Pulling a lightsaber on someone had expressed an interest in keeping you alive wasn’t the friendliest of gestures. 

Ayli wasn’t in a terribly friendly mood though. 

Also there was a recon droid hurtling towards the window on the far side of the room.

Without the time to leap past the shabby robed man, Ayli took the next best option and threw her lightsaber to disable the droid. With the help of the Force, the blade rocketed from her grasp like a missile and Ayli changed her focus to reclaiming it once it had punched a hole through the incoming attacker.

But that wasn’t quite how things worked out.

As the blade sailed past the man, he casually snagged it from the air, seeming to move far too slowly to have accomplished such a feat.

At the same time, the incoming droid exploded in a shower of pieces. There was no flame, and no detonation. Only bits of bot falling from the sky.

“My apologies,” the man said. “We will not be interrupted again.”

“Who are you?” Ayli asked, feeling more than a little concerned that she’d just disarmed herself by giving a potential foe her best weapon.

Not that her lightsaber was necessarily his best weapon. What he’d done to the droid, Ayli had the suspicion he would be able to do to her as well, though the droid wouldn’t have had any connection to the Force to call on to resist the attack.

“My name is Monfi Kyl, though I’ve been called a lot of other things, at least a handful of which aren’t profanities,” Monfi said. “You can let me know your name after I convince you that I’m here to help.”

“Help with what exactly?” Ayli asked, moving into the room but not yet taking the seat opposite Monfi. She could feel that he was trustworthy, but for all the training she’d had with the Force, she was still wary of relying on her feelings outside of combat. Being paranoid had served her well since she was a child and it hard to break away from a successful strategy.

“You’ve drawn the attention of someone truly foul,” Monfi said, and drew in a deep breath through his nose. “More than the attention. He’s hurt you already hasn’t he?”

“Before I answer that, I want my lightsaber back,” Ayli said, holding out her left hand.

“Oh! Of course,” Monfi said, and passed the unlit hilt over without hesitation. “It’s a fascinating design. The components are all new are they not? Yet the design has the elegance of an ancient Jedi style.”

“It was patterned after one I used to carry,” Kelda said, manifesting visibly within the room.

“Welcome Jedi! Or, hmm, is that the right appellation?” Monfi asked.

“She’s a ghost,” Ayli said.

“Oh, certainly not,” Monfi said. “Though I do acknowledge the similarities.”

“I died somewhere around a thousand standard years ago,” Kelda said. “And yes, I was a Jedi, once.”

“It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Monfi said. “Both of you.”

“You’re a Phantom Stalker, aren’t you?” Kelda asked.

Ayli braced for combat, despite the Force offering no suggestion that violence was in the offing.

Because violence usually came without warning in her experience.

Especially if she was the one initiating it.

“That is indeed one of the things I’ve been called, though you make it sounds much less like a curse than I’ve been told Jedi typically do,” Monfi said. “For what it’s worth, the preferred title I bear is Padal Horizon Knight, but this is neither the time nor the place for honorifics.”

“Not if that riot tank out there decides these walls are basically tissue paper,” Ayli said, curious that the Force was offering no warnings of danger at all, and that the crashing destruction she expected to hear from outside was entirely absent.

“The suborned droids have been freed,” Monfi said. “There are still assassins in the city who are looking to collect the bounty posted on you, but if you can give me enough time that issue can be removed as well.”

“Why?” Ayli asked. People without obvious agendas tended to have bad ones. There were exceptions but it wasn’t the exceptions who shot you in the back.

“We have a common enemy, I believe,” Monfi said.

“Darsus Klex?” Ayli could easily believe that Darsus had managed to make a wide array of enemies but it was still rather convenient that one had shown up just when she needed him.

“No, and yes,” Monfi said, proving that one did not need to be a Jedi to be talented at answering questions in the most irritatingly ambiguous manner possible.

Ayli offered only a weary glare in response to which Monfi held up his hands in a gesture of peace.

“We’re speaking of the same person,” Monfi said. “But the guise he wears as this ‘Darsus Klex’ is not who our mutual enemy truly is. He is not a man at all to be accurate, but rather a ‘phantom’, or a ‘Dark Side Lich’ as our former-Jedi might call him.”

“And you’re a Phantom Stalker, at least according to the Jedi?” Ayli asked. “Why didn’t they call you a Lich Stalker?”

“The phantom part was used in a derogatory sense,” Monfi said. “The Jedi did not care for my Order’s focus. They felt that our focus on seeking out aberrations in the Force led to too man of us being corrupted by the fear we followed.”

“The Jedi were also not overly found of people who refused to help with tangible problems and chased what, we thought, were usually imaginary enemies,” Kelda said.

“This feels like a pretty tangible problem at the moment,” Ayli said. “And I’ve still got the burns to prove it.”

“I suspect most of the foes the Padal Knights chased were similarly tangible,” Kelda said. “Though to be fair, I have a rather different vantage point now than most of the Jedi of my time did.”

