Chapter Text
Han and Leia rushed into Jacen's quarters as soon as they heard their son scream in pain. He lay on the floor while he writhed and clutched at his chest and yelled incoherently, as if he felt his heart being pulled out. His parents surrounded him worriedly, and within a few seconds, Han grabbed his shoulders and exclaiming, “Jacen! What is it?! What's wrong?!”
“Jacen, honey, please, calm down,” Leia said as she placed her palm against his forehead to alleviate whatever pain ailed him.
But once she touched him, she leaped back in a mixture of horror and pain. Han immediately released Jacen's shoulders and went to his wife.
“Leia, are you okay?” he asked as he grabbed her shoulders now. He spared his still-screaming son a glance before he looked back to regard his wife.
She looked back at him in speechless shock. “Jaina's gone, Han.”
“What?”
“I said... Jaina's gone. She's dead.”
It was only then that Jacen stopped screaming, and he turned to place his palms flat on the deck as he hyperventilated. When he started to sob, Leia hurried back to him and joined him in his despair.
Han only backed away from his wife and son and collapsed to his haunches along the doorframe in shock.
“I felt it, Mom! I felt it! Jaina died! Jaina is DEAD!”
. . .
When Luke felt Jaina die, he was in a different White Current Chiss disguise in one of Csaplar's spaceports. He had made an arrangement with a spice smuggler of all people to get transport off-world; however, when he felt the pain associated with his niece's demise, he doubled over in the middle of the milling crowd around him and didn't even know that he had dropped his disguise.
Only after he recovered from the shock of Jaina's Force-presence flickering out did his danger-sense spike. Immediately, he whipped out and activated his lightsaber and moved in a blur as he deflected charric bolt after charric bolt while also Force-knocking back those guards. When he was done and found that backup was headed his way, he wasted no time in hurrying to the departure point.
It would only take a number of other White Current illusions, and he could escape even the tight security that the Empire of the Hand still held over Csilla and all of the other Chiss worlds. Then he could return to the Jedi Order, wherever they were, and help crush the Sith menace who were in their midst.
. . .
With the Chiss fleet hunting them down, the Jedi Order found that, out of all the possible avenues of escape in the galaxy, their best hope was to head directly to the Transitory Mists, home of the Hapes Consortium. Kenth Hamner and the other Masters, sans Mara Jade Skywalker and her missing husband, knew that that would potentially embroi the Consortium against the Chiss Ascendancy again; but then again, since Queen Mother Tenel Ka was a Jedi, they figured that it would only be a matter of time before her monarchy would go to war with the Ascendancy anyway.
In the meantime, during a hyperspace dropout point between Denon and the Transitory Mists, a comatose Mara herself had been transferred from the Jade Shadow to one of the Skipray Blastboats. She was treated in that Blastboat's small medbay for the third-degree burns that she suffered from that console explosion and was placed on life support.
And from the report from the Blastboat's doctor, the Masters were told that even if Mara were to recover from her coma and have her burns treated with bacta as soon as possible, it was very likely that she would never be able to see again.
One of the nurses, Helmun, couldn't help but grin from hearing that news; thankfully, he faced away from the doctor's conversation with the Masters as he regarded Mara helpless form. If only he could find a way to poison her...
When the hunted Jedi fleet had finally entered the Transitory Mists and dropped out of hyperspace to make a course correction for Hapes itself, Mara awakened abruptly with a scream. As Helmun promptly stepped away in genuine surprise, the ship's doctor, a male Mon Calamari Knight named Uuckan, rushed to her side right when she stopped screaming and asked, “Master Skywalker! Are you alright? What's happened? Are you in any pain!”
With her eyes bandaged up, Mara yelled, “Jaina! Jaina! Jaina! She will be the death of us all! She will kill us all!”
Then Mara collapsed back to her bed. Uuckan checked her vitals and found that she was stable, but he could also sense that she had reverted back to her coma.
And in that coma, though she was now blind, the only thing she could see was that damned vision that had briefly awakened her.
It was the vision that her son Ben had dreamed of.
Jaina, cloaked in darkness, eyes tinted a fiery orange-red, red-bladed lightsaber held in one hand, standing over the whole Jedi Order. The bodies of everyone that Mara knew to still be alive littered the area around her once-beloved niece.
But in the area where Mara would have been lying, Ben was there instead.
Mara looked up at Jaina in horror; the younger woman sneered a smile that Palpatine would have been proud of.
Then the former Emperor's Hand was enveloped in an arc of lightning of never-ending pain.
. . .
Through the use of the credits and resources provided by the One Sith, Alema and the rest of Gorog had made great use of the time that they were given. By sending Joiners with new identities to acquire certain materials from worlds in which the credit and bank accounts were legitimized, the Dark Nest was able to find other spaces, worlds, moons, and asteroid belts that had yet to be charted by the Chiss Ascendancy—or the Empire of the Hand, as they were the ones in charge in that territory now—to not only grow more dartships, but things that were greater: nestships.
It would take a while, perhaps a year if the Killiks of Gorog were particularly productive—and they would be, if Alema's guidance as their queen was anything to go by—but the Dark Nest knew that, in the end, they could once again rise up and take their rightful place in the galaxy. And they would do it without the need for secrecy or manipulation of the other Colony nests to do so.
As Alema reveled in this thought in the midst of a meal on her people's newfound jungle homeworld—which, once again, consisted of the planet's native population along with members of a few other animal species—a sense came through her and the rest of the Dark Nest.
And it had to do with Jaina.
A sensation that made it seem as if she had died passed over all of Gorog. But when it cleared, it was Alema who noticed that she wasn't truly dead.
No. No, she was hiding, just like Gorog was now. And Gorog would let her hide... for now.
Until then, the Dark Nest had a lot to do.
. . .
“So that is what Jacen felt.”
“Yes. It was. But I... calibrated it so that even your mother would think you were dead. When Jacen was Force-stripped, Leia had held out hope that he was still alive, even when everyone else believed him dead. Including you.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I feel your mother's pain, now. So... are you ready to begin?”
“I have nothing else.”
“I will take that as a yes.”
Then Lumiya, Dark Lady of the Sith, activated her lightwhip before Jaina as they stood in the arena aboard the asteroid base known as the Home.
Even without her ability to sense the Force, Jaina activated her own lightsaber and held it upward in an aggressive stance. She moved forward even as Lumiya lashed out at her.
TO BE CONTINUED...