Nix was going to owe someone a ship. She hadn’t planned on owing anyone a ship, but Praxis Mar wasn’t proving to be especially welcoming on her approach to it.

“For as insistent as this place was on bringing me back, you’d like there’d be a better welcoming party than all these supercell storms,” she grumbled as she fought with the controls on Lasha’s ship to reach the group with the ship in more or less as many pieces as when she’d borrowed it.

“You are not welcome here I’m afraid,” Hendel the skeleton said. “Or at least not welcome by all.”

“I don’t recall feeling particularly welcome the last time I was here, but getting to the surface wasn’t this bad,” Nix said as a gust flipped the over sideways and blew them a dozen kilometers aways from where she’d been aiming to land.

“When last you arrived, we had been asleep for centuries. You changed that, and so turmoil rages once more.”

“I thought there were others like you though who wanted us here?” Nix said, seeing a path between two tornadoes which offered an escape from the boundaries of the storm.

“There are,” Hendel said. “And our numbers are growing. What you’re seeing is both the rage of those who would destroy you and the protection those who support you can offer.”

“So it could be worse than this?” Nix asked, cursing as a third tornado blew past closing off her path of escape.

“Far worse. The Beast does not sleep but it sits unmoving,” Hendel said.

“There!” Nix punched the drive over its rated limits and heard the superstructure of the ship groan. It was under so much strain but it would hold. It had been well maintained, and all of the microfractures she was inflicting on it could be repaired in a proper shop.

And the landing struts could be replaced.

She would do the work for free even.

Assuming that, having touched down on Praxis Mar at last, she would ever be able to leave.

“Everything is calm now,” she said. “Why? How?”

“The air was not enough to stop you,” Hendel said. “So now the land will try.”

Nix flinched at that, thinking of how a continent’s worth of land had tried to squash her the last time she’d been on Praxis Mar, but true to Hendel’s accounting, the Beast of Praxis Mar wasn’t move against her. Yet. 

What was moving were piles of dirt and sand, several dozen.

They each rose into a vaguely humanoid shape and began to stalk towards the ship like an onrushing tidal wave.

Nix tried to fire up the engines, which worked, to take off for pretty much anywhere else on the planet, which did not work.

“This place needs to make up its mind, does it want me here or not?” She wasn’t growling at the planet. That would have been silly. Planet’s can’t hear you after all. And when those that can apparently growl back a lot louder.

“You may want to flee this location,” Hendel said. “There seems to be an earthquake stalking you.”

“The thought crossed my mind. Unfortunately the ground is eating the lower half of the ship,” Nix fought with the control, briefly considered whether a tiny little hyperspace jump would be something she could pull off, decided (rightly) that the maneuver would be suicidal on a normal planet and extra-spicy deadly on a planetary Dark Side nexus, and settled on the only available course of action she could see.

Abandoning a ship that wasn’t her own didn’t feel like a wise decision. Ship hulls were significantly tougher than the squishy body she strolled around in for one thing. For another, she had no idea how far away Ayli was and the prospect of crossing half a planets circumference in order to find her wife was more than a little daunting.

On the other hand, Hendel hadn’t been wrong about the earthquake and it turned out that trying to kill one specific person with tectonic effects wasn’t exactly straight forward. Especially not when the person in question had spent her life attuning to the Force and a year in advanced training which including moving as only a Force user could.

“It has been forever since I got to do this,” Hendel said, Force Leaping as easily as Nix did despite lacking any particular musculature to channel the Force through.

Of course, Nix decided, if she was going to complain about that then asking how his otherwise disconnected bones were holding together in their proper positions rather resting as a pile on the ground would have been a better first question. As it was, she was simply grateful to have the company though.

“Does your faction have any safe locations we could head towards?” Nix asked, dodging a collapsing cliff which, honestly, was a really weak attempt on the planet’s part. She’d been able to see it was about to topple over without any Force sensitivity at all.

“Nowhere on Praxis Mar is safe,” Hendel said. “There are spots were more of us are gathering but those are the most imperiled spots of all.”

Which wasn’t what Nix had been hoping to hear, but intuition told her was probably what she’d most needed to be aware of.

The Force was great like that.

Have a problem?

Wonderful! Here’s another even worse one so that you can fix a whole bunch of things at once.

Nix hated working like that.

One problem at a time, spaced out over a reasonable interval.

Her entire career as a ship’s mechanic though had shown her that life simply did not work like that.

“Take me to the worst one then,” she said.

“Are you sure?” Hendel asked, tripping into a boulder which had come flying down from a new cliff which had erupted as the ground around them shattered. “It’s a lot worse than this at the Temple.”

“Worse that the ground trying to grind us to paste? What could be….oh, he’s there isn’t he?” Nix felt a tremendous pull to the south as the thought locked into her mind.

“Yeah,” Hendel said, defeat and resignation heavier than stone weighing down his words.

