The whispering raven-black tendrils coalesced into a languid shape emerging from the eldritch core of the abyssal death chamber of Darth Zannah. Sansa's soul recoiled in primal revulsion as the form gradually solidified from its swirling mass, surface layers shedding like viscous obsidian ichor dripping from an endless wellspring of pure corruption not seen in centuries.
When the last gushing rivulets finally fell away from the root, she felt a lump forming in her throat. The shadowed visage was that of a male Kel Dor, his many facial scars and enhanced proportions unmistakable for having been fully tainted by Sith influence mixed with dark magics, even behind the obscuring edges of shadow residing in every curve and ridge of the sanctum it was evident as gravity's constant pull.
"No...it cannot be--my son. I thought you were gone." Zinn murmured in naked disbelief while staring forward, her voice reverberating hollowly down the abandoned passages in pure shock. While the old Jedi knew De'busk had hidden something here her surprise was clear at what she was witnessing just the same as the other two Jedi.
Despite Sansa's instinctive aversion and every shred of sense screaming this was an aberration against the natural order...She could not help but reel backward from the revelation of Zinn's supposed son. "This man is nearly my peer! It is not possible--" Sansa pushed the words from her chest anxiously due to not having the correct words to even attempt to grasp this falsehood told as true by the older woman.
De'Busk resumed his fawning supplications in a guttural alien tongue, never lifting his gaze from the figure's steady approach. Reality itself seemed to warp and shimmer in the entity's wake, the air rendered greasy and corrosive against Sansa's exposed Tholothan skin.
Beside her, Torrin had dropped into a defensive crouch-- lightsabers held horizontally in a time-honored Form V opening stance, acting as a silent bulwark against the creeping currents of the dark side insidiously invading this sanctum. "You are the being I saw..." The Naboo-born Jedi understood that the Kel Dor from his night terror was in fact not Zinn and anger took root in his heart.
The shadowed Filo paused over De'Busk's prone condition with no response. Despite the Trandoshan's fervent entreaties, his eyeless black sockets bore into Sansa and her former comrades with merciless indifference. Then, as casually as swatting an insect, he backhanded De'Busk with a single clawed hand. "Stop crying like a welp...You are now useless to me," The deep voice came with vodered speech that growled forth from the imposing figure nearly as tall as the Trandoshan himself.
The war criminal's massive body sailed across the room in a boneless arc, smashing against the unforgiving stone with a pulverizing impact that caused the Jedi to grip their weapons even tighter. Sansa's stomach turned as she saw his scaly hide rupture in a gruesome spray of emerald viscera, De'Busk's very life essence rapidly leaching into the insatiable darkness surrounding the figure of this 'Filo'.
"No!" Zinn cried out loud, the truth of her own eyes betraying that facade of her innocent boy Cognus had set so long ago. "What...what is the meaning of this?! We needed him alive!" She said as Filo turned, the barest hint of a smile twisting the recesses of his shrouded features as it regarded Zinn for the first time since his emergence.
When he finally articulated again, the vernacular was a layered cacophony of overlapping whispers that seemed to splinter into myriad possible vocal realities with each passing syllable. "Behold...my awakening, naive Jedi. You were but a disposable cipher-- a fleeting gambit in a game you scarcely comprehend." He intoned grimly, there was a natural flow to the tide of words that beckoned them to listen till the haunting messages ceased.
Zinn's lightsaber pike instantly blazed with golden fury as she slashed it before her in an instinctive high guard that sent scatters of light through the chamber that were quickly lapped up into the void. "You lie, depraved beast! Show yourself for what vileness you truly represent! Filo was sweet and loving...he would never do something so heinous..." The Kel Dor ran through her artificial memories with twisting cultivated sentiments in her sanity still clouding it to the truth.
An inhuman chuckle whispered from the Filo-specter, its tone vile yet utterly devoid of any mirth. "Very well, Zinn...Let your senses finally embrace me in my entirety--I have waited for my revenge." With a rippling convulsion like cancer swelling outwards in the body, the entity's shadowed form exploded in a free-floating nimbus before fully wrapping itself like dripping swaths over the Dark Lord's figure once more.
