Rassi and Solna caught up with Nix, Ayli and the others on a pirate station which looked like it had never seen better days, mostly because it looked like it had never seen any good days at all. With a trio of Sister Zin’s fellow space nuns serving as their escort though none of the pirates offered them any trouble.

Which seemed odd to both of them?

“You’ve been here before?” Solna guessed, the Force being smugly quiet about the lack of response the nuns were generating.

“Others of our Order do business here,” Sister Calvarex said. 

Rassi was a big girl, both in height and width. For the first time however, she looked on the smaller side compared to Sister Calvarex. 

Which might also explain why the pirates were uninterested in giving them much trouble.

With that in mind, neither Rassi nor Solna were alarmed when they turned down a dark side alley that turned into an odd little maze. Had anyone else led them into a spot like that it wouldn’t have turned out well for someone, but the Sisters clearly knew where they were going.

That their destination turned out to be a bright and airy flower garden at the top of long lift ride was not at all what they’d been expecting, but the sight of their new friends told them they’d definitely come to the right place.

“So, is a new fleet worth the ship we banged up a little on you?” Nix asked.

“If its only a little banged up then you should be able to bang it right back into shape, right?” Sali asked.

“That is something I could do, yes, with enough time,” Nix said. “I would just need you to collect it first.”

Nix’s smile said she knew she was in at least mildly warm water in terms of the state of the ship, and she wasn’t quite willing to admit to what it was “mild” in comparison to.

“That should be easy enough,” Sali said, her smile matching Nix’s only in that, while she was legitimately happy that Nix was still alive, she was absolutely not going to pass up the opportunity to make her former lover squirm a bit. “We have, what, four, five salvage teams in the area? I’m sure they can bring it in you give them the coordinates where you left it.”

“Yeah, about that,” Nix said, pausing to find the right words.

“They’re going to need more than one set of coordinates,” Ayli said, finding, if not the right words, at least an accurate set of them. “Maybe a few thousand?”

“So, my ship is in a thousand pieces?” Sali said.

“More like a million probably,” Ayli said. “But most of the bits should still be grouped together, roughly speaking.”

“So banging it back together?” Sali said. “Might take a little while.”

“A little,” Nix said.

“Or,” Ayli offered. “We could give you something much better.”

“You really don’t need to,” Zin said. “That ship was insured after all.”

“No, no, this I want to hear,” Sali said. “What’s better than getting my very nice ship back?”

“There’s a Proton Beam Cannon floating out there,” Ayli said. “It’s damaged, but still functional. It’s also cloaked, but the cloak will be fading. As it stands I’m pretty sure one of your ‘friends’ is going to stumble across it as soon as they get done divvying up the fleet they captured.”

“Do we really want to put that kind of temptation into Sali’s hands?” Nix asked.

“I don’t know? Do we want it in anyone else’s hands?” Ayli asked.

“I mean, we could use it,” Nix said.

“I second that! And third it! And fourth it!” Goldie said over the comm Nix was carrying.

“Okay, maybe that would be a bad idea too,” Nix said.

“There, you see, so how does your very own proton beam cannon sound? You know in place of it being someone else’s proton beam cannon?” Ayli asked.

“I hate you,” Sali said. “Both of you.”

“Yay!” Nix said. “Hey, I’ll even install it if you want.”

“No!” Sali said.

“What? Why?”

“You will absolutely put a destructive fuse in it so it fries itself the first time I try to fire it,” Sali said.

“Well, I mean, no one else would know that,” Nix said.

“Why did I ever date you,” Sali said. “You are the worst.”

“It was so you could appreciate your current girlfriend more,” Nix said.

“I don’t have a girlfriend anymore,” Sali said.

Zin bapped her on the shoulder and held up her left hand.

Which Sali did as well to display their matching rings.

“CONGRATULATIONS!” Nix squealed and leapt to embrace them both.

“Now you officially can’t have her back,” Zin said.

“She’s been taken for a while now,” Ayli said.

“Not outside of Canto Bight,” Zin said, which was news to Rassi and Solna.

“Huh, we never did get that fixed, did we?” Ayli said, and glanced down at the ring on her fingers which was a twin to the one on Nix’s.

“We should probably fix that then,” Nix said and got down on one knee.

“Oh no you don’t! I get to propose to you,” Ayli said, also getting down on one knee.

“You proposed last time though!”

“Maybe! We don’t know that for sure though.” Ayli held forth her lightsaber for Nix to take, apparently as a betrothal gift.

“Wait, what?” Sali asked. “How do you not know…ah, Canto Bight. Right.”

Rassi and Solna exchanged a glance at each other in confusion, but it was Nulo who was floating nearby who cleared things up.

“Canto Bight is a, uh, resort world,” she said. “It’s sort of infamous for all the substances that can deprive people of their senses.”

“Makes for better gambling,” Sali said. “From the house’s perspective.”

“So are you two actually married?” Solna asked.

“They are definitely married,” Rassi said.

“Thank you,” Nix said. “And yes, in every way that matters, this is my wife.”

“For legal purposes though, for example in the eyes of the New Republic, our marriage certificate might as well be written in crayon,” Ayli said. “We don’t have to deal with the New Republic very much, so it hasn’t come up in the last year or so, but if these two are going to be all official, we can’t very well let them show us up.”

“I don’t think you’ll benefit from the same tax loopholes that she will?” Zin said to Ayli, indicating Sali.

“Hey! I married you for more than the tax breaks,” Sali said. “Those were just a nice bonus.”

“Which is why you’ll be giving me the proton beam cannon right?” Zin said, smiling sweetly.

“What’s mine is yours,” Sali said, looking genuinely smitten for a moment.

