Star Wars_ The Old Republic_ Revan - Drew Karpyshyn [2]
“Don’t talk like that. They can’t blame you for what happened. Not anymore. You’re not the same man you were. The Revan I know is a hero. A champion of the light. You redeemed me after Malak turned me to the dark side.”
Revan reached up and wrapped his fingers around the delicate hand resting on his lips, then softly pulled it down. “Like you and the Council redeemed me.”
Bastila turned away, and Revan instantly regretted his words. He knew she was ashamed of her involvement in his capture and her role in erasing his memory.
“What we did was wrong. At the time I thought we had no other choice, but if I had to do it over again—”
“No,” Revan said, cutting her off. “I wouldn’t want you to change anything. If none of this had happened, I might never have found you.”
She turned back to face him, and he could see the hurt and bitterness lingering in her eyes.
“What the Council did to you wasn’t right,” she insisted. “They took away your memories! They stole your identity!”
“It came back,” Revan assured her, pulling her close and wrapping his arms around her. “You have to let go of your anger.”
She didn’t fight his embrace, though she stood rigid at first. Then he felt the tension melting away from her body as she lowered her head onto his shoulder.
“There is no emotion, there is peace,” she whispered, reciting aloud the same words Revan had sought solace in only a few minutes earlier.
They stood there in silence, holding each other until Revan felt her shiver.
“It’s cold out here,” he said. “We should go back inside.”
Twenty minutes later Bastila was fast asleep, but Revan lay on the bed with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling.
He was thinking about what Bastila had said about the Council taking his identity. As his mind had healed, many of his memories had returned, along with his sense of self. But he knew parts were still missing, possibly gone forever.
As a Jedi he knew the importance of letting go of bitterness and anger, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t still wonder about what he had lost.
Something had happened to him and Malak beyond the Outer Rim. They had gone to defeat the Mandalorians, but they had returned as disciples of the dark side. The official story was that they had been corrupted by the ancient power of the Star Forge, but Revan suspected there was more to it. And he knew it had something to do with his nightmares.
A terrible world of thunder and lightning, shrouded in perpetual night.
He and Malak had found something. He couldn’t remember what it was, or where it was, but he feared it on a deep, primal level. Somehow he knew that whatever the terrible secret might be, it was a threat far greater than the Mandalorians or the Star Forge. And Revan was convinced it was still out there.
The storm is coming, and there is no escape.
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
LORD SCOURGE RAISED the hood of his cloak as he stepped off the shuttle, a shield against the wind and pelting rain. Storms were common here on Dromund Kaas; dark clouds perpetually blocked out the sun, rendering terms like day and night meaningless. The only natural illumination came from the frequent bursts of lightning arcing across the sky, but the glow from the spaceport and nearby Kaas City provided more than enough light to see where he was going.
The powerful electrical storms were a physical manifestation of the dark side power that engulfed the entire planet—a power that had brought the Sith back here a millennium before, when their very survival had been in doubt.
After a crushing defeat in the Great Hyperspace War, the Emperor had risen up from the tattered ranks of the remaining Sith Lords to lead his followers on a desperate exodus to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. Fleeing the Republic armies and the relentless revenge of the Jedi, they eventually resettled far beyond the borders of Republic-charted space on their long-lost ancestral homeworld.
There, safely hidden from their enemies, the Sith began to rebuild their Empire. Under the guidance