Nix had not expected to drive Ravas off as easily as she had. Part of her had assumed the ghost was going to be a permanent fixture in her life so long as she was with Ayli. If she was feeling honest with herself, she would admit that more than a few plans had crossed her mind for how she might exorcize Ravas, even if only for a day or an hour.

“Who was she talking about? Who did you speak to?” Ayli asked.

It was not the most important question before them at the moment, but it did suggest how much Ayli trusted Nix, given that Nix was the only thing standing between them and drowning in what was becoming a swiftly flowing river of liquid nitrogen. 

“It has to be Kelda,” Nix said. “There can’t be anyone else who would freak Ravas out like that after all the centuries she’s been dead.”

“She knows you’ve spoken to her old flame though, doesn’t she?” Ayli asked, uncertainty frosting her words more than the freezing river could.

“You know, I don’t think she does, or did I guess,” Nix said. Holding the bubble around them wasn’t as difficult as she’d imagined it would be, but that was because she wasn’t doing most of the work.

The Force wasn’t a muscle, or a battery. She didn’t have a giant reserve of Force energy in her. That wasn’t how it worked. Or it wasn’t how it worked for her. Ravas’ arguments suggested that some Force users did use their own reserves of strength to dictate how events would play out, but Nix knew that would never work for her.

What felt right to her was harmony. All her life she’d reached for that. She had memories of being just a wee little thing and feeling pulled by a flow beyond anything else in size. It had saved her life then. Not in a grand gesture but simply by coaxing her tiny feet onto the side of the hover platform that hadn’t collapsed due to bad rigging. No one else had considered the path of her steps significant. She was just a little child randomly running around an air concourse who’d gotten lucky. Nothing mystical about it. But the moment had stuck with her. She’d listened to the flow and it had carried her to safety, and so she’d grown up with at least one ear tuned for it, learning to follow where the Force led her without being fully aware that it was at all unusual.

She wasn’t unique in following the Force where it led her. Everyone felt its push and pull. When it went against their desires though, most pulled back or pushed on through it. Nix couldn’t claim she hadn’t done the same, more than a few times, and so she hadn’t thought she was particularly special.

Even standing amidst a river of death, she still suspected she wasn’t. 

She could feel the Force passing through her, could feel the liquid nitrogen parting because while it weighed far more than she could ever lift, it was so very small compared to the what the collective life of the universe could handle.

Not that she could call on the entirety of the Force. Only what she needed. And only as much as needed her.

“There’s enough coolant in this tunnel to reach the shuttles, isn’t there?” Ayli asked.

“More than,” Nix said. “Which the shuttles will not be happy about. Darsus isn’t going to be flying back to his daddy any time soon.”

“That raises certain problems for us too then,” Ayli said.

“I’m hoping we’ll find something at the end of the tunnel that’ll help with that,” Nix said.

“Hoping or you’ve had a vision of something?”

“Just hoping,” Nix said. “I can’t hear too much with all this rushing past us.”

It wouldn’t have been impossible for the Force to give her a clear view of where to go, but it seemed to prefer to leave things unspecified as much as possible. What bits of precognition Nix had experienced seemed to be limited to short bursts centered around moments of extreme peril.

Which suggested it was good that she wasn’t seeing what was to come.

“How much longer can you hold this bubble up?” Ayli asked.

“Long enough to get us to the far end,” Nix said. “There’s got to be a hatch or something we can use to get to safety. Especially if the candidates were following a tradition like Ravas where they’re burning their own reserves to use the Force.”

There was not, it turned out, a hatch at the end of the hallway.

There was a lift.

“This thing is a hundred years old, right?” Ayli asked.

“At least. It could be a lot older if the Children of the Storm found one of Ravas’ old bases to put to use for their scheme.”

“And it’s been exposed to extreme coolants, probably more than once.”

“Given the wealth the Children put together? I’m guessing hundreds of time? Maybe thousands?”

“And no one has been maintaining it?”

“I don’t see any droids around, so, yeah, probably not.”

Ayli flicked a switch on the lift’s control panel with her gloved hand.

The lift started rising instantly leaving the half filled corridor behind them.

“How is it still working? I can’t get a Kaf machine to last more than month and the Children have a death trap that lasts centuries?” Ayli demanded.

“Kaf machines are meant to break. They want you to buy new ones,” Nix said. “No one’s buying replacement death traps though, so they make those with extensive self-repair functions. The energy budget is probably pretty high but until the magma cools they’ve got a nice reliable geothermal source to tap into.”

“Should get one of those for the Goldrunner,” Ayli grumbled.

“Wait, did you think I didn’t build that into Goldie’s skillset?” Nix asked. “She can repair and modify herself however she wants, well within the limits of the components she has available.”

The lift finished ascending to reveal a room of long faded opulence. Small plasma torches burst to life on their arrival, illuminating a grand stage which they stood in the center of. Rising rings of seats flanked the stage on one side while on the other a huge red curtain hung, framing a view of empty wasteland outside the spire.

