Interlude: Yellow Eyes, Red Sands

Yellow eyes scanned the dunes as their owner's speeder darted across the barren landscape.

'Is this where you thought I'd end up, Master?'

Olia Fen shook her head and tried to discard the thought. All these years and she was still looking to him, despite what he had done. Despite what she had done.

Kalista glanced at her from the driver's seat, but she waved the green-skinned Twi'Lek off. She knew that she should be paying more attention to their surroundings, but then she had always had a penchant for drifting into melancholic thought in quiet moments.

In hindsight, perhaps it had been inevitable that she fell. She had always excelled at the Jedi arts, though she had also always had difficulty with being a Jedi. Too quick to anger, too much pride in her skills, too quick to use violence, too passionate…Many potential Masters had overlooked her because of those traits.

It was easy to blame the times she was born into and perhaps that had been the cause. When she had been born, the war had still been raging in full force with no end in sight. She remembered little of her childhood before the Jedi had taken her in, but she was told it had not been pleasant.

She was unsure if that was because she had been too young at the time or if she had subconsciously suppressed it, though she swore she could still hear her mother's voice in her dreams, humming a lullaby.

Olia had never understood why Master Xhal had chosen her as his Padawan. The Cathar had practically embodied the opposite of everything she had ever been. Where she had been a wild child, he had been a man of few words.

Where she had been carefree, he had been a strict disciplinarian. Where she had been short-tempered, he was patient.

Despite their repeated and heated arguments, she had never felt the urge to leave his side. For all of his talk of avoiding attachment, he had become the stern father she had never had, reacting with fond exasperation to her antics. She had accompanied him from one end of the galaxy to the other, battlefield to battlefield, learning all he had to teach and just enjoying being around him.

At his side, she had felt like the Jedi that few thought she could be.

Despite that, all that it took in the end was a shove in the wrong direction to send it all tumbling down.

All she had needed was one bad day.

Master Xhal had been a Jedi Shadow, meaning there were some missions that she could not join him on. He would disappear for months at a time, doing whatever he was assigned. Eventually, he didn't come back.

Xhal had been a private man, even among the tight-knit Jedi community. His funeral had been small and most that attended did so out of courtesy rather than any personal connection, though there had been no body to be burned. Still, Olia had felt some small consolation at the sight of several members of the High Council in attendance.

Grief had kept her confined to their shared quarters in the Temple for several days, where she went through what little he owned as she reminisced. Not everything they had done in the war was fight. Among their collective belongings were several holophotos and videos, showing the pair helping out in refugee camps and field hospitals.

But whatever solace she managed to find had been shattered by what she found next. Had she not flopped onto the bed and looked at the ceiling at just the right angle with just the right lighting, she would not have noticed it. A light tug with the Force was enough to pull the panel away, revealing a cache of carefully organized datachips hidden away in a small compartment built into the wall above Xhal's bed.

Curiosity briefly overruled all else as she plugged the first one into her datapad.

Curiosity had been quickly replaced with horror as she read. Contained on the datachips were records of his off-the-books missions, which were usually made and then erased following the completion of the task. However, Xhal had been a meticulous record-keeper, likely unable to stand not having documentation of his tasks.

Perhaps it had been a form of atonement in his eyes, to not have his crimes just…disappear.

There were missions that Jedi Shadows were expected to undertake. Capture, or if that failed, assassination of rogue Jedi or particularly dangerous Sith Lords. Ambiguously legal investigations of prominent corporate figures. Recovery or destruction of dangerous artifacts.

And then there were missions that were not expected. There were so many that she refused to look at most of them, but some caught her eye. Mainly, the existence of a number of secret prisons across Republic space, used to house war criminals, political prisoners, Sith, the inconvenient…and their descendants.

To her horror, she found that this had been going on for generations and that Master Xhal was just one of the more recent Jedi to be involved.

Belsavis was not a name she had recognized, but it would haunt her dreams for a long time afterwards. Master Xhal's notes of his role in the operation of the facility were more detailed than she had ever wanted to know.

Worst of all, there was no mention anywhere in the records that any of it had been done without the Jedi Council's approval.

Though she was loathe to admit it now, her fragile emotional state at the time had shattered into full-blown panic. Hiding the chips back in their compartment, she stole away in the middle of the night into the hidden tunnels below the Coruscant Temple that she technically wasn't supposed to know about.

There hadn't been a plan, just a general need to get away. One thing had lead to another and eventually she wound up on a public transport to Nar Shaddaa with precious little idea of how she got there.

Once she had calmed down slightly, Olia hadn't quite known what to do. In the squalor of the Smuggler's Moon, she did try to make an effort to keep to the Jedi ways, but without her Master around she found it harder and harder to justify it to herself. With what she had discovered, every lesson he had taught her was tinged with hypocrisy.

Every lecture on justice dripped with lies. She was plagued with doubts and wondered how many Jedi only paid lip service to the tenets they preached.

