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Following the dramatic events of Light of the Jedi, the heroes of the High Republic era return to face a shattered peace and a fearsome foe.

In the wake of the Great Hyperspace Disaster and the heroism of the Jedi, the Republic continues to grow, bringing more worlds together under a single unified banner. Led by Chancellor Lina Soh, the spirit of unity extends throughout the galaxy, with the Jedi and newly established Starlight Beacon station at the vanguard.

In celebration, the chancellor plans “The Republic Fair,” a showcase of the possibility and peace of the expanding Republic—a precept the Jedi hope to foster. Stellan Gios, Bell Zettifar, Elzar Mann, and others join the event as ambassadors of harmony. But as the eyes of the galaxy turn toward the Fair, so too does the fury of the Nihil. Their leader, Marchion Ro, is intent on destroying this spirit of unity. His storm descends on the pageantry and celebration, sowing chaos and exacting revenge.

As the Jedi struggle to curb the carnage of the rampaging Nihil, they come face to face with the true fear their enemy plans to unleash across the galaxy. The kind of fear that even the Force cannot shield them from.

Cavan Scott

The Rising Storm

High Republic - 4

ePub r1.0

Titivillus 02-07-2021

Cavan Scott, 2021

Digital editor: Titivillus

ePub base r2.1

For my light and life, Clare

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away …

The galaxy celebrates. With the dark days of the hyperspace disaster behind them, Chancellor Lina Soh pushes ahead with the latest of her GREAT WORKS. The Republic Fair will be her finest hour, a celebration of peace, unity, and hope on the frontier world of Valo.

But an insatiable horror appears on the horizon. One by one, planets fall as the carnivorous DRENGIR consume all life in their path. As Jedi Master AVAR KRISS leads the battle against this terror, Nihil forces gather in secret for the next stage of MARCHION RO’s diabolical plan.

Only the noble JEDI KNIGHTS stand in Ro’s way, but even the protectors of light and life are not prepared for the terrible darkness that lies ahead…

PROLOGUE

Ashla, moon of Tython

The screams had never left Elzar Mann. Many months had passed since Starlight Beacon’s dedication ceremony, since he had stood alongside his fellow Jedi. Since he had stood alongside Avar Kriss.

The eyes of the galaxy had been upon them in their temple finery, that damned collar itching as he’d listened to the speeches and platitudes, first from Chancellor Lina Soh, leader of the Galactic Republic, and then from Avar. His Avar. The Hero of Hetzal.

The Beacon was their promise to the galaxy, Avar had said. It was their covenant. He could still hear her words.

Whenever you feel alone … whenever darkness closes in … know that the Force is with you. Know that we are with you … For light and life.

For light and life.

But that hadn’t stopped the darkness from closing in later that day. A wave of pain and suffering, a vision of the future too terrible to comprehend. He had staggered, grabbing hold of a rail, blood gushing from his nose as the pressure in his head threatened to split his skull in two.

What he had seen had haunted him ever since. It had consumed him.

Jedi dying one by one, picked off by a twisting, unfathomable cloud. Stellan. Avar. Everyone he had ever known in the past and everyone he would meet in days to come. Faces both familiar and strange torn apart.

And the screams.

The screams were the worst.

He had made it through the rest of the evening in a daze, going through the motions, not quite present, the echo of what he had seen … what he had heard … burned onto his mind’s eye. There had been mistakes, a few too many glasses of Kattadan rosé at the reception, Avar asking for that dance she’d mentioned, Elzar leaning in a little too eagerly, a little too publicly.

He could still feel her hand on his chest, pushing him back.

“El. What are you doing?”

They had argued, privately, his head still spinning.

“We’re not Padawans anymore.”

It had been months since he saw her again, and when he did, the atmosphere was as frosty as a dawn on Vandor. Avar had changed toward him. She was more distant. Preoccupied with her new duties as marshal of Starlight Beacon.

Or maybe he was the one who was preoccupied. Elzar had meditated on the vision day and night since the dedication. He should have gone to Avar, to apologize and ask for her guidance, or if not her, then Stellan Gios, his oldest friend, but Stellan had duties of his own. He was a Council member now, responsible for guiding the Order as a whole. He would not have time. Besides, asking for help was hardly Elzar’s style. Elzar Mann was the one who solved problems, not posed them. He found solutions. Answers. New ways of getting the job done. So, Elzar did what he had always done: He tried to solve the problem alone.

