Empty Chairs

Posted on Wed Oct 7th, 2026 @ 5:48pm by Thurius & Sotah

6,454 words; about a 32 minute read

Chapter: Chapter IX: The First Verse
Location: Bronze Keep, Onderon
Timeline: After "A Table Set for Four"

The storm had gathered slowly after they left. At first it had been little more than a distant muttering beyond the walls, thunder rolling somewhere over the jungle in long, low notes that might almost have been mistaken for the shifting of the old fortress itself. The air had thickened with each passing minute, warm and wet enough that the cracked windows seemed to breathe with it, until the first rain finally began to strike the Bronze Keep in scattered, heavy drops.

By the time the storm reached them properly, the jungle beyond had disappeared almost entirely. Water ran in silver sheets across the arched windows and coursed down the outer stonework, overflowing gutters that had not served their purpose for decades and spilling from broken parapets in sudden streams. Wind pressed through gaps in the masonry and made the weaker candle flames bow and recover, whilst somewhere in the deeper corridors an unsecured door complained rhythmically against its frame. Lightning occasionally transformed the windows into pale mirrors, illuminating the chamber in brief, colourless flashes before surrendering it again to firelight.

Neither of the men had done much to disturb what remained inside. The broth still hung above the hearth, though the fire beneath it had fallen sufficiently low that its surface no longer stirred. Bomoor's bowl remained where it had struck the table, a thin trail of soup having dried unevenly across the stone from the spill. Two chairs stood empty in the places prepared for men who had now gone, one pushed back from where the Ithorian had risen and the other almost untouched, having never received the guest for whom it had been intended.

Thunder broke much closer now, briefly shaking dust loose from somewhere above the hearth, and rain hammered against the surviving panes with enough force to turn conversation into something that would require intention.

No conversation had yet begun and Sotah remained where he had been left. At some point after the two departing men had vanished entirely into the old passages, his hand had moved towards the weapon lying on the table. His broad fingers had closed around the leather-bound hilt and drawn it slowly to rest across both palms, and it had remained there since.

Loren's lightsaber looked smaller in his hands than it had in hers. The leather had darkened with age and use, polished along its highest points by years of contact with the palms and fingers of the woman who had carried it. The braiding beneath the binding was familiar in a way that seemed almost cruel now, each irregularity belonging to an object Sotah had once seen so often that there had been no reason to consciously remember it. There were scratches around the emitter housing, minute abrasions along the lower metalwork, a small discolouration near one fastening that might have meant nothing to anyone else.

To him, it was unmistakable. His first Padawan.

His hand shifted once, thumb moving across the old leather with such care that it might have been an attempt to confirm the weapon was real.

Outside, lightning flashed again. For an instant, the chamber became painfully clear: the abandoned bowls, the empty seats, the old royal crest faded into the back of one chair, Sotah folded into another with the hilt resting between his hands, and Thurius still nearby beneath the same ruined roof.

Darth Serus.

The name came unbidden, the supposed title of the man he had trained. It was not a costume adopted by some fallen Knight who wished to frighten the Order, nor an affectation borrowed from an extinct tradition, nor even the delusion of one more dark-side sect convinced that ancient symbols belonged to them because they possessed the courage to speak forbidden words aloud.

There had been no doubt in the room when the title was spoken.

Whatever else Thane had once been, whatever fragments of the boy, Knight and friend still remained somewhere behind the mask and beneath that immense darkness, the man who had walked from the Bronze Keep had restored something that had been dead for more than a millennium and claimed its inheritance without hesitation - and Bomoor was walking into that darkness with him.

Sotah had not yet spoken the name again, though. He had not said anything. The Selkath still sat slightly hunched over the lightsaber, the broad strength that had once given his posture an easy solidity seemingly withdrawn somewhere beyond reach. His eyes remained lowered, dark and reflective in the firelight, fixed upon an object that connected too many different lives at once: Loren as a difficult child and determined Padawan; Loren as the older Shadow who had walked beside Thane and Bomoor; Loren dead by the hand of the pupil who had followed her; and that same pupil returning years later, scarred, mechanised and carrying the title of an extinct enemy as though history itself had merely been waiting for someone sufficiently determined to resume it.

Across the room, Thurius' agitation required no words to announce itself. Whatever control the Cerean retained, it sat closer to the surface than usual, visible in the tension held through his long frame and the restless severity with which the storm-light occasionally caught his features. He had not yet committed himself to speech, movement or decision, but neither did he possess Sotah's exhausted stillness.

