Brant crawled down into the crack between glaciers. He had gotten the location from Kellaro: the last known whereabouts of his parents. The couple had come up here to hunt a beast that had been terrorizing the locals, it was said, and then disappeared.
But Brant knew the truth. Here, Hu’izei had captured them. Here was their last moments of freedom.
There wasn’t much there now. The bones of some large feline creature lay up against one wall, starting to be overtaken by the eternal march of glacier ice down the mountain’s slope. There were other bones, too, that Brant could identify as the creature’s old prey. Kellaro would’ve been sure to scour through them when he had been seeking signs of Kyolath and Dinui, and many scavengers had since that time as well, so Brant didn’t expect to find much of use among them.
Yet as he paced around the ice cave anyway, a small sheet of metal cracked up through the snow when Brant stepped on it. He tugged it out of the drift with an effort. It was a piece of a Mandalorian’s body suit, one side cruelly bent where it must have come away from the rest of the armor under intense pressure. It could have been any Mandalorian’s, for it was the section over which the pauldrons slid on the upper arm, usually left undecorated as it was rarely visible. Brant had a way of finding out for sure, of course. He held the piece out and breathed on it; at the same time, he worked his hooks into the Force and bent it to his will.
Strong, painfully clear images of his parents rose from the plate then. Brant felt, echoed over time, a panic from his mother, yet from the man standing beside her, only an odd sense of finality, as they watched something dark approach them from over the glacier.
The emotions echoed through the Force down to Brant as if Kyolath were still standing next to him. Resignation: his father had somehow known that this would occur, that his life could end no differently than in a confrontation with a Sith.
How had he known? Brant wondered, and he broke the connection.
He did not expect to find more meaningful clues in the refuse, though he kept the plate pressed to his chest and dragged his feet through the snow looking for more fragments for several hours anyway. Eventually, the sun began to go down and the cold became too bitter. Brant had means of combating that of course, but he couldn’t see the point. Like footsteps in snow, the last traces of his parents were gone from this place. He was alone, with his nightmares the only reminders of their past.