Sucking in all the surrounding darkness within moments. Deep black roots unplugged themselves from perfectly bored holes in the roof of the sanctum that had been siphoning the battle above and became materialized as the Kel Dor's void-like armor and robe.
Sansa cried out in shock, erecting a hasty Force shield against the eldritch onslaught pounding against her psyche's door. Beside her, Torrin exhibited similar horrified stress beneath a stern face, undoubtedly drawing upon every well of focus and mental fortitude to resist being utterly shattered by this abomination's grasping holds in the force. "Prepare yourselves...We may be the only chance to cull this menace." Torrin calmed his heart as he spoke.
Even through their combined barriers, Sansa could feel soul-sapping webs draining her energies subtly, only Zinn seemed inexplicably immune or inured to the psychic maelstrom raging around them, the corrupted Kel Dor Jedi stared deeply into the profane kaleidoscope unbowed. Her haunted features twisted not in agony or terror, but something far more visceral in nature. "You...did not change--F....Filo...."
She rasped in a voice fraught with emotion. "My son, my Filo...what horrors did that monster De'Busk commit against you to shatter your very being?" An eerie calm settled across the unlit chamber as if the Dark Lord was carefully considering his next words.
Then, with the subtlest insult, he spoke words that cleaved the bedrock of reality itself with the volume alone. "SILENCE..I am not your warped offspring--You 3 are lucky to have witnessed a small portion of my grand ascension." His black robe billowed behind him as his form finally fully came into complete view in the light of Jedi's sabers' glint.
"I am Darth Zakayo...and you are not permitted to survive this sacred ritual." Zakayo's electronic voice now came through clearly for the first time. He relished Zinn's horrified stupor, exhaling a rattling chuckle that may well have collapsed entire planes of existence with each grating decibel it climbed to before finally subsiding into normal volumes.
"Now try in vain." The words themselves dripped like the spoken equivalent of the most obscene toxic waste pointed at Torrin's previous comment. Sansa could taste the warped vowels corrupting the stagnant air. "Turn from your wicked path or we will be forced to end you--you can still shift back from--" A sharp glare from Darth Zakayo turned her words to hot ashes in her mouth, tendrils nearly standing on end at his regard.
Despite her resolute stance, Zinn seemed to physically diminish before their very eyes. The wise Kel Dor's armored certitude cratered in the wake of this revelation's gravity. "No...Cognus--" she rasped as if the air itself resisted her words. "My darli--" The sound of her sentence was chopped short by the Sith's quick response. "Do not speak that name!"
Zakayo quickly began to talk again. "It seems your pitiful journey through oblivion has only granted you a fraction of intellect, insect," the man slobbered in mocking reverie. "I yearn to test my new power though, You may all face me in tandem to make up for the differential..." His fraternal crimson twin lightsabers blazed to life in the shadowed warrior's grip.
A broad Dual-phase saber concealing two twisted kybers' almost fighting for supremacy behind its blazing flare cast from a broad handle and an elegant slightly elongated curved-hilt blade, both radiating plasma the hue of a dying dwarf star. Such tools were completely foreign to the Jedi, their slight tinges of fear feeding the blade nearly as much as the Dark combatant himself.
Sansa felt her throat constrict simply from being in the searing, baneful presence of the soiled crystals meant to be used to protect the innocent.
Torrin was the first to strike, leaping forward in a blinding series of whirling attacks channeling the grace of the Djem So form to the extent of his knowledge. His twin azure blades flashed with lethal accuracy targeting Filo's vital flanks, deadly intent in his aggressive offense. "I care not who you are--"
The polluted male Kel Dor batted the offensive aside with terrifying ease, parrying both lightsabers on the unyielding beam of his broad dual-phase saber in his right hand before lancing his curved hilt lightsaber in a blistering counter riposte aimed squarely at Torrin's throat. "Nor do I," Zakayo rasped through Malgus' refashioned mask.