They preached their code and expected her to follow it when they did not? The anger had burned in her gut, breaking down her inhibitions bit by bit. She had raged against her former mentor, screaming at his ghost that he had tried to make her like him. To break her will like some beast.

The Smuggler's Moon was a kingdom of vices. The best revenge she could think of was to indulge. Using her powers and looks to charm her way into higher and higher circles, she drank deeply from the well of fear and desperation that was Nar Shaddaa. As she delved farther into pleasures so long denied to her and explored her darker urges, her eyes were soon permanently stained yellow.

Months had passed in a blur. Through the Spice, drink, and gambling, she did feel some guilt for not saying goodbye to her few friends in the Temple and more for abandoning them in the middle of a war. She had wondered why no Jedi Shadow had come for her.

Her muddled mind finally came to the conclusion that they had better things to do, which would turn out to be correct. But not in the way she suspected.

It was during one of her few sober moments that she saw a Holonet news story on the Sacking of Coruscant, then nearly a week old. Before she could seek out Deathsticks to block out the new nightmares, she had been made an offer she couldn't refuse.

The detox that had followed had been…unpleasant and was not an experience she wished to repeat. Thankfully, the lesson of the consequences of over-indulgence had been firmly pressed into her mind and she would not soon forget.

"We're here," Kalista remarked, her tone as biting as the sand.

Olia blinked, shaking herself out of her memories. She should not be thinking of days now long gone. She was no longer a Jedi. She no longer served the Republic.

Before them, a looming structure of stone and durasteel jutted out from the canyon wall, its harsh edges eroded by the wind over thousands of years.

As she got out of the speeder, she observed her companion out of the corner of her eye. While she was proud of her own beauty, she would privately admit that the Twi'Lek woman was stunning, with curves and lines in the right places. The intricate patterns on her lekku were particularly entrancing.

However, it was marred by the harsh scowl that seemed to be permanently etched onto her face. Unfortunately, it was one of her only advantages. The other woman had only middling power, which rage could only enhance so far, and little combat training.

While her illiteracy had been her main way to manipulate the other acolyte, it also locked Kalista out of many paths to power as she could not take advantage of the archives.

The time spent teaching her to read would take away from Olia's own pursuits, but it was one that she couldn't afford not to take. Not with his allies getting stronger.

Him. Iren's pet.

Truthfully, she hadn't thought much of him when they first met, but something about him unnerved her even then. Maybe it was the way he looked at people, like he was taking them apart in his mind, piece by piece. Perhaps it was the fact that his expression rarely changed. The most she had seen was a small smirk.

Or maybe it was the way that he seemed so utterly detached from everything. He was an emotional blank in the Force, save for the simmering anger behind his eyes. Even then, it was so tightly constrained that it was barely there.

It was because of that that she had not attempted her usual method of dispatching rivals, due to being uncertain if he would "rise" to the bait, in both senses of the word. Instead, the game had morphed into a series of power plays, seizing the best pieces before the inevitable final confrontation.

Unfortunately, he had already done that in the form of the Wookiee thanks to Iren. That left her with Ianna, Terrak, and Qiv. Terrak would follow his sister, but Ianna was terrified of both Olia and him, though she was at least on speaking terms. Qiv had practically disappeared the moment Iren had dismissed him from the debriefing following the First Trial. Part of her wondered if the Nautolan was actually dead.

While she was certain that she could easily kill him, the Wookiee, and the Quarren in single combat, she was not nearly so certain about all three simultaneously.

As she unpacked supplies from the speeder, Olia paused as she realized something, "What do you think his name is?"

Kalista rolled her eyes and shrugged, knowing exactly who the ex-Jedi was talking about.

It was odd. She had become interested in this game of theirs, but she hadn't even bothered to learn her rival's name. Then again, she had never quite thought of him having a name. He was just…there. Now that she was thinking about it, she did need a name to differentiate him from every other male at the academy.

Despite them being his most prominent facial feature, calling him Scar was out. Too cliché.

Her mind drifted to an image of the web-like cybernetics that now made up half of her rival's face and she recalled the rumors of his exploits in the desert that had drifted into her ears from disgruntled acolytes who had been ousted from their "territories."

Spider?

"Spider," She rolled the nickname on her tongue, trying it out, "Spiiiderrr."

That would do.

"I don't want to know," Kalista sighed in frustration, "Just…tell me what we're doing here. Out in the sun. In the middle of the desert. Again."

Olia smiled. The Twi'Lek hissed and spat like an ornery cat, but she obeyed when directed. A hold over from her time as a slave. While it left her rather passive and ultimately made for a poor Sith, it made her easier to control.

"There is something in this tomb I would like access to. It is all you need know at the moment," With a frown, she patted her side, where her sword hung. Though she felt incomplete without her lightsaber, if she succeeded here it would be one more step towards getting it back.

Perhaps over Iren's cooling corpse.

Flicking on her glowrod, Olia entered the tomb of Tulak Hord, Kalista on her heels.

Master Xhal had always encouraged her interest in becoming an archaeologist, though she doubted that this was what he would have had in mind.

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