The difference between them had rarely seemed so pronounced.

Sotah did not look up. His fingers tightened almost imperceptibly around Loren's hilt as rain continued to batter the old fortress and the night beyond the windows vanished beneath another flash of white.

"I thought..." words echoed from where Thurius stood looking towards the failing embers in the hearth, warmth now receding, "I thought I would be ready for anything that came through that doorway."

Sotah could feel the Cerean's muscles clenching, holding back the sorrow, the anger, the fear that years of Jedi training had sought to bury.

"I was wrong."

The words came with a slight tremor in his diaphragm, and a sharp intake of breath before continuing.

"We heard the whispers, saw the dark paths they walked, listened to the reports from the Templars, but I just did not believe that such a change could be possible."

Thurius slid a hand down the stonework and turned dejectedly back towards his Selkath companion still hunched over, Loren's weapon in hand before adding:

"But, I think, worst of all is that I could still hear their voices in what they said," he paced slowly back over, "That the dark side does not simply drape itself over them like a disguise, but that they wear it willingly; speak through it as though it were only another philosophy debated in the temple halls."

His hand grasped out once again, this time finding the rim of the discarded bowl and tracing its edge.

"That passion in Bomoor was his... Dark though it was, it was honest and focussed, like the man I recall only... without the compassion that flowed in him as a boy."

For a while, Sotah did not answer. His thumb continued to move across the worn leather in his hands, following the material almost absently before stopping against one of the shallow marks in the metal beneath it. Another flash of lightning filled the chamber, bleaching the colour from everything for an instant, but the Selkath scarcely seemed to notice.

"Yes." The word was almost lost beneath the rain. Sotah remained hunched over Loren's weapon, his eyes fixed upon it rather than Thurius. "I heard them too. Bomoor was still..." He stopped, mouth remaining faintly open for a moment before closing again. The fingers around the hilt shifted. "And Thane..."

This time the silence lasted longer. Sotah lowered his head slightly.

"Darth Serus."

The correction came quietly, painfully, without conviction enough to sound like acceptance and without denial enough to reject what they had seen.

"They remembered us." There was something almost childlike in the simplicity of the observation, stripped of philosophy or judgement. His thumb pressed into the leather again. "They remembered all of it."

Thunder rolled across the Keep, close enough now that the old panes trembled within their frames.

"I..."

Sotah began to continue, as his shoulders seemed to sink a little further, but nothing followed. Whatever he had intended to say disappeared somewhere before reaching his mouth, and after several seconds he gave the smallest shake of his head.

"We were too late," he finally said, as his eyes remained upon Loren's lightsaber. "It is too late."

"It is not too late, Sotah!"

The reply left Thurius before he had fully realised he intended to speak, the words carrying more force than he had intended. His next words came slower and more measured.

"I refuse to believe we are powerless."

For a moment he remained standing before his certainty deserted him.

His eyes closed. He drew a slow breath through his nose, but it did little to steady the sudden ache tightening behind his ribs. The storm groaned against the walls and a whip of wind shook the trees and vines with a rattling shake before dropping to silence again.

The Cerean let out a long breath and dragged one of the empty chairs back across the stone floor. Ordinarily he might have winced at the noise, but now it seemed to pass straight through him.

When he finally sat, it was with none of the composure expected of a Jedi Master. He folded forward slightly, elbows resting against his knees, one hand pressed against his brow.

"Not again..."

The words emerged little more than a whisper.

For several seconds he stared at the floor between his feet.

"I thought Bomoor was different..." he continued, "I thought I had been different with him. I did not fill his young mind with stories of heroism and sacrifice as I did with Mykles - I encouraged him to embrace every aspect of Jedi teaching. He took no joy in death or darkness and seemed set to be not only a great consular but a capable warrior, just as Thane was."

The rain hammered harder against the windows.

"But now they speak of Sith and conquest and part of me wonders whether I changed anything at all. Perhaps my flaws cannot be fixed..."

Silence followed, not empty silence but filled with memories as the pair sat together buried in thoughts of the past.

Eventually Thurius straightened and turned towards Sotah.

The firelight caught the strain in his features, drawing tired lines that seemed deeper than they had only hours before.

"You guided me once." His voice was calmer now, but he still still held his heavy brow, "When I could see no way forward, you were the one who remained by my side and set me on another path."

