Solna felt five threats against Rassi diminish to four and then three. Three assassins was still plenty to end her friend’s life though and Solna wasn’t sure how she was going to stop them all.

Before she could though, they ran out of time.

Not her. Not Rassi. Not even the assassins.

All of them. Everyone in the Silent Enclave had missed that their brief window of safety had closed early.

The Death Shadows were in the camp.

Solna froze.

Just like everyone else.

Still.

Silent.

The instinct of a prey animal when it was caught with only the barest hint of cover, but taken to a supernatural level.

No one breathed. The wind which blew with the Death Shadows arrival carried the sound of no whispers, no creaking bones, and no heartbeats. 

It was an unsustainable state. 

Like one of their dances, there was only so long anyone could hold themselves in perfect stillness and silence. Some few might have the control and determination to go beyond the point of no return and avoid the Death Shadows by carrying themselves into a silent death, but a far larger number were going to break and gasp for breath long before then.

And then things would get loud.

From freeze to flight, people were going to scream. They were going to run. 

And they were going to die anyways.

Solna could feel a creeping miasma in the Xah, the curdled blood stench of lives cut short and a beckoning abyss.

The Lich’s tomb had felt like that. 

Death hadn’t come yet, but the unnatural carnage that awaited them would birth a nexus to the Dark Side which would last until all memory of the Silent Enclave had long since faded from the galaxy.

Rassi stepped forward and Solna bit back the urge to scream.

She could not let Rassi be the first one to fall.

But that wasn’t Rassi’s plan.

Solna saw that and stepped forward with her, raising the crystal she carried which matched the one Rassi held aloft.

“Hey,” Rassi whispered, breaking the silence as effectively as a gong.

“We could use a hand now,” Solna said, every eye in the crowd on her.

From the crystals they carried, a nightmare poured forth. The dead of another world. Captured by cruelty and locked in suffering for an age and more.

Solna knew how it looked to the Silent Enclave. She could see and feel the terror in them rise as a new, more visibly horrifying threat rose from the black clouds that billowed from her hand and Rassi’s. She couldn’t blame them either. The Dead of Praxis Mar did not, for the most part, appear as they had in life, but rather stood as the centuries of torment had shaped them to be.

The Silent Enclave was missing something though.

The spectres before them were a nightmare, but who they were going to be a nightmare for was still an open question.

“There are a lot more of the Shadows here than at the tradeport,” Hendel the skeleton said.

“Can you hold them back? We just need a bit more time,” Rassi asked, her gaze fixed somewhere beyond the crowd.

The Death Shadows had drawn back in a wave at the arrival of the Praxis Mar Dead, but like the tide, Solna could feel their presence swelling for a return.

“Don’t know for how long, but yeah, holding out against something horrible isn’t exactly unusual for us,” Hendel said and with a wave of his hands the spectres spread through the crowd breaking the silence with gasps of surprise and cries of fear.

That was all it took to bring the Death Shadows surging back.

The clash between the two, the Shadows and the Dead was not a silent one. Each screamed louder than Solna could have ever imagined was possible and in their own uniquely disquieting manner.

Where the Dead roared with centuries of pent up rage and suffering, the Shadows’ cries rang out from an unfillable well of agony and hunger.

“So what will it be?” Rassi asked, speaking not just to Jolu but the crowd as a whole. “Are you going to let someone here kill me, or are you going to listen?”

Incredibly, Solna felt two of the assassin’s rising to take their shot.

She didn’t want to kill anyone else, but letting Rassi be hurt wasn’t even vaguely a choice.

Come to me, she called to one of the Death Shadows and reached out with the Force, drawing it past the perimeter of the Dead.

With one hand, she caught a blaster bolt an inch from Rassi’s head – or really the Force did. She’d surrendered herself completely to it. The only future she wanted was one where they could be together. Whatever the Force needed from her, it could have.

As for the assassin?

“That one is yours,” she said aloud, pointing to the roof of a nearby shed the assassin had perched on.

The Death Shadow flowed around Solna, touching her face, her shoulder, her arms.

She understood it.

Her heart was not gentle. Or peaceful. She wasn’t willing to turn the Force on a living person, but she did want to see the assassin die.

Had she become something like the people who Expunged the Death Shadow?

Should it take her too?

The Death Shadow wasn’t precisely a sapient being. It was the void where a sapient should have been. What moved it wasn’t a desire from vengeance or rage at what had happened to it. It’s actions were somewhat mechanical in nature, guided only by the echoes of the person it had once been.

“Take me as well, if you need,” Solna said. “But don’t let any of these people hurt her.”

Solna would have been lying is she said the desire for vengeance which the Shadows were lacking didn’t burn bring in her heart, but more important than that, far more important, was that Rassi be protected, and she really would give anything to make sure of that it seemed.

It should have been terrifying, to feel the embrace of death tracing chill lines across her flesh, but there wasn’t any fear in Solna’s heart.

All she felt was proud.

