Lord Commander Brant Auretal paced his office in the Imperial Citadel, looking out through the rain-streaked windows, waiting to see the shuttle lights of his approaching superior on the landing pad. Waiting… for his punishment to come.
It stuck in his throat as unfairness. The boarding mission had gone poorly: an ambush had been lying in wait. Brant had sensed it, and tried to spring the trap before it could close its deadly jaws on the rest of the ops, drawing the enemy out with a stab into the wall and taking the brunt of the first attack upon himself. He thought he had saved the life of the Minister of War, but Lord Sarak had not seen it that way — the ambush had been so overwhelming even Brant’s sacrifice hadn’t been enough to slow the slaughter. He and Sarak survived, but instead of answering Brant’s summons afterward, the Chiss had gone straight to their shared superior to complain about Brant’s actions.
Betrayal.
That, too, stuck: not in his throat, but in his heart, like a knife slivered in. Sarak knew him, better than anyone in the Empire, but when push came to shove, it seemed he still only saw Brant as an animal. A wild child who did not deserve his station. He saw the mask Brant put on to shield himself from the unrelenting twisting of the Dark Side, and thought it was the real thing.
Grief.
With a snort, Brant turned back towards his desk. Well, was he really surprised? Betrayal was the way of the Sith. What was one more corpse to toss out of his heart and to the wolves? More importantly, he had an angry Pureblood to deal with now. He still had to get out of that meeting alive.
Somehow.
But before he could get very far in planning how he might handle that conversation, he saw a package waiting on his desk. Hopeful flitting feelings wondered if it was from Sarak or perhaps Venzeri, but no, that would be stupid… He reached for it, trusting that the Imperial Guard would have vetted it, pulling on the ratty string that held its wrappings shut.
The wrapping fell away and in his hands lay a stone shaped like a ridged icosahedron, with a glowing blue light in its depths.
An artifact of some sort? Brant had no way of knowing, and it didn’t offer any immediate help for dealing with Darth Sevatar, so he crossed back over to the window, staring out at Kaas City. The stone still rested in his hand.
If he only had some advice, he thought. Like the advice of a parent, or brother… Losing another friend made him nostalgic for his lost aliit, mostly his father. He stared at his translucent reflection in the streaky window and thought about how unlike his old man he looked. The darker skin came from his mother, and his eyes… they were the yellow of a Sith: like Darth Hu’izei’s almost, his once-master. Brant bowed his head.
“I wish you had never died…”
The stone flashed suddenly, a brighter blue. Brant looked down at it, blinking. It flared brighter and brighter, until all Brant saw was its afterimage. He let go of it, calling to his lightsaber, but he still couldn’t see a thing.
Before he could think of something else to try, the light went out. A small shockwave rocked its way through the Force. When he could see again, the stone was gone.
“What the kriff?”
He looked about. Despite the shockwave, nothing was immediately different. Same office, same desk, same city outside the window. Same grimy streaks in the window, that made his own reflection easier to see.
Brant stared at it as the realization sank in. He no longer wore the heavy armor of his station. Instead, pale robes. A silver and white mask. The mask was faceless, an assassin’s mask: the last thing many Jedi ever saw before they died.
Merce.
The old identity come back, as if from the dead, to haunt him.
And the Lord Commander had vanished, subsumed into that mask.
“What have I done…?”
The alarm bells suddenly rang out, signaling the presence of an intruder inside the Citadel. Brant hurried over to the desk’s console to check. Impossibly, he saw the alarms meant him.
He stared as the doors flew open, and his Honor Guard — what used to be his! — marched inside. He did the only thing he knew how to do: he slammed his lightsaber into a vent in the wall — ironically, a mirror of his actions during the boarding mission — filling the room with a hot steam that confounded even the infrared sensors. His Honor Guard were well trained, but he was a little better. That’s why he was — had been — in charge. He was able to slip out in the confusion.
Miles away, looking back on the Citadel from a distance, he stood dumb-founded, trying to put two and two together. That stone… it had changed everything. Literally everything. And despite the fury of Sevatar he could feel, even from this distance, he knew that it was more important than anything the Darth, Sarak, or the rest of the Honor Guard wanted to do or say to him. A power like that, left free in the galaxy… it could not be allowed to cause more havoc.
Merce slipped away. It was time to be the Shadow again. It was time to hunt.