Torrin managed to sway inside the mortal swing by a hairsbreadth, allowing the searing plasma to shear a burning furrow across his right shoulder instead of outright neck perforation. Hissing in slight injury, the ambitious Jedi knight changed tactics then kicked the stomach of Zakayo's armored body sending himself skywards in a dizzying of his own athleticism.
Sapphire plasma weaving a colorful web around the periphery with his backflips just as Zinn seized her opening. The senior Jedi's lightsaber pike whistled forth in swinging overhand arcs, intercepting the Sith's defenses from an unexpected 45-degree angle meant to cleave him in half. "We have to work together!" She rattled off. Sansa knew their strategy hinged on unbalancing this twisted mockery of Zinn's "son" through relentless combination attacks before he could establish a cadence and leverage its 'newfound' power against them yet felt fear weighing down her whole body as she watched the battle.
Trusting in her comrades over the screaming want to leave this dark place she dipped into the bountiful currents of the Force and extended a prospecting invisible hand towards the churning chaos at the center of Zakayo's embodiment. At first, there was nothing but a hollow vacuity that seemed to leech all sensation from her extended awareness like a black hole devouring all light and matter.
Unknowable malignity swirling before her psyche's perception, a cyclone of shadow and pure wrath, rapidly shifting between offensive postures and defensive sequences to counter Torrin and Zinn's fluid combination strikes with increasing ferocity. Each time their plasma blades annihilated matter on contact, the resultant detonations cast razor-edged strobes of baleful illumination across the chamber's walls and floor.
Yet their quarry remained indefatigable, turning their superior numbers into a detriment as they threatened to become snarled among each other mid-combat almost by design. " I see." Sansa mused as she thought out loud. It was in one such transition, the briefest nanosecond where the Sith overextended, torquing his shady marred frame to its absolute zenith between deflections.
Sansa struck bravely, Channeling her attunement to the living Force into a precision spear of psychokinetic jab. She unleashed the full potency of her formidable natural gifts directly at that momentary chink in astute defenses.
For the span of a single gasping breath, the hateful Dark Lord needed to adjust to the pinpointed attack at his rear guard. Torrin and Zinn seized that fleeting chance like bounty hunters dragging a kill back to their rich hirer.
Interlocking their respective lightsaber sequences, they poured relentless power into their alternating slashes and sweeps more in sync. Driving Zakayo back step after embattled step as he desperately realigned his cadenced conditioning. Molten gouts of lacerated stone showered the chamber with each exchanged blow sent careening into the tiled rocky floor after being sent back to the Jedi.
Snarling in genuine outrage now at the sudden shift in advantage, Zakayo cocked his curved lightsaber in a backhanded grip. Assuming the fluid stance favored by grizzled Jedi rogue duelists and assassins alike. With the speed of a viper poised to strike, he launched into a seamless wheel of spinning momentum--parrying each incoming strike with an artful blazing dance while simultaneously whipping his broad dual-phase saber around to press fresh counterattacks against their guards.
For several nail-biting seconds, the melee devolved into an anarchic free-for-all of blinding revolutions and impossibly tight deflection sequences that threatened anyone in range. His boundless endurance and raw physicality slowly whittled away at their flagging reserves of Force energy.
Sansa too entered the tense struggle, her slim blade barely able to deflect the much stronger opponent. She redoubled her inward focus on protecting the others, Every movement, every twitch became an extension of the living Force's indomitable patience until each counterattack was perfectly divined before its execution without endangering her allies.
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She settled into a trance-like state of calm, entering sublime symbiosis where blade and wielder became perfect manifestations of the unified Force front. Her movements assumed a near-imperceptible fluidity, each footfall as graceful as silk's touch. Whether through the influence of Sansa's trance or simple attritional skirmishing against their unrelenting combination, it appeared the Sith's guard finally flickered once again.
A simple hesitation as he postured to deflect both Zinn and Torrin's simultaneous strikes while pivoting to unleash another counteroffensive. With a subtle flickering flurry of impeccable timing, sidestepping outside the shadowed warrior's twisted vigil suddenly as she weaved between all 5 sabers, her blade flicked out in a blinding flash catching Zakayo cleanly across the elbow of the arm clutching his curved-hilt blade.
