The hike up to the tombs took most of the day. The beginning of the trail was well-marked and maintained, and it seemed the place was a common tourist attraction. He passed by one tomb near the base of the mountain, where the doors were thrown wide and people were going in and out, talking and laughing without care. Beyond that, the trail wound its way back and forth, getting steeper and rockier. The train of tourists died away as Brant climbed up it, until he only passed an old man with a backpack and an akk dog, simply stretching his legs on a pleasant nature hike.
But for Brant, the Other continued to tug at him, and the Dark Side continued to pool in his belly. He used the anger and impatience to push himself onward, even after the trail had petered out and he was scrambling straight up the hillside. He cut his hands on the rough rocks and the thorny branches of the trees, but he restrained himself from using the Force. If his visions were true, something powerful was awaiting him up here, and he wanted all of his energy to face it.
Finally he stumbled down again into what he at first mistook as a waterway. It was like a narrow little valley carved down the mountain from snowmelt, except that the stones at the bottom of the creek bed were too regular and even to have found their way there naturally. As he began to climb up it, he realized they were flagstones, marking an old path to the top of the hill. He nearly got tangled up in a few overgrown bushes, but then, tearing away from their last grasping fingers, he stumbled into a little alcove cut into the mountainside. Here, the paving stones were more visible, untouched by leaf detritus and dirt, as if someone had been sweeping them regularly. A tomb stood before him, but its door was missing, and Brant sensed only darkness in the space between the arch.
He switched on his headlamp, though it hardly seemed to help with lighting up the tomb’s interior. He saw that here, too, the stonework was well-preserved, and after a moment’s hesitation, he made his way inside.
He crept down a staircase, his footsteps seeming to sink into each step as if he were walking on the heart of the mountain itself. Carvings lined the walls, in much the same style as in the book’s illustrations. He pressed his hand on one: a Sith or Jedi stretched horizontally across the wall as they made a great leap at something else, their lightsaber leading the way. Brant’s headlamp continued to dull, as if it were burning out, and he followed the arc of the saber by touch, feeling down and inward, until…
His feet had just reached the bottom of the stairs, the start of a great chamber, when his hands brushed the dragon head. It was carved here on the wall just as it had been in the book, only it was bigger — much, much bigger.
When he touched its eye, Brant felt something come rolling through the Force towards him, something old and terrible that had been locked in this tomb for countless marches of the years. Brant had just enough warning before it overtook him, and he began to flee back up the stairs, the shadows clinging to his heels. The Dark Side inside him resonated with it, called to it, and Brant turned about with a scream: “No! Leave me alone! Begone!”
The Other took visible form then, rearing up front of him, wings unfurling from either side before falling into smoke and dust. The obscured outline of a tall, robed figure stood before him, poisonous yellow eyes opening within the depths of the hood. Brant shivered; he recognized that same light in his own eyes when he stared into the mirror, when his rage and pain was greatest just after the deaths of his parents.
“You called for me.” The ghost spoke, though Brant saw no movement of its facial features beyond the constant roiling of the smoke. “I am Karkemir, he who would be Sun Eater.”
Brant shook his head and found his courage. “No. That title belongs to my father, and you’re not him. He is dead! No trace of him remains.”
“I am what was severed from him…”
“No. You’re not! You are not even a Force ghost,” said Brant incredulously, but fear was still climbing up his throat. In defiance, he ignited his lightsaber and slashed it through the figure. The violet Dantari-focused blade passed right through where the thing’s neck should have been, but it did not destroy it.
The smoke instead broke apart and engulfed the chamber. It happened so quickly Brant couldn’t suck in a breath to hold it, and he tasted the smoke on his tongue. It was acidic, like he might imagine the taste of licking engine degreaser to be, and then Brant lost his sense of self entirely.
He had snatches of visions. The carvings on the walls had come alive, their subjects gathered around him. Robed figures: Sith and their cultist followers. Villagers fled before them, away from the thing that was summoned up in their footsteps. Only a few defenders turned back, wielding swords with glowing blue gems set in them: some kind of vibroblade or perhaps proto-lightsabers. Brant felt intense hunger shoot through his body as he looked at them — something more than the thrill of the hunt that usually overtook him as Merce — something akin to true hunger, for taste of flesh and blood…
Brant gagged, as the scar in his belly twisted at the thought, and in a strange twist of fate, that old injury saved him. He came back to his body, felt his hands and knees pressed against the floor, his chest wet over with bile. Crawling, not enough thought left to even be humiliated in his urgency to get away, he staggered back up the steps and out of the Other’s grasp. He threw himself out onto the flagstones marking the tomb entrance, coughing up more bile, and with it, expelling the terrible memories. Then he lay awhile, trying to put his screaling thoughts into order.
It was confirmation of who his father had been, he thought. The dragon was only a legend, and he had no way of telling from what he had witnessed if the thing riding behind the Sith horde had been a flesh and blood creature, a manifestation of the Dark Side, or just an illusion fed by the power of so many Sith, taking advantage of the villagers’ superstitious fear. It had been effective though, and Brant believed he had seen a time period on Serenno when the darkness of the Sith had grown so great as to nearly blot out the sun. Sun Eater. Now he understood the moniker.
Brant rose to his feet then, pulling his stained robes and shirt off his back and bundling it under one arm; the bile had begun to sting. The spring day had turned warm but humid on his back, and Brant absently ran a hand over his stomach, the wrinkled edges of the scar there. The blue of the ancient blades had reminded him sharply of the lightsaber that had given him this scar, itself wielded by a zealous Jedi. Yet the stones had not had quite the same hue to them, or the same aura — not that crawly, obnoxious feeling of righteousness that Jedi seemed to ooze, but something much colder and sterner.
Brant turned back to the tomb door, to the Other he sensed lurking just inside. “You’ve been following me for a long time,” he called out. “You bear the name my father once did when he was Sith. What are you?”
“I am that which was severed from him.” The Other’s voice was faint and watery, barely reaching Brant as he stood in the sun.
“But not here,” said Brant after a pause to think. “This is a tomb, not the site of a war. The battle I saw took place in a valley.”
The spirit stayed silent.
“I want to know,” pressed Brant, then, thinking he’d better make a proper offer of it: “Tell me, and one day I might return to free you. If it’s true my father played a role in conquering this place, then we are of the same essence.”
“No,” said the Other. “I am something greater. I am the darkness, the monster you have let in, thinking to tame me. It is I who will control you in the end.”
“Yet my father bested you.” What else could explain why Kyolath had walked free for so many years while this thing was chained here? “So you can’t be that strong.”
“Your father abandoned me in his weakness.”
How had Kyolath been Force-severed? Brant suddenly wondered, and he felt doubt creep in, but he refused to let it show in his voice. “I will not,” he said boldly.
“We will see. Go, seek the place where I was cut. It is on Rekkiad. Retrieve the crystals, so I might be whole again.”
The crystals he saw in the swords? “Rekkiad?” asked Brant aloud. “It will take me a while to secure the funds to get out that far — though it shouldn’t be that hard. I have a generous master, after all.”
The voice said nothing.
“I will free you, and you will teach me,” Brant commanded.
The only thing that answered was the soft sighing of the wind in the trees around him. The entrance grew a little less deep, a little less black, as he stared at it: whatever it was that had been lurking within had retreated.
“We will see, then,” Brant echoed in a soft growl.