“I don’t think so,” Rassi said, drawing the Death Shadow away from Solna and leaving everyone, even the Death Shadow stunned. “You’re not here for her. And taking anyone how you want to take them won’t fill in what’s missing from you.”

Solna was too slow and too stunned to stop the next blaster bolt. Part of her objected in outraged denial. How could anyone possibly be so stupid as to keep trying to kill a girl who was trying to save everyone?

The attack didn’t quite work out how the last assassin was expecting though.

Solna and Rassi hadn’t come to the Enclave entirely of their own volition. They’d been following the flow of the Force, and Rassi was still quite calmly centered within it.

With a wave of her hand, and a tidal wave of backing from the Force, she batted the blaster bolt away.

That, unfortunately, required releasing the Death Shadow.

Which hadn’t exactly heard the words Rassi had spoken.

It merely sensed someone who was exactly like the ones it hungered for.

The Shadow didn’t cross the distance between Rassi and the assassin. It merely took one step forward and then was beside the assassin.

What happened next was the sort of thing the adults in the crowd shouldn’t have seen, much less the children. Many of them knew the assassin. He’d been a member of the community for fifty years. He’d taught a number of them basic self defense techniques. He’d played Sabbac with others. He’d even won the yearly prize for Garsho Chili for the last five years.

And he’d been an unrepentant murderer.

The cruelty and callousness which lived inside him did not remain there for another instant longer though. Pretty much nothing did when the Death Shadow turned him completely inside out and, while the process started in the blink of an eye, it, sadly for everyone, did not finish that quickly.

From the pile of gore, the Death Shadow arose, larger and screaming louder than ever.

“I’ve got this,” Solna said, with no idea how she was going to hold back the Death Shadow she’d pulled through the ever weakening perimeter of the Praxis Mar Dead. “Tell them what they need to know.”

Rassi began speaking, uninterrupted by assassins at last, and told the gathered crowd about what the expunging rites really were. Her words would have fallen on hardened hearts and unfriendly ears but everyone in the Enclave could feel how the Xah flowed through her. 

Could feel her not as a corrupter of the Xah, but as the voice of the Xah, moving with it and moved by it but without exerting the pressure to move them which they had all grown unconsciously accustomed to whenever an Elder spoke.

When she turned to speaking of how they had been raised to have no defenses so they could be more easily controlled, a wave of denial and outrage arose. 

That was impossible, they couldn’t have been tricked like that! 

The Elders got their positions through experience and oneness with the Xah!

They had defenses! The Xah was their ally. Their ally they were taught never to call on. And which would decide when they lived and died as was natural. As was right!

The Xah which was screaming at them through Rassi to LIVE!

The Xah didn’t want them to die.

So why had the Elders left?

And why couldn’t they be like Rassi?

She wasn’t anything special? She was terrible at being silent! Everyone knew that! She wasn’t anything special, so why was the Xah speaking through her? 

And why wasn’t Honored Jolu speaking at all?

The rock solid denial began to crack under those doubts but the outrage didn’t diminish, it merely began to shift its target.

Which wasn’t an especially good thing from Solna’s point of view since the outrage seemed to be feeding the Death Shadows and driving them into an even  greater degree of frenzy.

It didn’t work out like you hoped, did it? The question wasn’t formed with words. Solna put it together from the empathy she was able to piece together for the Death Shadow.

It didn’t respond with understanding, but it did pause, which was good enough to begin with.

What’s consuming you, the emptiness, it wasn’t filled at all by that was it? She wasn’t blaming or admonishing the Shadow. She wanted to find a path forward for the two of them, because the same abyssal need to hurt people yawned wide in her heart as well.

The Death Shadow did not want empathy though. Or kindness. Or a path forward. It’s nature, all that was left to it, was to destroy.

But Solna had felt its touch. She knew the memories that were lost to it yearned for something more.

For rest. For peace. For justice.

It wanted to leave behind a world where it would never have existed.

What was isn’t what will be. We can learn from what happened. We can see what becomes of our actions. We can do better.

The thoughts called some of the Death Shadows memories back, but with them came the capacity to deny Solna as well.

People don’t learn. They repeat the same mistakes over and over. And what does it matter if they can do better, when what was done is unforgivable?

Everything changes. Even the things we think are forever. Even the worse things. Our power is in carrying the things we love with us, and learning from the things we leave behind.

Solna felt like she was hearing the words as much as speaking them.

Was the Xah speaking through her too? Or had she been thinking about her place and purpose since her old life was lost to her for more reasons than she’d known?

Somewhere in Rassi’s speech, she’d made her points and fallen silent.

So that everyone could watch what Solna was doing.

And could hear what she was saying.

The Death Shadow could not change. It was a crime of the past which could never be left behind.

You don’t need to be bound to the suffering others inflicted on you, Solna said. You don’t need to forgive them, but you can let them go and embrace the new life that’s before you.

Resting her hands on the Death Shadow’s chest, she let the Force flow through her and carry it away to where all the scattered fragments of the person it had once been were waiting for it.