Immediately his hand and a portion of his forearm fell to the floor with a thud, the crimson lightsaber clacking away in a crackle of severed plasma as it turned off quickly. The man's aura shrieked like a furnace being doused, reflexive spasms causing him to launch himself backward beyond immediate threat with a Force-propelled backflip tinged with gray-hued lightning.
Grasping at the cauterized stump with his remaining hand, his covered eye sockets bored Sansa's solely with pure apoplectic indignation. "YOU..." The battle seemed to grind into viscous slow motion as he reacted to Sansa's crippling strike with blitzing velocity.
Even as his severed hand and lightsaber tumbled away, the shadowed warrior was already reaching across his torso with the remaining limb to trigger a recessed panel in the actual tangible Beskar armor weave beneath the black robe's void-like essence.
A panel popped open the side, extruding a sleek Cortosis cylindrical shaft crowned with sharp articulated fingers. With reflexes still beyond natural parameters, Zakayo grasped the proffered appendage and seamlessly slotted it into the cauterized stump of his severed forearm without a word.
Umbilical cylinders snaked forth and rooted into his seared flesh while neural receptors fused with organic musculature, the sound mechanics ripping flesh surging out then its center spun into correct sizing. The entire process unfolded in mere seconds, culminating with him flexing the glistening metal fingers of a fully integrated robotic prosthetic as if he'd been born with the augmentation. "Unfortunate," he spat the word like the most vile obscenity.
Torrin took full advantage of the distraction by launching into an acrobatic blitzkrieg charge, whirling within Zakayos guard in a blinding series of horizontal slashes. To the discerning eye, they seemed to flow together into one unbroken perpetual dynamo dancing amidst the chaotic fireflies of intersecting plasma arcs.
Zin joined the furious cadence in perfect counterpoint like before lightsaber pike sweeping in wide orbits designed to catch the Sith's retreat and allow Torrin's alacritous blade work to penetrate any gaps in the unpredictable rhythm of the enemies form 7 techniques.
As the grinding exchange escalated Zinn diverted a sliver of her focus into reaching out through the murky psychic miasma surrounding them.
She recoiled almost immediately, her mind engulfed in hateful dissonance reverberating from the yawning dark rift the conflict above had torn open that the Dark lord now supped on greedily.
She had basked in the radiance of light and life throughout her banishment, communing with the inexhaustible luminance of the Force far closer than her days as a fledgling Padawan initiate. To be suddenly submerged in such a profane antithesis...after all this time spent as the only lit candle worked its dark hold on her mind now that she had opened it to its taint.
Yet she persevered, Zinn detected a glimmering counterpoint in the chamber still latent. A flicker of pristine luminance struggling against metaphysical asphyxiation within that profane sanctuary much more effectively than her or Torrin's more practical grasp of the Force.
It was Sansa, her psyche a single flickering sconced flame threatening to burn through the shifty haze surrounding them with all her might. Zinn redirected the full potency of her Force attunement into bolstering that intangible firelight, infusing it with her own indomitable purity of existence to stoke against the entropy of soiled energies.
Sansa seemed to jolt back into fatal focus with that psychic catalyst. Her lightsaber revolved in faster, tighter trajectories. The audible harmonics shearing from her blade's disturbances filled the chamber like the keening howl of disembodied apparitions. Zinn's own lightsaber pike contributed percussive layers of counterpoint, the convergent waves pulsing in a discordant symphony of tangible light temporally suspending any encroachment.
Then, between one infinite nanosecond and the next...Torrin overextended fractionally in his relentless offensive. A single stray vector threaded beyond the blinding perpetual dynamo pulsing around them all with reckless abandon.
In that eternal moment between instants, Filo's robotic prosthetic flexed with inhuman timing too infinitesimal to track with normal eyes. The glistening fingers ceased their whirling deflections entirely, retracting to allow the curved lightsaber blade to click off suddenly as Torrin's was meant to glance off of its plasma.