His eyes drifted briefly towards the lightsaber resting in Sotah's hands.

"So tell me," he spoke plainly and earnestly, "Where do we go from here? Where is the path I cannot see?"

For several seconds, Sotah gave no indication that he had heard the question. The storm continued around them, rain rattling hard against the ancient panes whilst water hissed somewhere beyond the walls. Loren's lightsaber remained across his palms, but his fingers had tightened around it now, enough that the worn leather disappeared partially beneath the breadth of his grip.

Thurius' words seemed to reach him only gradually. Something faint shifted across the Selkath's features, but his eyes remained lowered.

"I believed I was wiser then," he said, and the admission was so quiet that it might almost have been intended for the weapon in his hands rather than the man beside him. Sotah's thumb moved once across the leather and stopped.

"I felt ..." he began, then faltered.

The old familiar instinct to find some gentler shape for the thought appeared to desert him entirely. His mouth remained slightly open for a moment before he closed it again, breathing slowly through the silence.

"I thought I understood people; where they might go, or what they might become with the right guidance, belief and freedom."

His grip tightened a fraction further around the hilt. Outside, lightning briefly whitened the room, catching the wet gleam of Sotah's eyes before darkness and firelight reclaimed him.

"I was arrogant, in my way. Very certain of my wisdom...."

There was no bitterness in the words - only exhaustion. He finally raised his gaze towards Thurius, though there was little of the old wily warmth or quiet confidence waiting there.

"I do not think my wisdom was as sage as either of us believed." Sotah looked back down at Loren's weapon. "And I..." The thought stopped, and this time he made no attempt to recover it.

Thurius raised his head a little more, noticing the abrupt end to Sotah's sentence.

The storm had gathered slowly after they left. At first it had been little more than a distant muttering beyond the walls, thunder rolling somewhere over the jungle in long, low notes that might almost have been mistaken for the shifting of the old fortress itself. The air had thickened with each passing minute, warm and wet enough that the cracked windows seemed to breathe with it, until the first rain finally began to strike the Bronze Keep in scattered, heavy drops.

By the time the storm reached them properly, the jungle beyond had disappeared almost entirely. Water ran in silver sheets across the arched windows and coursed down the outer stonework, overflowing gutters that had not served their purpose for decades and spilling from broken parapets in sudden streams. Wind pressed through gaps in the masonry and made the weaker candle flames bow and recover, whilst somewhere in the deeper corridors an unsecured door complained rhythmically against its frame. Lightning occasionally transformed the windows into pale mirrors, illuminating the chamber in brief, colourless flashes before surrendering it again to firelight.

Neither of the men had done much to disturb what remained inside. The broth still hung above the hearth, though the fire beneath it had fallen sufficiently low that its surface no longer stirred. Bomoor's bowl remained where it had struck the table, a thin trail of soup having dried unevenly across the stone from the spill. Two chairs stood empty in the places prepared for men who had now gone, one pushed back from where the Ithorian had risen and the other almost untouched, having never received the guest for whom it had been intended.

Thunder broke much closer now, briefly shaking dust loose from somewhere above the hearth, and rain hammered against the surviving panes with enough force to turn conversation into something that would require intention.

No conversation had yet begun and Sotah remained where he had been left. At some point after the two departing men had vanished entirely into the old passages, his hand had moved towards the weapon lying on the table. His broad fingers had closed around the leather-bound hilt and drawn it slowly to rest across both palms, and it had remained there since.

Loren's lightsaber looked smaller in his hands than it had in hers. The leather had darkened with age and use, polished along its highest points by years of contact with the palms and fingers of the woman who had carried it. The braiding beneath the binding was familiar in a way that seemed almost cruel now, each irregularity belonging to an object Sotah had once seen so often that there had been no reason to consciously remember it. There were scratches around the emitter housing, minute abrasions along the lower metalwork, a small discolouration near one fastening that might have meant nothing to anyone else.

To him, it was unmistakable. His first Padawan. His hand shifted once, thumb moving across the old leather with such care that it might have been an attempt to confirm the weapon was real.

Outside, lightning flashed again. For an instant, the chamber became painfully clear: the abandoned bowls, the empty seats, the old royal crest faded into the back of one chair, Sotah folded into another with the hilt resting between his hands, and Thurius still nearby beneath the same ruined roof.

Darth Serus.

