Brant spat blood on the plating of the Nar Shaddaa streets, glaring at the retreating back of his master. He should have expected that punch. He really should have. Did he think just because he had somehow snagged the attention of a Dark Councilor, he would not be above more beatings? Brant cursed in Mando’a. Of course that would have been too easy…
He couldn’t stop to think, however; some of the seedier citizens of the Duros Sector were slowly wandering his way, with the subtle yet focused look of hunters. Brant brought himself to his feet with an impulse of the Force, summoning a crackle of lightning into one hand, and the hunters abruptly turned away. Brant had a few more minutes to catch his breath unmolested, and he looked around.
Auratera, his new master had said. Brant was to find him on Auratera. Was it a planet, a city, a district? He had no idea. His first task was to get out of here alive, however. Identifying the place could wait until he was near an archives.
He began walking in the direction of the speeder rental, head up, giving a faint glare to anyone who looked at him for more than a few seconds. The punch the big Cathar had landed in his stomach continued to hurt, and he stopped only for a second or two to reorder his gut into some semblance of working. He grimaced as the Dark Force rippled through his muscles, tearing and dragging them back into place. The wounds began to shift and reopen again almost immediately, but with the pain gone, Brant could increase his pace to a swift walk. Just get out of here.
Just as he was crossing a long bridge, a few blocks from the speeder rental, three figures blocked his path. Brant was fully frustrated by this time, and on seeing them, he broke into a confrontational trot. Two of the figures pulled something out of their belts — blasters most likely — but Brant didn’t wait to confirm. He put on a burst of speed, augmented by the Force, and slid his blade from its sheath. He crossed the last few meters at a blinding run, slamming into the men before they could bring their weapons up far enough to aim.
Brant’s blade left satisfying trails of blood through the air, but the combat was short-lived. Street-fighting was one thing, but facing a Sith was quite another, and the three were quite unprepared.
When he at last got a look at their dying faces, Brant found he couldn’t tell if they had been gangsters or innocent citizens. He stared at the last one in particular, a woman with traces of Cathar heritage in the shape of her nose and the dark tracks, like mascara, around her eyes. The Dark Force was still pooling in his gut, and he curiously didn’t feel anything but the slow burn of its anger.
Seething silently, he pushed the bodies over the edge of the bridge, to be found later by some guttersnipe scavenging for credits — or perhaps not. Perhaps they would forever rot down there, in the bowels of the Hutt city. It was no longer Brant’s problem, at any rate.
A day had passed. Brant was back at the Sith Academy, perusing its datacrons and, once, a musty tome made of real leather and paper. The book wasn’t of much use, just recounting Sith legends, only one of which mentioned Auratera, but Brant kept paging through it, running his fingers across the etched letters. Was this what Mhakno meant by “writing” and “pens”? The thing didn’t seem too durable, and not at all easy to edit and amend, like a datapad. Maybe that was the point, Brant reflected.
He made his choices of datacron carefully and then, with them stuffed in a sack, climbed up the wall of the Academy to sit up near the top spire, looking out over the Yavin 4 landscape. He had found the little nook as an Acolyte, when he had been fleeing an aggravated Overseer and her whip made of lightning. It had been an oddity he had noted as a child, when he had been running from his Imperial minders: unless his pursuers were starfighter pilots, most failed to look straight up — especially when they were angry. So he had climbed into the lofty nook and waited for the angry Overseer to pass, promising he would one day be as powerful as her and repeat each strike of the lightning on her own hide. It was a tense few hours, and he had only crept down again when he heard the dinner bell and his stomach was beginning to hurt.
Much like it was hurting now. The Dark Healing had long since worn off, but Brant didn’t relish the idea of yet another soak in a kolto tank. He wedged himself between two large stone blocks and upended the sack of datacrons on the ledge up front of him. His return to the nook today was certainly less urgent than his encounter with the Overseer, but no less filled with anxiety, as he wondered what might happen to him if he failed the Dark Councilor’s task. He was pretty sure the Cathar was perceptive enough to look straight up, after all.
So he wasted no time, arranging the datacrons and settling into trawling through their precious information. The sun was touching the horizon, a brilliant orange like fire, throwing eerie red light on the walls of the temple like painted blood, by the time he was nearing an answer.
Auratera turned out to be a planet, one that orbited two suns and had an unusually strong connection to the Force. Brant had gleaned a hyperspace route to it and a few schedules of transport ships that made the journey there, if infrequently. Most of them were meant for the shipping of foodstuffs and not people, but he supposed a few waves of his hand and the Force could persuade their captains to let him tag along.
That settled, he slid down the backside of the temple, startling a red Twi’lek who had been meditating there. She was only an Acolyte, and he smirked at her, but he didn’t have time for bullying today. He returned the datacrons to the archives and then set about booking passage to Auratera.
Of course, getting to Auratera was only half the journey, Brant reflected, as he trotted down the gangplank of the transport, his gaze directed up at the night sky. Though it was technically near midnight, the planet’s second sun smeared a lavender glow across the sky like a bright moon. He could sense the Force vibrating all around him, even here in the spaceport where the ground had been sheathed over with metal and concrete. Brant could suddenly see why the Dark Councilor would pick this planet for his stronghold, though the feel of its Force was slightly unnerving to the Sith apprentice: tremoring with the Light Side.
Yet, perhaps that made Brant’s job easier, he thought, as he walked from the port and down into the little village that surrounded it. The buildings were constructed of wood and thatch instead of more space-worthy materials, and there were certainly no hulking shadows of Sith Lord palaces hiding behind them. Even if Hu’izei had no interest in grand dwellings, Brant thought, the Dark Side must gather thickly around him and his servants; they would stick out like a sore thumb in the planet’s naturally Light-Sided thrum. Brant might have to travel for several days to find it, visiting each major city by speeder, but he didn’t imagine such a signature could hide from him for long.
Brant felt the Acablas’s power before he saw it, like a constant screaming in the Force, and Brant knew he had to be close. The stones of the path under his feet were ancient, each steeped in an energy so fearsome he could almost taste it. He had seen Sith Lords unlock the origins of such objects before, but to him these were only a blank wall of mystery.
Instead, the energy they put out lit up in his mind like a web, many paths trailing through the land to converge at a single spot. It was like a web in more ways than one. A knot of Dark Side energy, like a spider, crouched in the middle, feeding on the bodies of hundreds — no, thousands? — of the flies it had slain and bound there. That vergence stood out in stark contrast to the gentle hum of the rest of the planet’s Force — which was how Brant had found it.
He could feel the eerie draw of it now, like blood trickling across his skin: the steady poisoning of an entire ecology. The two conflicting sides of the Force twisted up inside of him as well, pushing and pulling like tides, each threatening to claim him. His excitement was growing at the prospect of being so close to the end of his journey however, and he used that, leaning into the Dark Side, until the troubling feeling passed and pure passion embraced him.
Brant finally crested the ridge and looked down at a stone Sith temple perched on the edge of deep funnel into the ground: Acablas. Even at this distance, he could just make out figures moving along its steps, hooded in black and red. Smirking, he pulled out his datapad and began to type out a message.
My lord, it read. I have found the base of your power.