Stepping in the Shadowed Cave did not come with the sensations Ayli had expected. There was no shiver of cold to it. No mounting sense of dread. If she hadn’t been told it was a place where the Dark Side pooled, she could have had a nice picnic in it watching the waves crashing on the reefs beyond itself mouth.

“It holds what you bring in with you,” Kelda had said, but that simply didn’t seem to be the case. Ayli carried so much darkness inside her. She’d seen it and had reveled in it. For all that she hated how out of control and sick it made her feel, she also couldn’t deny just how good it had felt in the moment.

The raw power that had coursed through.

Feeling the shackles of civility fall away leaving her free to act on all the pain and rage she carried.

Had she ever been as fully her true self than when she gave in to the Dark Side? With no restraints in place, who else could she have been?

She felt the heat of the red lightsaber passing by her face a millisecond before it did.

The howl came next.

The Dark Side was strong within the Shadowed Cave, but it was not absolute.

Ayli let the Force guide her as she dodged backwards and ignited  the blue bladed saber Kelda had given her. It wasn’t hard to tell the counsel of the Force from the distractions of the Dark Side. Ayli had listened to whispers of self destruction all her life and tuning them out was a skill she’d had far too much practice at.

The shadow wielding the red blade had backed off for a moment when its first attacked missed, but whatever fear had stayed it’s hand was short lived as Ayli barely had her blade raised into a guard position when the shadow struck again.

Red and blue blades crashed together at head height, Ayli blocking her opponent with an ease derived from the attack being the most obvious one the shadow could have made.

She hopped back away from the knee the shadow tried to drive into her gut for the same reason.

The opening in the shadow’s guard was a trap. Ayli teased at it with a feint, and parried the expected riposte. She tried to step in to the opening she made, but the shadow was already retreating as she did. 

As though it knew her moves as well as she knew its.

That was all it took for Ayli to work out what she was fighting.

On the next exchange, she made sure to lock their blades together and with her free hand blew the tattered cloak of darkness off her doppelganger.

She stared into her own face across the cavern from her. Her own face, but not her own eyes. Not any more.

Since losing herself to the Darkside on Praxis Mar, Ayli’s eyes hadn’t regained their original hue. Every time she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she found the yellow and red marks of her failure staring back at her.

Her doppelganger – her Dark Side spawned doppelganger though – she had Ayli’s eyes. Her real ones. 

Ayli’s next slash wasn’t gentle and it wasn’t a feint.

It was met by an opposing slash that was every bit as powerful though and the lightsaber blades briefly locked together as Ayli and her foe struggled against one other, each growling at the resistance they faced. 

With their blades bound, Ayli shoved out with the Force, only to be hit by a matching Force Push that sent the two combatants flying to the opposite sides of the cave.

The shadow copy wasted no time in rising back into the fight, flying across the room with a scream.

The red lightsaber descended with enough power to crack the cave in two, but Ayli met it with her blade and stood her ground, struggling as much with holding off the blow as recovering her balance.

With a breath, she stopped pressing directly against the red lightsaber, turning instead to redirect the blow to her side.

The next swing, Ayli met by ducking under it and parrying behind her back.

That bought her a shot at tripping her foe, but the shadow hopped over Ayli’s spinning foot and avoided Ayli’s follow lightsaber strike by somersaulting backward.

The brief respite let Alyi spend a heartbeat focusing herself and looking at the situation like Kelda had taught her to.

This was what she had brought into the cave with her.

This was what she’d expected to find.

The shadow fought exactly like she did. 

And it made her angry.

She kicked herself mentally.

“You’re not my opponent,” she said aloud.

The shadow didn’t answer. It stalked around the perimeter of the caves towards her and drew a second lightsaber blade.

Ayli was puzzled by that for a moment until she caught a good look at the design of the hilt.

It was Nix’s blade and it had been scored and scorched. 

Ayli didn’t need psychometry to understand the meaning of the damage to hilt or what the red blade which sprang forth from it meant.

The hilt said it had been taken from Nix. The blade said its crystal had been corrupted when the lightsaber was used to kill a Force User. When it was used to kill Nix.

Ayli felt the jolt of fear shoot through her at the revelation. 

It tingled.

And with a deep breath and the inner awareness she’d spent a year struggling to attain, that was all it did.

In the Shadowed Cave, Ayli couldn’t quite find the feelings of peace and serenity that allowed her to feel in harmony with the Force but the darkness around her couldn’’t stop her from remembering the moments of grace she had found.

She’s lounging in bed on what promises to be a mild and sunny day. She’s perfectly awake and she could get up easily, but there’s a warm human woman nestled against her who is still blissfully slumbering. In a little while Nix will wake, and they’ll reheat the Paklar Lasagna they hadn’t finished the night before and then they’ll go for their morning walk along the seashore meditation path to start the day off with the sort of training that was particularly rigorous for those like Ayli who found peace and calm almost antithetical to their preferred mindset.