The name came unbidden, the supposed title of the man he had trained. It was not a costume adopted by some fallen Knight who wished to frighten the Order, nor an affectation borrowed from an extinct tradition, nor even the delusion of one more dark-side sect convinced that ancient symbols belonged to them because they possessed the courage to speak forbidden words aloud.

There had been no doubt in the room when the title was spoken.

Whatever else Thane had once been, whatever fragments of the boy, Knight and friend still remained somewhere behind the mask and beneath that immense darkness, the man who had walked from the Bronze Keep had restored something that had been dead for more than a millennium and claimed its inheritance without hesitation - and Bomoor was walking into that darkness with him.

Sotah had not yet spoken the name again, though. He had not said anything. The Selkath still sat slightly hunched over the lightsaber, the broad strength that had once given his posture an easy solidity seemingly withdrawn somewhere beyond reach. His eyes remained lowered, dark and reflective in the firelight, fixed upon an object that connected too many different lives at once: Loren as a difficult child and determined Padawan; Loren as the older Shadow who had walked beside Thane and Bomoor; Loren dead by the hand of the pupil who had followed her; and that same pupil returning years later, scarred, mechanised and carrying the title of an extinct enemy as though history itself had merely been waiting for someone sufficiently determined to resume it.

Across the room, Thurius' agitation required no words to announce itself. Whatever control the Cerean retained, it sat closer to the surface than usual, visible in the tension held through his long frame and the restless severity with which the storm-light occasionally caught his features. He had not yet committed himself to speech, movement or decision, but neither did he possess Sotah's exhausted stillness.

The difference between them had rarely seemed so pronounced.

Sotah did not look up. His fingers tightened almost imperceptibly around Loren's hilt as rain continued to batter the old fortress and the night beyond the windows vanished beneath another flash of white.

"I thought..." words echoed from where Thurius stood looking towards the failing embers in the hearth, warmth now receding, "I thought I would be ready for anything that came through that doorway."

Sotah could feel the Cerean's muscles clenching, holding back the sorrow, the anger, the fear that years of Jedi training had sought to bury.

"I was wrong."

The words came with a slight tremor in his diaphragm, and a sharp intake of breath before continuing.

"We heard the whispers, saw the dark paths they walked, listened to the reports from the Templars, but I just did not believe that such a change could be possible."

Thurius slid a hand down the stonework and turned dejectedly back towards his Selkath companion still hunched over, Loren's weapon in hand before adding:

"But, I think, worst of all is that I could still hear their voices in what they said," he paced slowly back over, "That the dark side does not simply drape itself over them like a disguise, but that they wear it willingly; speak through it as though it were only another philosophy debated in the temple halls."

His hand grasped out once again, this time finding the rim of the discarded bowl and tracing its edge.

"That passion in Bomoor was his... Dark though it was, it was honest and focussed, like the man I recall only... without the compassion that flowed in him as a boy."

For a while, Sotah did not answer. His thumb continued to move across the worn leather in his hands, following the material almost absently before stopping against one of the shallow marks in the metal beneath it. Another flash of lightning filled the chamber, bleaching the colour from everything for an instant, but the Selkath scarcely seemed to notice.

"Yes." The word was almost lost beneath the rain. Sotah remained hunched over Loren's weapon, his eyes fixed upon it rather than Thurius. "I heard them too. Bomoor was still..." He stopped, mouth remaining faintly open for a moment before closing again. The fingers around the hilt shifted. "And Thane..."

This time the silence lasted longer. Sotah lowered his head slightly.

"Darth Serus."

The correction came quietly, painfully, without conviction enough to sound like acceptance and without denial enough to reject what they had seen.

"They remembered us." There was something almost childlike in the simplicity of the observation, stripped of philosophy or judgement. His thumb pressed into the leather again. "They remembered all of it."

Thunder rolled across the Keep, close enough now that the old panes trembled within their frames.

"I..."

Sotah began to continue, as his shoulders seemed to sink a little further, but nothing followed. Whatever he had intended to say disappeared somewhere before reaching his mouth, and after several seconds he gave the smallest shake of his head.

"We were too late," he finally said, as his eyes remained upon Loren's lightsaber. "It is too late."

"It is not too late, Sotah!"

The reply left Thurius before he had fully realised he intended to speak, the words carrying more force than he had intended. His next words came slower and more measured.

"I refuse to believe we are powerless."

For a moment he remained standing before his certainty deserted him.