“I feel like there’s supposed to be an audience waiting for us here,” Ayli said.

“I think there is.” Nix gestured to the far back seats where spectral forms were flickering in and out of existence. 

“I don’t…” Ayli started to say and then drew her breath in sharply. Her lightsaber was in her hand and blazing with light an instant later. “Those aren’t ghosts.”

Nix watched and listened, trying to understand what she was seeing.

Ayli was right.

There were no ghosts in the theater chamber.

There were only the things which had eaten the ghosts.

“Oh. This was not a good place to come to,” she said, understanding the danger they were in. 

The Spire was a place where the Force had been cast out of balance and twisted into an ugly, tangled mess. Pain and death was baked into the foundations of the structures and the designers ill-intent had been preserved as well as lift had across the centuries.

The spectral creatures who inhabited the Spire had been drawn to it like moths to a flame and were caught in its web of hate and malice as surely as the ghosts of those who’d failed their tests had been.

“We should leave,” Ayli said, stepping in front of Nix as the spectral forms began to flicker closer.

“Darsus is still down there,” Nix said. “And the shuttles will be frozen to the floor for a while.”

“That is a problem,” Ayli said. “But it might not be as bad a problem as this one.”

“We might be able to talk to these things,” Nix said. “We know that’s not an option with Darsus.”

“They don’t look like they’re interested in conversation,” Ayli said, brandishing the lightsaber in a clearly threatening gesture.

“Hey!” Nix yelled to the specters. “We’re not the ones who did this to you. We can fix it though.”

“We can?” Ayli whispered.

“We can blow up the Spire if we can get out of here,” Nix said.

“As a historian, I find that idea abhorrent,” Ayli said. “As a sapient being with breath in my body still I am all for it though.”

The specters did not seem concerned with either Nix’s plan or Ayli’s lightsaber.

They should have been though.

As the first one flicked within range, Ayli lashed out, the red blade searing through whatever ectoplasmic substance the specter was composed it.

It screamed and Nix could feel it dying.

The others surged forward at that.

Some of them charged towards the stage, holding back only as far as the circle Ayli spun in to ward them off. 

The others turned to the wounded specter and devoured it, drawing fresh screams from it which seemed to energize all of them.

“Killing them makes things worse,” Nix said.

“Glad to hear any alternatives,” Ayli said.

Nix raised her hand and tried to shove the lot of them back as she’d held back the liquid nitrogen. When the Force she called onto the shield them reached a specter though it twisted and buckled, warping in on itself. 

The specters didn’t have material bodies to grasp onto but the long simmering rage within them had carved channels which carried away Force projections.

“I think these things are evolved to eat Force users,” Nix said.

“Maybe that’s why Force people carry lightsabers?” Ayli said.

“Good luck that we’ve got one then,” Nix said, noticing that even in this dire situation there were still threads of luck working in her favor.

“It’d be luckier if we had two of them,” Ayli said.

“Can you hold these things off if we try to get out of her?” Nix asked.

“I think so,” Ayli said. “They’re so, I don’t know, snarled? Makes them easy to get a read on even when they’re flickered out.”

“Let’s try to get up there then,” Nix said, pointing to the booth at the back of the theater where a variety of machinery was visible.

“I don’t think there’s a spaceship up there,” Ayli said.

“If there is, it’s a really small one,” Nix said. “What I’m looking for are the controls to this place, and the comms.”

“That could be useful,” Ayli said. “Stay close okay.”

Staying close turned out to be far easier said than done. Their dance on the Goldrunner had been at least partially under Nix’s control and she’d held back from moving as fast as she could to give Ayli a chance to get used to sensing the distance between the two of them. Fighting against the specters required just a bit more speed and precision than that.

They were halfway up the stairs to the back of the theater when the first specter slipped past Ayli’s guard. Nix could sense them too and managed to get her right hand in front of the specter before it struck.

Cold deeper than the liquid nitrogen flashed through her hand and up her arm. It was reaching into her chest to freeze her heart when she rallied and used the Force to move her own hand, casting the specter away.

“Nix!” Ayli had sensed the damage Nix had taken but there wasn’t time to deal with that.

“I’m fine,” Nix said. “I can keep up. Go all out. You won’t hit me.”

Ayli hesitated for a moment and wound up narrowly slicing a specter in half before it could barrel through her chest.

Nix laughed at the indignation on Ayli’s face and that broke the last bit of hesitation that was holding Ayli back.

Together they spun through a dizzying series of steps, slicing another two specters who were torn apart by the hoard before the growing melee reached the doors at the back of the chamber.

Nix opened the doors with Force, allowing them to dance through before she slammed them shut again.

Despite their incorporeal nature, half the specters didn’t seem to be able to follow them. They lost another half of the horde when they dashed into the stairwell leading to the control room, and the last few dropped away step by step as they rose to the top of the Spire.

Nix wanted to believe that meant they were moving towards safety.

But she knew they weren’t.

That feeling was confirmed when they entered the control chamber.

“It has been so long since anyone came here to die,” the most ancient of the Specters said.