed landing pad near the top of the central tower catching her attention and holding it fast.

“Where we have to go,” Nix mumbled, to no one in particular.

Droopy touched down as light as a feather, her controls as responsive as any Ayli had found in even the few top end racing ships she’d flown. 

“Someone should wait in the ship in case we need to leave quick,” Ayli said.

“You wouldn’t trust me to do that,” Sali said.

“Sure she would,” Zindiana said. “At least if I stay behind to watch over you.”

“I was thinking Nix should stay,” Ayli said. “Since she knows how to fix things if anything goes wrong.”

“No. I’m coming with you,” Nix said. It wasn’t a suggestion. It wasn’t even open to debate.

Ayli glanced at the pirate and the nun. Sure. Why not give them some alone time. Fewer people to split the treasure with.

“Whatever we find, I’m here with you,” Nix said, taking Ayli’s hand in her own.

Ayli’s breath caught in her throat. It was such a simple gesture. Why did it feel more intimate than if they’d wrapped their lekku together? Not that Nix had lekku. Not that she needed them. 

“Same,” Ayli said and, hand-in-hand, walked into the darkest place she’d ever ventured in her life.