First he had consulted the Archives in the Great Temple, poring over countless textfiles and holocrons in the collection, even going so far as attempting to decipher the mysteries of the Ga’Garen Codex, the ancient grimoire whose text had confounded linguists for thousands of years.

Even then, sitting in the Archives, under the watchful gaze of the statues of the Lost, Elzar had heard the screams at the back of his mind, seen the faces of the slain in every reflective surface or passing Padawan.

The Codex had brought him here, to Ashla, Tython’s primary moon. The ancients had called this stretch of land the Isle of Seclusion, which was exactly what he needed if he was ever going to fully understand what he had seen. He needed solitude; focus. The last straw had been receiving a message from Stellan’s old Master, the esteemed Rana Kant, congratulating him on his elevation to Jedi Master. Furthermore, the Council had a posting for him; he was to be marshal of the Jedi outpost on Valo on the edge of the Rseik sector.

Him? A marshal? How could they be so blind? Couldn’t they see he wasn’t ready? Couldn’t they see how troubled he was?

Elzar walked toward the ocean, feeling the warm sand beneath his feet, discarding his outer robes as he approached the water. Yes, this was better. This was where he would finally see the truth. Where he would finally understand. He didn’t stop at the shore but strode out purposefully into the waves. Up to his knees. Up to his waist. Soon he was swimming out to sea, stopping only when he could no longer see land. He spun slowly, treading water, surrounded only by the sea and the Force itself.

It was time.

Elzar took a deep breath and pushed himself down beneath the waves, eyes closed, water rushing into his ears, blocking every other sound.

Show me.

Guide me.

Give me the answers I seek.

There was nothing. No revelation. No response.

He kicked back up, drawing air into his lungs before plunging back down again.

I am here.

I want to learn.

I need to understand.

Nothing changed.

Where were the answers he’d been promised? Where was the understanding?

He repeated the ritual, breaking for air, plunging back down, letting the ocean swallow him whole. Again, and again, and …

It was like hitting an air pocket. All at once he wasn’t sinking, he was running, his fellow Jedi at his side as nightmares snapped at their heels. They weren’t in water, but in fog. Thick. Acrid. Impenetrable. Nothing made sense. Not the chaos, not the panic.

Not the fear.

He opened his mouth to cry out, seawater rushing in from far away, from a different world, from a different time.

What is this?

Where is this?

Speak to me!

And the Force spoke with such strength that Elzar was thrown into a spin, images flashing past his stinging eyes like purple lightning.

Avar.

Stellan.

A Tholothian … Indeera Stokes? No, one of her tendrils was missing, an unfamiliar face contorted in rage.

Bones splintering.

Skin cracking.

Eyes clouded, no longer able to see.

And the screams. The screams were louder than ever. Harsher than ever. And his scream was loudest of all.

Where?

Where?

WHERE?

Elzar’s shoulders heaved, seawater spluttering from his lungs. He was back on Ashla’s shore, salt drying on his skin, baked by the burning sun. He looked around, eyes still blurry, trying to focus on the golden sands that stretched out to either side of him, wingmaws circling in the sky above, ready to pick the flesh from his bones. But he wasn’t dead yet. None of them were.

He pushed himself up and stumbled back toward his Vector, gathering his robes as he went. He needed to get off Ashla. Needed to leave the Core. The Force had spoken. It had already answered his question, if only he had listened.

One name, a planet, where he would finally be able to put things right.

Valo.

CHAPTER ONE

The Rystan Badlands

A comet plowed into the ice field, setting off a devastating chain reaction. Asteroids and space rocks bounced off one another like billiard balls. The only difference here was that most of the balls weighed millions of tons and could crush a ship like an egg. Those that weren’t completely obliterated by the impacts were reduced to razor-sharp shards that only added to the wave of destruction.

No spacer entered the Rystan Badlands lightly. The ice field was filled with the twisted wreckage of cruisers that had attempted to run the gauntlet of colliding planetoids and failed. On a good day it was a dangerous, idiotic endeavor. On a bad day it was suicide.

Today was a very bad day.

