Ayli’s memories were a trifle dim after Kelda saved her in the Shadowed Cave. Taking a full barrage of Force Lightning to the back had only been survivable, she guessed, because she’d been carrying a manifestation of her own Dark Side there. Even with that though, collapsing into unconsciousness had seemed like a wonderful idea.

Sadly it hadn’t been a wonderful idea which Kelda allowed her to indulge in.

The crawl out of the cave hadn’t been pleasant, and it had happened over a much longer period of time than Ayli could account for based on how the sun’s position in the sky had changed, but she had eventually made it out into the low surf and the beach beyond the Shadowed Cave were Kelda had at last stopped pestering her and let her catch her breath.

She told herself she was only going to spend a moment before she moved on. With the Force no longer twisted up and tangled around her, she was able to draw on it like Kelda had taught her, calling in strength and healing which her poor, bedraggled body desperately needed. 

The moment she needed however was just a bit longer than she’d anticipated, and without meaning to, she found herself drifting down into a turbulent storm of dreams, waking just long enough to spoil any true rest she might have gotten only to sink down once more. 

It was dark by the time Ayli regained more than a passing degree of wakefulness, but the panoply of stars above her made the night endlessly brighter than the cave had been. 

“We have a problem,” Kelda said. She was sitting beside a small fire she had apparently assembled near enough to Ayli to ward off the night’s chill. In the distance the mouth of the Shadowed Cave loomed large, its aura accentuated by the well founded fear Ayli felt at the thought of venturing back inside.

“What happened in there?” Ayli asked, collecting the scattered remnants of her thoughts and tossing away the half remembered snippets of the dreams she’d been wrapped in while she lay on the beach.

“Something found you,” Kelda said. “Something that was not supposed to be there.”

For a moment, Ayli couldn’t recall anything that had happened within the Shadowed Cave. Only a black veil hung in her memories. Shaking her head to push it aside, bits and piece of the past returned to her.

“I fought…?” Ayli caught an image of herself screaming, a red lightsaber blade in hand.

“You passed your trial,” Kelda said. “You handled what you brought into the cave with you wonderfully. But there was something else in there.”

Ayli remembered pain. The Force Lightning that should have killed her.

The Force Lightning that had struck down her Dark Side doppelganger as well.

“What happened to her?” Ayli asked, pushing herself to sit up. “The other one. The other me?” That her doppelganger should be okay was somehow of paramount importance.

Kelda chuckled. “I think that’s something you can tell me.” 

“She was hurt. But she’s not here. Do we need to go back into the cave for her?” Ayli could feel her thoughts were still a bit disconnected from the world around her, but after spending a day collapsed due to wounds that were only feeling worse the more time went on, it felt like an excusable lapse.

“No. She’s quite safe. Seems to be in a bit of pain still. Which isn’t really surprising. Her back is a terrible mess.”

“You looked her over?” Ayli said, still not quite getting it.

“All day,” Kelda said. “I wasn’t sure if she’d be able to drag herself out of the cave on her own, but she’s made of tough stuff. If she’d feeling up to it though, I would recommend we return to the Temple and see about getting her some actual medical attention.”

“Uh, what? Where is she?” Ayli said before finally working out what Kelda was saying. “Oh. Yeah, okay, that’d be me then. She was just me. In fact, that was all me wasn’t it?”

“Unfortunately no,” Kelda said. “The version of yourself who you fought was a part of you. The thing that attacked you afterwards is something else.”

“Darsus Klex.” It was a profanity from how Ayli spoke the name. “Except, no, he said Darsus was dead. And that Darsus still hated me.”

Ayli’s memory of the thing Darsus had become was disturbingly vivid and yet cloud as well. She’d recognized him with perfect certainty as being Darsus but when she tried to call up an image of what he had looked like, the figure was cloaked in shadows, features obscured with only his general build matching what she remembered of Darsus.

“Those may both have been true statements.” Kelda led Ayli back up the twisting path away from the Shadowed Cave. “What attacked you in there is something that should never be. It’s the sort of thing the Jedi of my time and later would have been drawn to inexorably and removed from the galaxy no matter the cost.”

“Does it have a name?” The archeologist in Ayli couldn’t help but be curious about something with so ancient a history. The Force Sensitive in Ayli wasn’t quite so thrilled by it, but still wanted to know what she should call a foe she was pretty sure she was going to fight again.

“I’m sure it does,” Kelda said. “Finding out what that is will likely help us a great deal.”

“What did the Jedi used to call it?” Ayli asked.

“A problem,” Kelda said. “Each one has their own name, and their own limitations and capabilities. They also do not work together, they would consume each other in a heartbeat and grow more powerful in so doing. Collectively, they were called things like ‘Force Aberrations’, or ‘Dark Side Liches’, or ‘Walking Bantha Puddus’. I prefer the last of those, but it does fall a little short in describing what they’re capable of.”