“Okay, for you I’ll do the installation and not put in the kill circuits on it,” Nix said. “That can be my wedding present to you.”

“Thank you,” Zin said.

Ayli cleared her throat.

“I believe there’s another wedding under discussion?” she said, noting that they were both still kneeling.

“Ah, good, so you accept my proposal then!” Nix said, turning a mischievous smile on Ayli.

“That depends,” Ayli said. “What are you offering for my betrothal?”

“I’d give you my saber, but, it’s…”

“Not exactly wedding material, yeah.”

Again, Rassi and Solna shared a puzzled look.

“What happened to it?” they asked together.

Nix drew forth a fairly plain hilt, and offered it to no one.

There was a presence within it. Dim. Sleeping.

And unspeakably deadly.

“I don’t want to call it a Death Saber, because that sounds so overwrought and pathetic…” Nix said.

“But that’s not an inaccurate name for it,” Ayli finished.

“What did you do? What is it?” Solna asked, pushing away her sense of it in the Force. She wanted absolutely nothing to do with whatever was in that hilt at all.

“When you sent the Death Shadows to us, they turned on the Elders,” Nix said.

“But we didn’t send them to you?” Rassi said.

“You did, in a manner of speaking,” Kelda said.

“When you broke the Silent Enclave, you broke the tether the Death Shadows had to you,” Ravas said. “We helped them find the Elders but honestly it wasn’t hard. They were drawn them like light into a black hole.”

“Which is very good,” Nix said. “We owe our lives to you two.”

“Really?” Rassi asked.

“How?” Solna asked.

“Our plans didn’t work out quite how we thought they would,” Ayli said.

“And the Elders were a lot stronger than we were ready to deal with,” Nix said.

“To be fair, they were slurping down Imperial lives like they were bacta packs,” Ayli said.

“True, and that wasn’t the sort of thing we’d ever seen them do before, so kind of a cheat,” Nix said.

“What do you mean ‘slurping down Imperial lives’?” Sali asked.

“Remember how we said it was a bad idea for the pirates to try taking on the Elders?” Ayli asked. “Turns out the Elders knew a Force trick where they could rip the life out of someone and add it to their own. The Imperials had the bridge filled with troopers when they brought us there to use as hostages. A smart move given what we’d been doing to them, but kind of stupid as it turned out with what it let the Elders do.”

“How did you survive?” Rassi asked.

“Blocking that sort of thing isn’t hard if you’ve got even halfway decent shields,” Nix said. “Honestly a bunch of the pirates probably could have managed it too. Imperials on the other hand are so hungry to worship the powerful and so lacking in basic empathy that they’re all but divorced from the Force, or at least any meaningful dialogue with it.”

“Which isn’t to say they weren’t a problem,” Ayli said. “Nix taunted Dolon and they hit her with something that came pretty close to ripping her apart.”

“It came close to ripping us all apart,” Lasha said.

“Sounds like I had the easier time of things then,” Monfi said, his arm which was cradled in a sling and the cast on his leg making that a questionable claim, though still perhaps an accurate one.

“Dolon wasn’t who we thought he was,” Nix said. “Not since he was named Primus at least. Which means I never met the original.”

“What do you mean the original?” Solna asked.

“The Elders weren’t just trying to kill us. If they wanted us dead they could have managed that without ever being in danger themselves. What they were really doing was trying to shred us and leave our bodies as empty husks to put their own spirits into,” Nix said. “With the Imperials dead they could have let the pirates take over, claimed that they were Ayli, Lasha, the kids and me and waked away with no one the wiser.”

“But you were too strong for them?” Rassi asked.

“Not in the slightest,” Nix said. “I was maybe two seconds away from becoming their meat puppet when the others stepped in and then the Elders started eating the Imperials for extra strength. We fought back, but Ayli even chopping off Dolon’s head didn’t help.”

“Okay, I am definitely glad we let you be the boarding party,” Sali said.

“Same,” Nix said. “Don’t get me wrong, that entire situation sucked, but I at least knew we would get through it.”

“How?” Solna asked.

“The Force was with us,” Ayli said.

“Eagerly in fact,” Nix said. “What the Elders were doing was everything they’d told you a ‘corruption of the Xah’ was, and the Force was basically done with their idiocy.”

“Which was probably why the Death Shadows were able to find us so quickly,” Ayli said. “The moment the Elders dropped their cloaking to assault us it must have been like a signal flare went up.”

“Even they weren’t quite enough though,” Nix said. “So Ayli dumped the Star Destroyer’s main power conduits onto Dolon and let the reactor fry him.”

“Which, before you think that sounds too good, he survived,” Ayli said.

“But to do so, he ate the rest of the Elders,” Nix said. “Which made him a bit bigger of a problem.”

“So you hit him with your lightsaber?”

“Lightsabers weren’t really bothering him at that point,” Ayli said.

“Yeah. And the Death Shadows couldn’t get to him,” Nix said. “So I called them in and gave them what they needed to reach him.”

“What? How?” Solna asked.

“I wasn’t the one they wanted. They would have hurt me, they do that just by existing, but I knew I wouldn’t take much organ damage if I gave them a place to go.”

“Which was into her lightsaber, which turned the most disturbing shade of nothing,” Ayli said.

“Nothing as in the black of space?” Sali asked.

“Nothing as in invisible,” Nix said. “Unless you move it, then it looks like a tear in reality.”

“That sounds rather dangerous,” Monfi said.

“It is,” Lasha said. “Which is why she’s not going to turn it on again.”

“Yes. For that reason and because I do not want to wake up the all the Death Shadows which are sleeping within it. They’ve earned their peace. Just like we have.”