Mim and Kueller always had a fallback point, a rendezvous location for when a job went sideways. For now, it was Tatooine. Specifically, the abandoned and decaying Palace of a one-time gangster slug, long since dead.
The problem was that the Darkest Knight had been basically mothballed for almost a year. A day outside of Almania, the engines seized up and dropped them unceremoniously out of hyperspace. It took almost two days with both Kyla and Elaysia working nonstop to track down the issue, and fix it, before they could be on their way again.
The delay ate at Mim, and as soon as they were back in hyperspace, she retreated to the main cabin. Elaysia could safely calculate the hyperspace jumps and manage the trip to Tatooine. There was no way that Kyla could endure the endless hours of space travel without doing something. Not when the empty space where the Bond should be gnawed at her.
So she sat alone in the main cabin, with only the flicker of hyperspace casting azure reflections across the room. In that shadowed stillness, Mim sank into the Force, breathing into it and opening herself to the Dark Side. Time passed in lurches, sometimes dragging and sometimes seeming to speed by, while she sank deeper and deeper into the Force. Elaysia came and went, leaving trays of food that were sometimes consumed and sometimes ignored.
At no prior point in Mim’s life had she connected so deeply and for so long to this dark energy. The Force-marked rune of the Dark Lord burned permanently on her forehead.
In that seething, silent darkness, Kyla Mim scoured the galaxy for any trace of Dolph Kueller’s essence. For days, she existed in this half-dreaming state where the faintest whispers of Sith imprints were more real to her than the bed beneath her. The Force-traces she hunted, relentlessly, endlessly, were all she knew.
Across starlines and supernovas, she chased one well-remembered set of emerald eyes. Dipping between black holes and skirting around pulsars, Mim followed ghost after ghost on a futile hunt for her Husband.
There were echoes of the Sith all across the cracks of the universe. Hidden Lords wrapped in their own idylls of protection. Powerful names and powerful Houses, ghosting across her senses – caught, tasted and disregarded. They were not her quarry. They were irrelevant for the moment.
Only once did she come close. Only once did bright eyes in a familiar face that whispered “family” burn within her mind. Every muscle in her body tensed as she narrowed in on that elusive essence, zeroing in on it from halfway across a galaxy. Hidden. Faint. The barest impression at all. Flashes danced before her eyes, of the well-known face of her one-time student, superimposed on a city that felt oddly familiar to her.
Lyn’Viel Ama’ris.
For an instant, Mim absorbed the impression and filed it away. Then he, too, was dismissed as she continued again her relentless hunt for Dolph Kueller.
The search was futile. On the day that Elaysia opened the door to her room to announce they were on final approach to Tatooine, Mim had felt nothing. Found nothing. Her hunt was unfulfilled and despair was bitter and tasted like ash in her mouth.
“Prepare yourself for battle, Elaysia.”
It was the first time she had spoken in days and Kyla’s voice emerged, rusty and rough. She opened her eyes to stare into the emerald-bright gaze of her daughter.
“If they live and are here, we will find them.”
* * *
They had skirted the edge of the Dune Sea, taking the direct approach to the sole road that gave access to the former palace of the long-dead Hutt. Elaysia was well trained in the Force, but Mim’s awareness was on overdrive after her lengthy communion with it. She could hear the skitter of tiny desert mice. She could feel the heartbeats of the scattering of Desert People miles away. But from the palace itself? Nothing.
They entered with weapons in hand, blasters and lightsabers ready. Mother and daughter moved with the efficiency and familiarity of long experience hunting together, breaching the one-time stronghold with silent ease.
The palace had been used by many creatures since Jabba’s death, and the long-ago hunt that led to Mim and Kueller’s own battle here was hardly the only conflict these walls had seen in the intervening years. Blaster marks scored and pitted the walls. Rubble piled up in corners, sometimes sand blown in from the Dune Sea and sometimes old bones of the dead. This place had been picked clean. Nothing of value remained and only the ghosts lingered here.
As they moved into the shadowed throne room, Mim tasted the utter emptiness of the place and felt despair rise – but more than emptiness, there was the faint hint of recentdeath. An echoing swirl of violence done here.
A deeply familiar violence.
So it wasn’t a surprise to find fresh corpses strewn across the room. Well-armed, well-armoured corpses that looked like they had once been one of the better-outfitted mercenary groups in the galaxy. Possibly even hunters from the Guild. Mim walked through them, her senses tasting only death, her index finger free of the safety guard and hovering over the trigger of her DL-44 blaster.