“I’m going to guess whatever you did in there didn’t end him, just drove him off?” Ayli saw her and Nix’s bungalow in the distance and yearned for both food and the medpack she had stored there, though not in that order.

“You are sadly correct,” Kelda said. “If things like that were so easy to lay to rest, the Jedi would not have needed to be so vigilant against their incursions.”

“How long do we have before he comes back?” Ayli found the medpack waiting exactly where it should be, and freshly restocked with a note from Nix which read ‘hope you don’t need any of this’.

“I am not sure that it will, or that it can,” Kelda said. “Things like that are so bound to their hate or fear they can only manifest in areas which are strong sufficiently strong in the Dark Side.”

Ayli grabbed the severe burn cream from the medpack, mixed the base components together and started applying it to her back. The flesh she touched wasn’t as tender as she expected it to be but the pain still lingered there.

“You’re doing a good job healing it on your own, but the cream is still a good idea,” Kelda said.

“He said something about finding me being a disappointment. He was looking for the ‘other’, which has to be Nix right?” Ayli was already planning out the jump routes to follow her wife’s path.

Their separation was only supposed to have been for a week while Nix tracked down a promising lead she’d found. They’d both laughed at the idea that either of them would run into trouble in that period, coming up with increasingly far fetched problems that might occur the moment they left the sight of one another. After a quiet year of living together, and with no worrying wobbles in the Force, it had been all too easy to imagine that the tumultuous catastrophes which had threatened to swallow them whole when they first met were relegated to old stories and that they’d grown enough in wisdom to never fall into the same traps again.

And to be fair, they hadn’t.

This seemed to be a whole new problem Ayli had stumbled into.

New, even if it wore the face of an old adversary.

If it was after Nix though, Ayli had to warn her, especially with how easily the Lich had blindsided both Ayli and Kelda. 

“That’s it’s looking for Nix seems entirely likely. That it’s not able to find her yet also seems likely though. If it could it wouldn’t have come here.”

“So, could he only see me because I went into the Shadowed Cave then?”

“Possibly. As I said, the different Aberrations have different capabilities and different limitations. Sending you into the cave was a mistake born out of ignorance, and I apologize for that, but it may have been the only method by which this thing could be unearthed.”

“Ravas is with Nix still, right?” Ayli asked.

“She has not returned yet,” Kelda said, a hint of concern in her voice.

“That’s good. She would definitely warn Nix away from going into any Dark Side caves, right?”

“Yes.” Kelda had an oddly troubled look on her face which Ayli had no issue deciphering.

“And Nix has at best a fifty percent chance of listening to her.” Ayli knew her wife, and loved her not despite her quirks and eccentricities but because of them. Even with that though there were times when Ayli wished she had given into the impulse to install a tracking chip in Nix, and possibly an interstellar comm relay.

Of course, she didn’t really need either of those.

She had something far better.

“You are planning to travel to her and warn her?” Kelda asked. “I can be there much quicker.”

“Right. Force ghost powers. Let’s go with that. Just let her know that something related to Darsus Klex is looking for us. You don’t need to mention that I got fried. I’ll be in perfect shape by the time she gets back.”

Ayli did not want Nix racing back across the stars when it wasn’t necessary, and she especially didn’t want Goldie making “best time” on the journey since that was likely to involve damaging things that shouldn’t broken. Things like space docks, shuttle ports, or wherever else Goldie was birthed when Kelda found them.

“I understand,” Kelda said, seeming to share similar reservations. 

Ayli finished applying the burn cream and turned, expecting to see Kelda gone. Vanishing into the Force wasn’t even a trick at this point. It was just how Kelda moved about.

Except she hadn’t.

She was still standing in the room with Nix looking slightly puzzled.

“That’s odd?” Kelda seemed to be speaking to herself but she was looking at Ayli as though she might find an answer in that corner. “I can’t find her. I can’t find either of them in fact.”

“What,” Ayli said, her voice growing sharp and dangerous at the idea that something had already happened to Nix.

“They’re fine,” Kelda hastened to explain. “I can feel them both within the Force, but I don’t know where they are.”

“How is that possible? You always know where they are, don’t you?” As far as Ayli wa aware, she, Nix, and Ravas were Kelda’s principal anchors within the living world. No matter where they were, they were always within arms reach of Kelda since it was connection and not distance which bound them together.

“I do. Or I should,” Kelda said, still gazing outwards as though she could see beyond the stars if she simply looked hard enough. “Even if they had ventured into a Dark Side nexus, I should still be able to hear where they were. All I hear though is silence.”

“Can you get anything? A planet? A system? A general direction?” Ayli asked.

“No. I’ve never encountered this before. I would have sworn it was impossible in fact.”

“Should I be more afraid or less then?”

“Why don’t we go find them so we can be sure.”