Before even Zinn's combat mastery could compensate, his overextended blade lurched in a sickening lateral trajectory. Its lethal arc dragged straight toward her unprotected flank with catastrophic inevitability. "No!" The human Jedi knight cried out with horror.
Sansa tried to react with Force-heightened reflexes, yet was unable to alter the blue blade's lethal momentum. She launched herself into a brief sideways revolution designed to interpose her own body with her old friend Zinn.
For the span of a single tortured inhalation, Torrin's errant lightsaber bisected Zinn just below the sternum in an unintended eviscerating slipstream of superheated plasma. The scent of charred flesh and cauterized viscera blossomed noxiously across the chamber as her now molten innards splashed in all directions.
Sansa's scream of horror and denial echoed down the fraying peripheries of Zakayo's smiling visage like a clarion call of defiance. With the desperation born of watching her former comrade slaughtered in such a manner, the young Tholothan Jedi warrior seized every gossamer thread of her newfound hatred....and unleashed it.
Navigated by virgin incandescent outrage, her lightsaber immediately transitioned into the most aggressive exchanges witnessed by even Torrin. Searing plumes of vaporized dust particles gushed with each thunderous combination as she battered the Sith with contemptuous down slashes mixed with nearly imperceptible movements. "YOU MONSTER!" Sansa let loose as she watched the smile only grow with each clash.
Despite pouring her utter being into that devastating offensive, the shadowed abomination matched her stroke for stroke solely with his much broader saber only. His robotic hand's speed and form 7 stance forced ceaseless lockstep of inviolable blade work spinning out in tighter and more minuscule volleys than before.
The realization dawned upon her with each fresh failure to penetrate his guard, he was physically and truly augmented into something...transcendent. He had become a being severed from learned biological limits, an almost dark evolutionary inevitability of absorbing so much vile power over one's life.
As their gyrating lightsaber exchange dragged them further into the profane heart of that sanctum, Sansa caught a glimpse of Zinn's still form discarded in a crumpled heap by their furious battle's frame. The former Jedi's body had already gone vacant and soulless, yet seared into her mottled features was an expression of perfect serenity.
As if attaining enlightenment through martyrdom in that single surpassing instant before her corporeal form was gruesomely cut in twain. Sansa fought fiercely to retain her own sentience even as the trauma seemed to burrow soul-deep into her psyche.
It was at that moment, as fresh torrents of hatred roiled at the injustice Zinn had been condemned to, that Zakayo chose to make another murderous play. His shadowed robes billowed with the unseen currents of the void energies agitating around them as he sidestepped Sansa's latest piston of overheads.
Pacing quickly backward, Zakayo unfurled to his full towering height. Switching off the 1st blade of his dual-phase saber into a much longer and darker crimson blade and raising it vertically in a preparatory salute as ancient as dueling itself. "You are much stronger than I expected...It is praiseworthy." His vodered voice buzzed with excitement.
Channeling every obscene scrap of power he'd accumulated from this epicenter of ruin, the Dark Side monstrosity unleashed a force blast in all directions of such magnitude the whole cavern itself seemed to shudder in rippling exhalation of strength. "DIE!"
The shockwave met Sansa's hastily raised purple saber with an annihilating intenseness that splashed scorching flecks of plasma and shattered rock in all directions, small cuts forming on her face and body.
Granite-lined walls and ancient fused archways buckled and cracked apart layer by corroded layer with Her and Torrin standing at the epicenter of the destructive shockwave. Anchoring herself with everything she had, Sansa dimly registered him staggering through the morass of debris and momentum, the Jedi's brown eyes already hollow with the thousand-yard stare of one resigned to leaving mortality behind for one's sins.
His lips parted in a wordless entreaty of final counsel...a garbled stream of white noise drowned out by the very laws of physics worked themselves in upheaval. Sansa's last lingering shreds of perspective, she fixed Zakayo viciously with her gaze across that ruinous chasm separating their battling forms. The shadow stared back without remorse or any fathomable emotion, simply nodding once in succinct acknowledgment as she weathered the blast.