–Less than 48 hours dead– Elaysia observed silently.
The only dead were the mercenaries. And they had been experts in their trade. Peering into faces, Mim could put names to many of them. But there was no lanky teenage corpse. There was no former Emperor staring with sightless emerald eyes. Nor did Anwyn or Kueller step from the shadows to reveal themselves.
Were these only the losses of the merc crew that captured her Husband and son? The thought of Dolph Kueller being taken down by rabble left a bitter taste, but he must have been so desperately weakened by the Force Storm he triggered on Almania. So vulnerable, without her at his back to protect him, with only a half trained boy as backup.
“They were already here. Waiting,” Kyla said quietly. Snoke? Opportunism? She couldn’t know, so she assumed the worst. Their enemy knew their fallback plans and had been waiting.
The despair surged within her as she stepped deeper into the throne room. She should have upgraded the Darkest Knight’s engines years ago. If they’d been faster, if she had been here, she could have…
Mim froze.
Scattered amidst the sand and the blood, something sat waiting for her. Something black and gold and familiar.
Her hand clenched around the blaster briefly before she holstered it. The Emperor’s Robes. Black and gold, silk and embroidery, the garb of Dolph Kueller for most of his life – when he wasn’t kicking around in the fringer’s long duster and patchwork armour he preferred for their hunts.
It called her like a beacon and Kyla knelt in the sand to gather them to her. As she did so, the brutal gaping hole in the center of the torso became apparent – blaster bolt scoring crisping the edges but no blood. No blood.
Behind her, she felt an echo of her vanished despair radiating from her daughter.
“Mim, is… is Father dead?”
“Dead? Of course not. Your father and brother are very much alive, Elaysia.”
Kyla’s gloved hands drew the robes to her as she stood, relief and gratitude warring within her. There was no clearer way he could have warned her into cover, and no better way to explain the path he and Anwyn were taking now. Sinking into the obscurity of Aren’s gunslinger heritage, abandoning the giant target on their back that was the name Kueller and the connection to the Imperium.
They lived and would survive.
Mim offered up a silent thanks to the uncaring universe that had seen some perverse twist of fate guiding their paths. Without the gift of Aren Mim’s soul joined within him, this wouldn’t have been possible. There was no possibility that Dolph Kueller, former Emperor and Dark Lord, could successfully sink into obscurity to protect himself and their son for an unknowable length of time.
“How do we find them?”
Mim looked across the corpses littered on the sand and shook her head. “Wrong question, Elaysia. If it were safe to join them, they would have been waiting for us. Come – we have to leave before the next round of reinforcements arrive. I want us back in space within the hour.”
Elaysia’s alarm battered at her as they cautiously emerged from the Palace ruins. “Where are we going now, Mim?”
Kyla recalled the passing glimpse of bright eyes and familiar soul, set upon the backdrop of a world she remembered well. Lyn’Viel might be long gone, and it was always going to be a long shot, but it was one she was prepared to take.
“Don’t worry. I’ve got the coordinates for you.”
* * *
Mim emerged from the ‘fresher unit attached to the Darkest Knight’s main cabin, and stared mutely at her naked reflection. The sands of Tatooine were washed away, and while she knew the necessary next steps, her emotions were a volatile twisting thing.
Memory burned like ash.
“I will never leave you,” she had promised, that first morning after their long-denied union. Staring down the length of her body as he knelt before her in this very ‘fresher, water pouring over them both. Blue eyes locked on green.
“I will never leave you.”
For damn near twenty years, she had kept her word. Staring mutely at her own reflection, the fury kept at bay suddenly rose with a rabid heat. This was wrong, terribly wrong! Kyla’s fist lashed out with that livid rage, planting itself recklessly in the mirror and shattering it, and her reflection, into a hundred tiny shards that fell like silver splinters to the floor.
For a long moment, nothing moved.
Then Kyla sighed, glancing from the fractured reflections of herself to the bleeding knuckles of her fist.
“Dammit.”
If he were here, he would tease her relentlessly for that childish burst of anger. And he would be right to do so. Mim inhaled a measured breath and ran her hand under the water, methodically cleaning away the blood and mirror shards before affixing a bacta patch.