“Hey, it wasn’t like I was going to end up going anywhere else in the end,” Nix said, feeling more at peace with the doom she was rushing towards than was perhaps wise or warranted.

“It’s just…” Hendel stumbled over his words. “I’ve seen this. I’ve been here. I’ve been you. I don’t…”

“You don’t want to watch me fall,” Nix said. “You don’t want to have to relive what you went through.”

“You don’t deserve that.”

“You didn’t either.”

“I failed. I thought I was more than I was and that cost me and everyone else everything.”

“The same could happen to me,” Nix said, feeling the truth of that statement ripple through her. 

She was moving faster than she’d ever moved before. Praxis Mar was a Dark Side Nexus. It was home to fear and hate and despair so dense that it was all but palpable, but fear, hate, and despair were still a part of the Force, and the Force was with her.

“You don’t know what that means,” Hendel said. “The guy waiting for you at the Temple? He wasn’t here when Praxis Mar fell. He didn’t need to be. The Dark Side here? It’s uncontestable.”

“You’re probably right,” Nix said. “No, I take that back. You’re definitely right. You’re speaking from experience, not just supposition.”

“Then why aren’t you running away? Just…just leave. Go anywhere. Refuse the call of this place. It doesn’t need to claim more victims. There are enough of us here already.”

“You’re more than victims,” Nix said. “And you deserve better than this. Not deserved in the past tense. Deserve. Now. Today. You are absolutely correct that the problems of Praxis Mar are far, far beyond my ability to fix. I’m a ship’s mechanic with less training than a six year old Padawan Jedi, and we both know this place could swallow an army of Jedi who tried to fix it.”

“Then you know you’re going to your death?”

“There is no death, there is the Force,” Nix said, doing her best impression of Kelda. “Or at least so I’ve been told. Hanging around with a talking skeleton and a couple of Force Ghosts is sort of convincing proof of that but there are a lot of dead people who aren’t so talkative so maybe the jury is still out there.”

“You won’t come back as a Force Ghost here,” Hendel said. “There isn’t even a ‘you’ left most of the time, and if there is, it’s so much worse.”

“That’s why I need to do this,” Nix said. “I’ve turned my back on a lot of bad situations in the past. What happens here is going to stay with me for the rest of my life.”

“You can live with more than you think,” Hendel said. “And there’s a lot of good you can do that doesn’t require you to throw yourself into an impossible meat grinder.”

“I kind of hate that you’re speaking from experience and that you make so much sense,” Nix said, dodging a meteor of lava which a newly formed volcano had hurled on sub-orbital arc towards her.

“Thank you. If you mean that though, we need to turn around. We shouldn’t be this close and getting any closer means he’s going to be notice you for sure.”

“Oh, he knows exactly where I am,” Nix said, the hint of a feral smile teasing the corners of her lips.

“Then you’re already doomed,” Hendel said, dropping behind Nix as fresh despair sapped his strength.

“Hey,” Nix said, leaping back to grab his wrist bones and pull him forward. “If you’d known before hand that you were totally, one hundred percent, doomed, and nothing you could do would change that, what would you have done.”

“Something else, anything else,” Hendel said.

“Nope. You’re completely doomed remember. The other side has all the power. You’re helpless. So do you just lay down and give up? Will running from the conflict change anything?”

“No. No it won’t.” Hendel said, and Nix felt the cloud of despair around him grow just a tiny bit fainter.

“What about embracing it? What about spitting in the face of the Dark Side and making it work for its win?”

“It’s still going to win though,” Hendel said, coming to a standstill.

“Is it?” Nix asked, pausing beside him and not letting go. “Did you study the Dark Side at all? What’s the first rule of the Dark Side, and basically page 1 of the playbook that every tyrant work from?”

“The Dark Side lies.”

“You’ve been trapped in a Dark Side Nexus for centuries. Oh, you’re having problems imagining a better future? Hate seems to be overwhelmingly powerful? There’s no hope at all of fighting back? No chance that there can ever be a better future? Hmm, I wonder why that’s all you can see here in the land of ‘infinite’ darkness?”

“This doesn’t feel like a lie though,” Hendel said. “When I died, I fell because I’d believed a lie about myself and the strength I had, and Praxis Mar showed me how wrong that was.”

“Wow, you made a mistake. Well, we all know that everyone else is perfect and that no one can ever learn from a mistake.”

“Hard to learn much after you’re dead,” Hendel said, the hint of an unseen smile coloring his words.

“It’s never too late,” Nix said. “Those bones you’re wearing? This crude matter meat bot I’m piloting? These aren’t us. They’re how we express ourselves, but we are so much more than this. We are a part of all that lives, we are a part of history, we are the dreams of those who came before us, and the memories of those who follow after. This planet is lost in Darkness? So what? The Force is with us and we are the Force.”