Moments after, the entire ruin imploded into a yawning circumference of pure backdraft. The explosion's catastrophic backlash swept across the mining facility's surface in a cataclysmic shockwave from below that sent the flames shooting into the sky due to the release of air pressure and rippling the verdant plains and arboreal groves like an incoming tsunami rushing to devour it whole with the quaking tectonic plate.
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A solitary figure emerged amid the smoking rubble, scorched robes fluttering wildly in the raging atmospheric distortions billowing around them as the facility crumpled behind a curtain of inferno and debris from not only the force wave made by the Sith lord but the Mandalorian's previous bombardment of the temple.
As the crimson lightsaber hushed after being used as a means of escape, an ominous Wookie howl split the chaos, its bestial timbre echoing across Dantooine's shattered remainders from the forests. To Zakayo's shock, he heard the sound of something moving toward him from underground.
Lazily spinning to confront whatever it was, His inert blade hilt angled low before him. The drift of smoke from the incinerated landscape eddying in his shadow's wake, out of the gaps of the cracked building lumbered a blue silhouette wreathed in twin blazing arcs of azure plasma. "I will not falter...You are an enemy of The Order--And I will end you." The Jedi knight had snapped out of his traumatized state caused by his accidental murder of Zinn.
The debris-laden squall parted to fully reveal the bloody form of Torrin, both ragged hands clutching lightsabers aloft and body angled into the opening flourishes taught to him on Coruscant. " You will beg at--" Torrin stopped speaking.
Above Zakayo emerged an odd sight, a sleek red-accented astromech droid hovering through the carnage while whistling almost in marvel at the fallout. "WEEEEEEIOOOO" Its silver domed head swiveling in grating echoes, the little bot a simple viewer simultaneously absorbing every unfolding thread of devastation through hundreds of prismatic angles before landing near the Sith lord's feet.
Zakayo unhurriedly clicked his tongue before patting it lovingly on its head. "Yes, I survived...and no I am not finished." The reply was met with a smooth pivot of the droid's head toward the battered Jedi then followed by another beeping probe. "Woo." The tone trailed off. "Oh, well if he insists on being here." Zakayo retorted with a smile.
Torrin pivoted to a towering black-fur Wookie behemoth swathed in charred bandages and frayed fluff that was caked in blood. His beady eyes cast in stark illumination beneath the blue of the lightsabers' glow mixed with the inferno around them.
A devastated bellow shook loose debris from every surrounding outcropping as the beast called into a small communicator, staring daggers at Torrin's unbroken form. The sounds of rumbling engines began to grow closer. "I will not fall here, you will not escape after the deaths you've caused." Torrin's voice was strained with effort, yet the defiance behind his words resonated brilliantly as the birthing of heavens illuminators.
"Let's see how much your precious order trusts you then," spoke Zakayo, his diction precise without the slightest inflection of emotion. As if to punctuate that cosmic inevitably itself, the first fragmented shards of the Republic armada's main ships began streaking across Dantooine's upper atmospheres in a blockade far too late to help. "Your failure is admirable, but I have a war to wage..."
Zakayo let his last words hang in the air as Jarelle's heavily armored Mandalorian gunship descended through the fiery plumes, landing amidst the rubble with a thunderous thud. The ramp lowered, and the imposing figure of the Dantooine clan leader strode out, flanked by her only surviving elite bodyguard.
The bloodied black colored Wookiee let out a series of mournful howls, prompting Jarelle to rush over to her hidden member in De'busk's camp. "Report, what has transpired here?" The Wookiee's words came out in a frantic series of barks and roars barely understood by the clan's leader.
Jarelle's eyes widened in disbelief behind her golden helmet's T-shaped visor as the full story unfolded of Zinn's tragic death below their feet, the lie of Zakayo's noninvolvement cast through fake tears. "Jedi scum! She was the only reason you two still draw breath!" she snarled, whirling on Zakayo with her blaster drawn. "And you...Who are you?! The Wookie claims you are with us." Jarelle's voice shook with anguish at her master's death.