Turning her back on the shattered mirror, Mim moved into the main cabin. Almost without thought, she gathered the black and gold robes and drew them on. The toughness of embroidery amidst the softness of silk was familiar to her skin, but wearing them herself was a bizarre sensation. Kyla was long-limbed and tall, but even she couldn’t match Kueller’s height. The robes trailed past her bare feet, and the gaping hole that would have been a lethal chest shot on him merely exposed the marriage rune tattooed on her stomach.
It seemed appropriate somehow, as she opened the wall panel containing her few precious belongings.
Blue eyes drifted past old keepsakes – a dusty journal, a ring, a rusting collar that once held a Dathomiri witch – and settled on the two candles. Almost identical scenes sculpted into the wax. Her fingertips traced lightly across their familiar surfaces, his gifts to her and his promises. Beacons and talismans. Yes, she was grateful these had remain locked safely away here on the Darkest Knight.
Between the candles nestled a small cube, held securely in the wall bracket.
Kyla removed the cube, carrying it back to the bed with her. She settled herself in the center, letting the black-and-gold robes of Kueller fall gracefully about her frame, and placed it before her.
Her hand was steady as she activated the Holocron of Dolph Kueller.
The visage of the gatekeeper was always different. There were so many forms and faces that Dolph had worn over the years. Old, young, corrupted, fresh-faced, Imperial arrogance and Sith majesty and every combination thereof. At times, it had worn her own face. Aren’s face. Like Kueller itself, it would poke and prod to its own ends and used its illusionary abilities remorselessly to do so.
Today, the image was heartbreakingly familiar. The Dolph of now, the one the Holocron had identified from their last interaction when Satal unexpectedly entered the cabin before she had concluded their conversation. It had updated.
The image wavered briefly as the Holocron responded to her attire. It gave Mim the moment she needed to steel herself.
“What has happened?” the Holocron demanded, rippling briefly before settling into an image of the current-Dolph dressed in those same imperial robes.
“Many things.” Mim had learned years ago that volunteering excess information got her nowhere with a Holocron. “I am no longer on Almania. I will not return there.”
The Holocron stilled. “Have you fulfilled your Destiny, Kyla Mim? Have you finally killed Lord Kueller?”
Mim’s bright blue gaze studied it. “The Bond has been ruptured. We are no longer one.”
Something cunning and alien flickered across the Holocron’s face, a quicksilver flash that terrified her. “And with his death, you claim his throne and title.”
She had never truly feared him in any form. Dolph could never harm her. But this was not Dolph. As much as the Holocron had insisted that there was no difference between it and the living Kueller, that wasn’t strictly true. It possessed and embodied a piece of her Lord’s spirit. But by its nature it was not alive.
There was danger here. She tasted it in the air. Felt it on her skin.
“Dolph Kueller is not dead.”
Saying it aloud was a benediction and a promise to herself, but it froze that flash behind the Holocron’s illusionary gaze. It’s filaments realigned, adapting to this new information. Did she only imagine that it registered disappointment?
“Why have you accessed this Holocron? To rectify your failure to protect what is yours?”
It provoked. It pushed. It denied. It challenged. This was the value and the frustration of dealing with a Holocron, specifically that of Kueller. But it was exuding a familiarity now that eased the sense of unexpected danger.
“You taught me that failure means setback, not simply death. I accept that I have failed. Allow me to propose my response. I welcome your perspective.”
“Tell me, Mim. Your stronghold wrenched from your grasp. Your Lord in hiding. Your Bond broken. What options remain to you that you seek guidance on?” A delicate pause. “Revenge?”
Her chin lifted and inexplicably she felt the weight of Satal’s torn robes pressing down upon her narrow shoulders.
“I have no time for revenge. Our enemies will not cease hunting us until we are dead or they are dead. So they must die.”
“Is this not revenge?” the Holocron purred.
Kyla smiled and there was no echo of it in her gaze.
“They will die and I will claim what is theirs, and make it our own. I was taught what it means to be a Lord by the greatest of us. Do you imagine I can abandon my responsibilities now, in the time of greatest need?”
It was more of an idea than a plan, at this early stage. Less than an idea. An inspiration. Elaysia would be secured on the world that held her one-time student, instructed to pursue her own livelihood. Dolph would remain in hiding with Anwyn, doing the same.
But Mim?
Kueller had spent years striving to teach her what it meant to be a Lord and in the end, she had learned it by what he gave to her. A family to protect. A home to guard. She could rip aside what was nonessential and abandon it as needed, she would strip herself to bare bones to pursue her goals. What didn’t matter would be dismissed.
What remained was certainty.
Snoke would die, and she would take what was his and turn his death into their triumph.