His eyes closed. He drew a slow breath through his nose, but it did little to steady the sudden ache tightening behind his ribs. The storm groaned against the walls and a whip of wind shook the trees and vines with a rattling shake before dropping to silence again.

The Cerean let out a long breath and dragged one of the empty chairs back across the stone floor. Ordinarily he might have winced at the noise, but now it seemed to pass straight through him.

When he finally sat, it was with none of the composure expected of a Jedi Master. He folded forward slightly, elbows resting against his knees, one hand pressed against his brow.

"Not again..."

The words emerged little more than a whisper.

For several seconds he stared at the floor between his feet.

"I thought Bomoor was different..." he continued, "I thought I had been different with him. I did not fill his young mind with stories of heroism and sacrifice as I did with Mykles - I encouraged him to embrace every aspect of Jedi teaching. He took no joy in death or darkness and seemed set to be not only a great consular but a capable warrior, just as Thane was."

The rain hammered harder against the windows.

"But now they speak of Sith and conquest and part of me wonders whether I changed anything at all. Perhaps my flaws cannot be fixed..."

Silence followed, not empty silence but filled with memories as the pair sat together buried in thoughts of the past.

Eventually Thurius straightened and turned towards Sotah.

The firelight caught the strain in his features, drawing tired lines that seemed deeper than they had only hours before.

"You guided me once." His voice was calmer now, but he still still held his heavy brow, "When I could see no way forward, you were the one who remained by my side and set me on another path."

His eyes drifted briefly towards the lightsaber resting in Sotah's hands.

"So tell me," he spoke plainly and earnestly, "Where do we go from here? Where is the path I cannot see?"

For several seconds, Sotah gave no indication that he had heard the question. The storm continued around them, rain rattling hard against the ancient panes whilst water hissed somewhere beyond the walls. Loren's lightsaber remained across his palms, but his fingers had tightened around it now, enough that the worn leather disappeared partially beneath the breadth of his grip.

Thurius' words seemed to reach him only gradually. Something faint shifted across the Selkath's features, but his eyes remained lowered.

"I believed I was wiser then," he said, and the admission was so quiet that it might almost have been intended for the weapon in his hands rather than the man beside him. Sotah's thumb moved once across the leather and stopped.

"I..." he began again, then faltered.

The old familiar instinct to find some gentler shape for the thought appeared to desert him entirely. His mouth remained slightly open for a moment before he closed it again, breathing slowly through the silence.

"I imagined I understood people; where they might go, or what they might become with the right guidance, belief and freedom." His grip tightened a fraction further around the hilt. Outside, lightning briefly whitened the room, catching the wet gleam of Sotah's eyes before darkness and firelight reclaimed him. "I was arrogant, in my way. Very certain of my wisdom...."

There was no bitterness in the words - only exhaustion. He finally raised his gaze towards Thurius, though there was little of the old wily warmth or quiet confidence waiting there.

"I do not consider my wisdom was as sage as either of us believed." Sotah looked back down at Loren's weapon. "And I..." The thought stopped, and this time he made no attempt to recover it.

Thurius raised his head a little more, noticing the abrupt end to Sotah's sentence.

"No."

The answer came quietly as Thurius lowered the hand from his brow and shook his head.

"No, I will not allow you to do that."

The anger was gone from his voice now. What remained was weary conviction.

"It's one thing for me to question my merits as a teacher, but I know that without your companionship and guidance, I would never have allowed myself to enjoy my position, my life again. So don't you start trying to convince yourself that none of it mattered. It mattered to me."

He gestured faintly towards the lightsaber in Sotah's hands.

"The light Loren shone into the world would never have been half as bright, were she not shaped by your patience. Don't speak like the galaxy would have been better without you: I doubt Loren would agree."

The rain thundered against the windows as he continued.

"And I think if Darth Serus agreed the galaxy was better without you, he would never have come here tonight. Perhaps we misunderstood how much their frustration would carry them into anger and into darkness. But that does not mean your kindness failed them."

Thurius glanced towards the storm beyond the glass.

"And I don't think your kindness has left them either," his voice carried a calmer essence than before, "Even spoken in anger, Bomoor did not wish to see us degraded. We cannot ignore that."

Again, Sotah did not immediately answer. The words concerning Loren seemed to reach him where the others had not.

"The light she shone..." The phrase emerged quietly and Sotah turned the hilt a fraction within his palms, watching the dull firelight travel across the worn metal near its emitter. "Yes," he said. "She did."