Zakayo calmly hid his lightsabers within his robe, only his malgus-antiox-masked face sticking from a black hood. " I too share your grief...I am Filo. Zinn's only son, I came after years of searching brought me here..." Jarelle froze, lowering her blaster slightly as realization crept in. "Filo...the one she mourned as dead--How are you still alive?"
Zakayo's eyes narrowed. "The Jedi have slain the person I loved most and you ask why to keep my existence a secret--She held my life a secret to protect me while leaving also me in the care of her loving wife." Zakayo warped the truth with every sentence he let drift smoothly out.
The Mandalorian re-aimed her blaster, directly at Torrin's bloodied form. "Then they will pay for this betrayal, comrade. Death to the Jedi!" Torrin gathered what little strength remained, raising his lightsabers defiantly. "Stand down, Jarelle. It pains me more than you know, but Zinn's death was an accident...I do take the blame for what happened though, I was too blinded by purpose to understand you." Torrin took a step forward in a knowingly distracting display.
He strained to not lock his eyes to the barely alive Sansa, still lying prone under the rubble where he had hidden her. Torrin now knew a Jedi's sacrifice was meant to protect the future, he gave a solemn nod to himself. "I accept surrender, all I ask is for a fair trial so I may tell my truth in whole." With those words, Torrin deactivated his lightsabers and held his hands up in surrender to the encircling factions against him. "I will show you The Jedi are not the true enemy of your people...I promise."
Jarelle motioned her guards forward to bind Torrin as Zakayo watched impassively behind boring regards. The Dark Lord knew that even one Jedi could derail his plans, yet he needed Jarelle to not suspect him of his vileness so soon.
The tall Kel Dor approached Jarelle as her soldier secured Torrin, the deceit dripping from his lips like honey. "You have my deepest gratitude for apprehending the Jedi responsible for my mother's demise." He placed a comforting hand on her pauldron, she met his touch with an uneasy glare. "Please, allow me to join you! I can provide guidance from Zinn's teachings and avenge her death far greater than even this victory you have gleamed."
Jarelle was silent for a moment, clearly conflicted, before giving a reluctant gesture of putting her hand on Zakayos shoulder. "Very well...Filo, You will have a place among my most trusted--Your mother was a great and honored woman." Jarelle offered with small tears building in her purple eyes, she too was blinded by the dark aura of the Kel Dor.
The small red astromech that had accompanied Zakayo hovered towards Sansa, domed head swiveling in apparent inquisitiveness. A bemused string of whistles and chirps sounded from its vocabulator, almost a mocking acknowledgment that she yet lingered.
As if dismissing her entirely, the droid pivoted and trundled off through the rubble to rejoin its Dark master aboard the Mandalorian ship. Its final parting trill echoed back hauntingly, leaving Sansa alone amidst the fiery devastation.
The Wookie Grrawgnok let out a throaty outcry, clobbering Torrin roughly while dragging the battered Jedi up the boarding ramp into the gunship's dim interior bay. The first whispers of the Republic's armada may have made themselves known forcefully but the dark energy surrounding Zakayo kept them concealed from radar.
The gunship's engines roared to life, rising from the ruins on towers of ion exhaust just as the sky opened up. The Mandalorian vessel banked hard and burned toward the stratosphere. In the massacre's aftermath, the only sign of life remained the crumpled form of Sansa, lying motionless but for the shallow rise and fall of her chest.
As the Mandalorian began to depart with her captive Jedi, Sansa remained dormant, tears streaking her dust-covered cheeks. She had witnessed Torrin's noble sacrifice and silently vowed that it would not be in vain. Somehow, some way, she would rally those who still fought for the light without falling into the deep pitfall being set for the galaxy's protectors.
Zakayo's dark machinations would reveal themselves with time. No matter how long she had to struggle against the encroaching darkness, the battle had been lost, but the war was only just beginning for the young Tholothan Jedi Knight.