“I get it,” she said. “I do. This isn’t you. This what I’m tormenting myself with.”

The shadow growled and leaped in a spinning slash, which Ayli simply wasn’t there to be hit by.

“Fighting you is about as smart as punching myself in the face to knockout my own problems,” Ayli said, distinctly aware that if that had every been an option she would likely have taken it at several points in her life.

The shadows strikes didn’t get any slower, and it didn’t calm down, but Ayli found it increasingly easy to read them. She could feel the shadow’s frustration – her own frustration – and knew each moment what it would lead to.

Including the Force Lightning.

Ayli snapped her lightsaber to life for that and caught the lightning on her blade.

Shadow or not, real or not, Force Lighting was not something she was ready to fool around with. 

It also wasn’t a great sign that the shadow was escalating. 

“I don’t want to have to kill you,” Ayli said and then considered the idea for a moment longer. “Wait, can I kill you? What would that do to me?”

Her shadow clone raised both hands and screamed forth an even bigger torrent of Force Lighting.

It was enough that Ayli wasn’t able to catch it all with her lightsaber. Most of the bolts missed, flung wide by the shadow’s overwhelming aggression, but a few snuck around the blade and landed on her arms and legs.

Ayli dropped to one knee and only managed to keep one hand on her lightsaber as the rest of her muscles spasmed in agony.

“No!” she said through gritted teeth. “No. We’re not doing this. I am not letting you run out of control.”

She cast aside her lightsaber and held up both hands herself.

Rather than hurling her own Force Lightning back at the shadow though, she used the Force to draw power back into herself, making the storm of energy her own.

It wasn’t pleasant, but Ayli’s reserves held out long enough for the shadow to reach the end of its unnatural endurance and collapse in front of her.

With smoking hands, Ayli reached down and lifted the shadow back up to its feet.

“If I brought you in here, then you’re mine,” she said, sad to see that the shadow’s eyes now matching the yellow and red of her own.

The shadow tried to struggle, buy Ayli simply held the shadow’s wrists and waited. Rage is powerful but it is also terribly exhausting and Ayli could feel the crushing weight of fatigue that had built up on the shadow.

When the shadow finally collapsed, Ayli was ready to catch her, which seemed to surprise the doppelganger.

Finish this, the doppelganger said, her voice a perfect mirror of Ayli’s.

“There’s no finishing anything in here,” Ayli said. “I’m stuck with you. Even if I could stab my dark side away there’s no chance that I’m stupid enough to make that mistake anymore.”

Or leave me, the doppelganger’s voice was fading as its strength seemed to run out like the tide.

“Can’t do that either,” Ayli said and turned to lift her former foe onto her back. “I brought you in here. I’m bringing you out. Probably whether I want to or not.”

Then hate me, the shadow’s voice was little more than a whisper.

“I’ve tried that.” Ayli found the shadow’s weight bearable but only just. Each step took more effort than the last, but her determination rose with each one. “I’ve been afraid of you. I’m been mad at you. I’ve even given up on you. None of those have every worked though. So we’re going to try something new.”

What? the shadow’s voice gained some strength from either curiosity or puzzlement.

“I don’t know. Maybe believing in you? Accepting you? Seeing you for what you are? We’ll play it by ear and see how things go.”

You cannot accept me.

“You sure about that? Because I know someone who already has.”

The Force Lighting that slammed into Ayli came as a total surprise.

She was on the ground, burning inside and unable to understand how her doppelganger had marshaled enough hatred for another assault without it being obvious.

Except the doppelganger was on the ground writhing beside her.

RUN! the doppelganger screamed and fear flooded Ayli’s battered body.

It was good advice impeded by the small problem that Ayli was quite incapable of any movement at all.

“Disappointing,” a voice steeped in a far greater darkness that the shadow could ever have managed said. “I’d hoped for the other one but this one will do. It and its shadow might even prove some amusement.”

Ayli called on the Force and felt the Dark Side swallowing her like an ocean. Beside her, the doppelganger was weeping. She had shrunk down to a reflection of the terrified girl Ayli had been when she’d learned of her parent’s death.

Which might have been an understandable response as she was moments from her own. 

“Perhaps if I toy with it for a while, the other will sense this one’s pain and come back for it?” the man said and Ayli recognized the voice underneath all the hate.

“Darsus Klex? How are you alive?” 

“Oh, I assure you, he most certainly is not,” the man wearing Darsus’s body said. “But he still hates you. So, so very much. I cannot tell you the joy this brings him.”

“Go to hell,” Ayli said, drawing on the Force through sheer determination to struggle back up to one knee.

“Where do you think we are?” the man said, raising his hands as another, final stroke of Force Lighting gathered in his fingers.

“Somewhere you are not wanted,” Kelda said, appearing in front of Ayli with her hand outstretched.

The Force Lighting never left the man’s fingers.

Instead a wave of blue brilliance surged through the Shadowed Cave, driving back the darkness with light unyielding.