“So if this Lich isn’t Darsus Klex, who is he?” Ayli asked.

“His true name is gone, destroyed in the process of making himself into a lich,” Monfi said. “Since rising as one, he has adopted as many names and titles as those whose lives he’s usurped. The first such life was a vile monster of a man named Paralus Stahl, and that’s the one he’s returned to again and again.”

“Sounds like a delightful individual,” Ayli said. “Why is he after me?”

“I was rather hoping you would be able to tell me that,” Monfi said. “I caught his trail on Nestaba Rel. There’s a Dark Side nexus there we keep a watch over and he arrived at its door already in possession of the body he wears now, and focused on his mission.”

“What did he do to the body?” Kelda asked.

“He drowned it,” Monfi said. 

“In the Dark Side?” Aly asked, remembering with a shudder what Praxis Mar had been like.

“Yes, though more tangibly in the lake at the center of the nexus. From what I was able to read, it was an excruciating death.”

“Reading the past in a Dark Side nexus is almost guaranteed to show the viewer the lies they fear most,” Kelda said.

“For a Jedi, yes,” Monfi said. “And I won’t pretend it was easy to peer past though illusions, but the Force can be guided, even in a Dark Side nexus to reveal the truth. Given how often that is where the trails we follow lead us, my Order has techniques focused on providing the Force with the guidance it needs.”

“Why would this Paralus kill a body he was already possessing?” Ayli asked, understanding pretty easily why someone would want to kill Darsus, but unsure how that could have benefited someone who was capable to possessing Darsus in the first place.

“For the same reason all Dark Side user do anything,” Monfi said. “Power. The body he wears still moves and can still interact with the living world, but it is powered only by the corrupted energies of the Dark Side.”

“Like Ravas’ body was?” Ayli asked, glancing over to Kelda.

“It can’t be quite the same, otherwise he would be inert anywhere outside a Dark Side nexus,” Kelda said, watching Monfi for his reaction.

“That’s the trick of it from what we’ve been able to ascertain,” Monfi said. “A Lich possessing a body is usually limited because the Force which flows through the host resists the twisted Dark Side energy the Lich has warped its very self into. It will spend as much of its strength constantly fighting its host as it can use to do anything else.”

“Oh, I see,” Kelda said. “Drowning the host in a Dark Side nexus, or I suppose any other suitably horrific death, corrupt the host’s life force and allows the Lich to empower the host with its own energies without resistance. It weaves the host’s suffering into conduits for its own malice and rage.”

Monfi nodded with a broad smile on his face.

“I cannot tell you how refreshing it is to hear a Jedi say that. I’ve been taught that the Jedi regarded our our understandings of the Dark Side as impossible fantasies.”

“Why would they think that? It fits with what we’ve seen and I’ve had all of one interaction with him so far,” Ayli said.

“Because it shouldn’t be possible,” Kelda said. “Murder does not grant anyone power. Drowning a person, even in a Dark Side nexus, is a good method of producing a corpse and not much else.”

“She’s right,” Monfi said. “From everything we know, what a Lich does can’t work. And then we watch it work anyways. Really hard to argue with someone in cases like that.”

“So where does that leave us?” Ayli asked.

“At a choice,” Monfi said. “Your attackers were sent by one of Paralus’ minions. My associates have dealt with that problem, for now at least. If you wish, you may leave and chose your own path forward. Paralus will almost certainly come for you again, or those connected to you, but you have survived one brush with him so I will not claim doing so again is impossible, only that he will have learned from your encounter much as you have.”

“And the other choice is to combine our efforts with yours?” Kelda said.

“We will be stronger working together,” Monfi said, “providing we can trust one another.”

“Wait. You said Paralus would strike at those connected to us? How distant could those connections be? And what could he do?” Ayli asked, a thousand concerns leaping to her mind.

“Physical distance is generally irrelevant to a Force Lich,” Monfi said. “What matters more is how entangled your life is with someone else’s.”

“So my parents?”

“Are at risk, especially if they are often in your thoughts,” Monfi said.

Ayli was a bit ashamed that, for as much as she loved them, she’d spent months focused on her Jedi training without thinking about her adopted parents much.

There was someone else however who was never far from the center of her mind.

“And my wife?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

“Unless you are estranged by apathy, I’m afraid she’s in peril as well,” Monfi said.

“Could Paralus cloud her in the Dark Side to where neither of us would be able to sense her?” Ayli asked, as the echo of a terrible rage seemed to scream across the stars to her.

“That’s not something we’ve ever seen a Lich do,” Monfi said. “I doubt they can since we’re most often stuck with tracking them by listening for their victims. If they could hide the people they target we’d almost never find them.

The scream was so far away and yet Ayli could feel it echoing out of her heart.

And Kelda could do too from the look on her face.

“Something is very wrong,” Kelda said.

“We have to go. Now,” Ayli said. “And you’re coming with us.”