There was no gratitude in the acknowledgement, nor any visible comfort taken from it. Rain still swept hard across the windows, driven almost sideways for several seconds before the wind shifted again, and Sotah continued staring at the weapon.

"And if that is true..." His cranium tightened faintly, the expression an approximation of a furrowed brow in the Selkath. "...then what follows from them? Thane carried things I taught him further than I ever intended. Bomoor did the same with you. They have not forgotten our lessons, no. They have built upon them."

Sotah lowered the lightsaber slightly towards his lap, though he did not release it. For the first time since Thurius had begun speaking, something beyond grief seemed to intrude upon his thoughts. Not confidence, nor renewed conviction, but the faint return of obligation. His dark eyes lifted towards the storm-darkened windows.

"They do not know." The words came more clearly this time. "Quellus or the Council." Sotah's gaze moved towards Thurius. "They have long suspected darkness and corruption - Rynseh has counselled as such for months... but they do not know that the Sith have returned, not by name. Is it ours to tell them?" The question came with no urgency, only exhaustion. "Do we go back?"

He looked down again at the hilt in his hands, even before his friend answered.

The question forced a sharp intake of breath from Thurius, holding it in his chest as his eyes searched the dark corners of the room for the answer. Finally, they settled again on the hilt Sotah too could not escape gazing at.

"No," he stated, firm but not demanding, "We go forward."

The old Cerean master rose up, steadying himself once more with the chair, his arm trembled slightly as the shock of the recent encounter still tinged his muscles but he resisted, holding himself upright.

"There is nothing to be gained for any party: Rynseh will merely confirm what he has already concluded and Quellus will believe him, our former padawans will be none the wiser to the plot against them within the order and we..."

Thurius' eyes now were set on Sotah, watching the sluggish rise and fall of his body as he lingered in this state of doubt.

"...we will become nothing more than echoes. Whatever fate they determine is just for us, our ability to affect change will cease in that moment. Whatever is left of our agency, I want to put it somewhere it might count for something."

Sotah lifted his eyes. There was still no return of the old warmth in them, no knowing glint or patient amusement waiting behind the exhaustion. He simply regarded Thurius across the failing fire, as though looking now not for reassurance but for something he himself could no longer provide.

"Where would you take us, then?" The question was quiet. Sotah's gaze dropped briefly towards Loren's hilt before returning to his friend. "What path do you see?"

Thurius did not answer immediately.

Instead, he turned back towards the hearth. A weary sigh escaped him and he ran a hand down his face.

"Yes," he murmured, "That is the real question, isn't it, my friend?"

His eyes remained fixed upon the fire.

"If not the Jedi... then what?"

Most of the fire had collapsed into itself. The larger logs had burned low, their structure giving way beneath layers of blackened ash. Yet amongst them, almost hidden from sight, a small cluster of embers still glowed stubbornly near the edge of the grate. They should have gone cold long ago. Instead they clung patiently to their light, feeding upon whatever fragments remained.

"Of course, there is always the road not travelled."

His gaze settled on the surviving embers.

"We could find those who stepped away long before we did. Seek out the Rift Jedi."

The suggestion sounded almost tentative at first, but as he spoke he found himself considering it more seriously.

"We stood in this very fortress beside Master Sazar of the Rift. Whatever the Council thought of her choices, I never found her lacking in wisdom or integrity."

He folded his arms loosely.

"A respectable Jedi. An ethical one. I could see myself trusting more people like her. Whether I would join them..."

He trailed off slightly, the silence only broken by a low rumble of thunder in the distance, through the great, dark forest outside the window.

"That I cannot say. But it has to be better than returning to Coruscant only to be slowly eroded into obscurity by judgement, blame and suspicion."

Finally he looked back towards Sotah.

"If there is still good for us to do, I would rather spend what remains of my life feeding what light still shines than sitting in the dark waiting for someone else to decide my fate. I believe Loren... and Mykles... they would want that. And the men who stood here with us tonight..."

A sad smile tugged at one corner of his mouth.

"...deep down, I think they would want it too."

The suggestion seemed to settle differently from everything that had preceded it. Sotah's grief did not lift, nor did the old confidence return, but some faint movement of thought passed behind his dark eyes as Thurius spoke of Sazar and of the road neither of them had taken.

"The Rift," Sotah began, although he could not bring himself to answer the final point Thurius had made. "They used to call me 'sympathiser', as if such a thing were contrary, like it was 'un-Jedi'."

