Star Wars - Lost Tribe of the Sith 04 - Savior

sibling’s advance, looked back in surprise.
    “You’re right, Jariad,” Korsin said, choking back blood. “It’s time for me to go—but not without my last official act.
And it’s overdue.”
    Adari should have been more surprised. By nightfall, more than a thousand Keshiri had arrived near the foot of the Spire, leading five times that many riderless uvak. Themob of beasts circling high above the smoking formation had given the appearance of a living, leathery halo. It was stirring, but disappointing: this many would barely have filled the uvak pens in the southern foothills.
    Adari had given up scanning the horizon long before her compatriots did. At midnight, a lone rider from Tahv had arrived, breathless and terrified. His report confirmed her suspicion. Tona had fallen under Nida Korsin’s spell and revealed all their plans.
    It had been hopeless from the beginning; someone would have betrayed them. Tona was just the weakest. Adari had turned away before she heard whether Nida had rewarded Tona, or killed him. Nothing mattered anymore.
    What
had
surprised Adari was what had happened next. She’d expected everyone to leave. To fly away, free their uvak, and melt back into Keshiri society before the Sith found them. Instead, when she’d somberly taken to the clouds on Nink and headed for the dark river of air, she’d found the entire entourage in her wake.
    She’d fallen asleep, assuming Nink would surrender to gravity in the night. So many others had already fallen away. Her turn would come.
    But she awoke to something else.
    From above, the spit of land was no more than a seam between the waves, a chain of reefs adjoining a mucky surface barely larger than her old neighborhood. Nothing about it suggested a haven. But the jet stream had given out—and so had Nink. Of the riders who had begun, fewer than three hundred remained. It was this, or nothing.
    And this is close to nothing
, she thought as she padded across the salty grime of the beach. The mainland had provided everything the Keshiri needed to thrive. Here, bare necessities would have to be clawed for. Infrequent rains pooled fresh water on concave reefs. The uvak, uselessin these doldrums, would have to be culled dramatically to give the scant vegetation a chance. Their flesh was barely edible; their carcasses yielded the only building materials.
    To her intellectual pursuits, the island offered nothing at all. Just the same volcanic rubble from beach to hillcrest. Years in a purgatory of her own making weren’t enough, it seemed: now she must be bored to death. All she’d found was an ancient Keshiri corpse—another lonely victim of the oceanic air currents.
    Why couldn’t the Sith have landed
here?
    She knew the answer. The Sith had been trapped in such a place. To save herself—from them, and from the elders—she had set them loose. Korsin had been right, those years ago.
We all do what we have to do
.
    They were doing it now. Adari looked at Nink, dying of exhaustion, forked feet barely responding to the caresses of the surf. She couldn’t simply bury him when the time came; he’d be needed, just like the rest. The uvak were integral to their survival—but disposable when necessary.
    The Sith had looked upon the Keshiri in exactly the same way.
    Adari studied her people, toiling mutely on the island. They expected they wouldn’t survive the year. Worse, anyone who came looking for them would not be a savior.
    Perhaps Korsin’s Sith worried about the same thing, she thought. Perhaps the tales were true. Perhaps the real Skyborn, the
true
Protectors of legend, were out there somewhere, hunting for the Sith.
    She didn’t believe it.
    But then, she never had.
    Seelah awoke on a slab in her old sick ward. There wasn’t any difference between the patient accommodationsand the biers in the morgue; it was all cold marble, just as everything in the accursed temple was.
    She was moving now—only her legs weren’t. She remembered it all. Seconds after she saw Nida arrive, Gloyd brought the fight into her chamber. Gloyd had always bragged that whoever took him out wouldn’t live to celebrate. Indeed, cornered by Seelah and her confederates, Gloyd had activated something he must have had literally up his sleeve since the crash: a proton detonator. The Houk’s insurance policy had brought the room down on the entire party.
    The Force had helped free Seelah from the rubble that pinned her from the knees down, but nothing could make