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Zannah felt a small twinge of disappointment. She had hoped he would be smart enough not to continue a battle he could not win. Another lesson I will have to teach you.

As he drew near, she responded not with physical violence, but rather with a powerful spell of Sith sorcery that attacked Set’s mind. He tried to throw up a protective Force barrier in response, but Zannah’s power shredded his defenses, leaving him completely vulnerable.

Sith sorcery was as much a part of the dark side as the deadly violet bolts of energy her Master unleashed from his hands, and when Bane had first recognized her talent for the subtle but devastating magics he had encouraged her studies into the arcane. From ancient texts she had learned to twist and torment the thoughts of her enemies. She could make them see nightmares as reality; she could cause their deepest fears to manifest as demons of the psyche. She could, and had, rip the minds of her enemies apart with a simple thought and a gesture.

With Set, however, she did not intend to destroy him completely. Instead she enveloped him in a cloud of utter despair and hopelessness. She reached into the innermost recesses of his mind and wrapped it in the nothingness of the void.

Set’s eyes went blank, his jaw hung slack, and his lightsaber slipped from nerveless fingers. He slowly slumped to the ground, his eyes closing and his body trembling slightly as he curled up into a fetal position.

This was to be his final test. A weak mind would collapse upon itself to wither and die, leaving the victim forever comatose. If Set was strong, however, his will would fight back against the horror. Little by little it would tear away at the emptiness, refusing to die, clawing its way back to the surface until consciousness finally returned.

If Set was truly worthy of being her apprentice, he would recover from his current condition in a day or two. If not, she would simply have to begin her search anew.

11

The Huntress brought her shuttle in low over the desert wastelands that covered the majority of Ambria’s surface. Though she had received no formal training, she was highly attuned to the Force, allowing her to feel it rising up from the sunbaked dirt as her ship skimmed across the surface.

Thousands of years ago Ambria had been a world of verdant forests, brimming with life and the power of the Force. But the lush vegetation had been devastated when a Sith sorceress tried—and failed—to bend the entire planet to her will through a powerful ritual. Unable to control the violent energies of the dark side, she was destroyed by her own spell … as was the landscape of the entire planet.

For centuries the corruption of the failed ritual influenced all life on Ambria, transforming the once beautiful world into a nightmare of stunted, poisonous vegetation and twisted, mutated beasts. Eventually the dark side energies released by the Sith sorceress were trapped in a great lake near the planet’s equator by a Jedi Master named Thon, but the damage was too widespread for the world to ever be completely healed.

The Iktotchi knew all this not because she had studied the planet’s history, however. Her connection to the Force allowed her to see things; it gave her glimpses of the past, present, and even possible futures. The ability was common to all Iktotchi in varying degrees, but the Huntress’s talent went far beyond that of the rest of her species. Most Iktotchi would get nothing more than a subtle sense of danger when an impending threat was coming, or a general feeling of whether a new acquaintance might be friend or foe. On occasion they would be granted precognitive dreams, but even these were little more than random images that meant little without context.

With her, however, it was different. Over the years she had developed her skills so that she could control and direct the visions that flashed through her mind. When she concentrated on a specific person or place, she would get a rush of visual and