Yars earlier, when the distinction between Reborn and Rift had carried considerably more blood behind it, he had found the boundaries less important than many around him seemed to - even Thurius, at a time. Yet, his expression darkened as quickly as the memory surfaced.

"I remember the Second Conflict all too well, Thurius," he said. "I remember far too many people died whilst Jedi argued over which kind of Jedi the galaxy required, and then we fought one another - killed one another."

Outside, thunder rolled more distantly now, though the rain continued to course against the windows.

"Sazar was a good woman. I trusted her, too." His eyes moved briefly towards Thurius as he finally agreed. "I would go with you." A faint wet breath escaped him. "But not to exchange one robe for another."

The old Selkath remained quiet for several seconds after that, apparently considering whether there was anything more to say. Then his grip shifted upon the hilt and some measure of obligation returned to his expression.

"But the Jedi Council must know." His voice remained soft, though there was greater certainty in it now. "I will offer no trail than we may already have, nor offer them anything that turns our meeting into a weapon against Bomoor and Th- and... Well, they must know what has happened."

He glanced towards the dark corridor through which their former pupils had departed and lightning flickered somewhere beyond the jungle, too distant now to bleach the chamber white.

"The Sith have returned," he admitted, "and they wear civility and familiarity."

Thurius lingered a moment at the edge of the worn old table, hands hovering in the air, not sure whether to commit to a position on his body, or against the wooden surface.

Eventually he settled on grasping the table, leaning down and allowing it to take some of his weight.

"It has been a long road, Sotah, and I fear I may have lost sight of a few truths along the way," he shook his head slowly, eye lids closing into a tight bunch, "But I have never once doubted your sense of morality. When they whispered 'Rift Sympathiser', I heard only that you still cared. When they marked you a traitor for siding with Rusasha over that Caanan Senator, I saw only a protector and a friend."

He allowed his eyes to open a fraction and his voice dropped to a whisper, "So, if you wish to inform the council of what we know, I would never seek to tell you that is wrong."

He turned to face his friend fully, a note of desperate appeal creeping into his strained tones, "I would only ask that you send only words and not yourself as penance. Come with me to the Rift. Not to join them. Not to swear yourself to anything. Just... come."

His grip tightened slightly upon the table.

"All these years we have watched people choose sides and all it has wrought is bloodshed. Maybe for once we should stop worrying about where we belong and focus on what good we can still do. Because if there is still a way to reach Bomoor and Thane, I do not think we shall find it imprisoned in the temple. Because I cannot bring myself to believe their light is dead."

Sotah's eyes had lowered once more to the weapon in his hands, but this silence was not quite the same as those that had preceded it. Something in Thurius' words had reached beyond the grief sufficiently to disturb it, not to lessen what had happened, but to make remaining exactly where he was seem, for the first time, like a choice of its own.

"You still call him Thane," he said, as his fingers moved slowly across the leather. "But I honestly do not know whether there is anything left for us to reach."

He did not disguise the admission. Whatever hope Thurius could still find in the men who had stood before them, Sotah could not yet share it.

"But..." His gaze returned to his oldest friend. "...perhaps you are right that we shall not discover otherwise by surrendering ourselves to men who have already decided." The words cost him something. That much was evident in the way his eyes fell again immediately. "The Council must be warned, but words will suffice - not penance."

For the first time since Serus had placed the weapon upon the table, Sotah's hands closed around it with something other than grief. He turned the hilt carefully, examining its familiar shape one final time before drawing it towards himself and securing it within the folds of his robes.

Then, slowly, the old Jedi Master rose. There was no sudden restoration in the movement. He still looked tired, older somehow than he had at the beginning of the evening, and the easy solidity that had once seemed inseparable from him had not returned. Yet, he stood.

"We will tell the Council." His eyes met Thurius''. "Then we will find the Rift."

Outside, the storm was beginning at last to move deeper across the jungle. Rain still fell heavily against the Bronze Keep, but the thunder had begun to recede, each report arriving a little later and a little further away than the one before.

Sotah looked once more around the chamber: the remnants of supper, Bomoor's abandoned bowl, the dying embers in the hearth and the chairs that had been placed there in expectation of something none of them had truly understood.

Then he stepped away from the table. By morning, the fire would be cold. The bowls would remain where they had been left, and around the table that had been set for four, every chair would stand empty.

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