The Squall Spider bucked as it weaved through the spinning rocks. The craft was small, barely larger than a shuttle, but it was fast and as maneuverable as any of the Jedi’s famed Vectors. In fact, anyone watching the strange arachnid-like craft could have been forgiven in thinking that a Jedi sat at the controls. Who else could have negotiated the ever-shifting starscape, weaving left and then right to avoid being pulverized by giant balls of ice? But the being in the pilot’s seat couldn’t have been further from a Jedi. The Jedi were the defenders of life and light the galaxy over. They lived for others, never for themselves, maintaining peace and harmony wherever they roamed. In short, they were heroes.

Udi Dis, on the other hand, had been born a Talortai but now only identified as a Nihil. As broad as he was tall, the avian had dedicated his life to piracy and plunder, taking what he wanted and decimating whatever was left. It wasn’t a noble life, but it was the only one he knew, and it had given him a place in the universe that had repeatedly spat in his face.

The only thing Dis had in common with the Jedi was his connection to the Force. Many Talortai were sensitive to the energy field that bound the universe together, but few of his species ever made use of it, the cowards. They said it wasn’t their right, that to do so was somehow immoral. Dis had never understood why. If you were lucky enough to have abilities, shouldn’t you use them, hone them to gain an advantage over those who didn’t? This was why the majority of Talortai were doomed to remain where they were, scratching out a meager existence on Talor while he was out here in the stars. Sure, he had been let down many times, sometimes by others, most often by himself, but the Force had never betrayed him, not once. Life would have been better if he hadn’t gotten himself addicted to reedug, but for now he was sober and had never felt so alive.

Dis clutched the controls with clawed hands, his muscled arms bunching as he slewed the Spider sharply to starboard, skillfully avoiding the debris that, with a lesser pilot at the helm, would have killed everyone on board. But Dis knew the badlands like the back of his feathered hand, even though he had never flown them before. All Talortai had an innate sense of direction, feeling the vibrations of the cosmos in their bones, but Dis’s navigational skills were off the chart. Thanks to his talents, he could feel the location of every asteroid in the field. He didn’t need maps or even a navidroid. All he needed was the Force.

Behind him, the door to the Spider’s cockpit slid open, stale air gushing from the planet-hopper’s cramped corridors. Dis didn’t turn to see who it was. There was no need. He heard the scrape of the boots on the deck plates, felt the swish of the cloak through the air, Dis’s feathers ruffling in response to the presence of the man he had pledged to serve for the rest of his life.

Marchion Ro.

The Eye of the Nihil.

Had he been surprised when Ro approached him about this mission? Of course he had. He had no idea the Eye even knew his name, let alone what he could do in the pilot’s seat. Dis had spent the last few years serving on the Cloudship of a saw-mouthed Crocin who went by the name of Scarspike, a thug who spent more time abusing his crew than planning raids. And it showed. Dis had killed Scarspike after a botched attack on Serenno’s funeral moon. They had lost three Nihil that day, but Scarspike had lost more, Dis opening his scrawny throat with a slash of a wingblade. Dis had no idea if the Cloud’s slaughter had first brought him to the Eye’s attention. Maybe, maybe not. All Dis knew was that he suddenly found himself elevated beyond the Strikes and the Clouds and all the Nihil’s ranks to join Ro’s personal retinue. His aggrandizement didn’t go unnoticed. The Nihil had a strict hierarchy. You started as a lowly Strike, working your way up to Cloud and eventually to Storm. The Nihil horde was organized into three Tempests, each commanded by a Tempest Runner. There was Pan Eyta, a towering Dowutin with ideas above his station, the cold and efficient Twi’lek Lourna Dee, and the latest appointment, a scheming Talpini known as Zeetar. It was fair to say that the Talpini’s promotion had put Pan’s squashed nose out of joint. Dis’s sudden promotion had only rankled him further. Pan and Dis had almost come to blows, the Dowutin claiming that Ro was undermining the Nihil’s Rule of Three. Unlike the Tempest Runners, the Eye was supposed to have no crew of his own. Yes, he had the casting vote when making plans, and yes, he provided the navigational Paths that the Nihil used to avoid Republic entanglement (well, most of the time, at least). Dis suspected that if it weren’t for the Paths, Pan would have sent Ro spinning out of an air lock long ago, but the navigational aids were too valuable. They gave the Nihil the edge, so Eyta’s concerns fell on deaf ears. Dis was welcomed aboard Ro’s vast flagship, the Gaze Electric, which was largely maintained by a crew of silent droids, its many chambers empty, like a palace with no occupants. It was here, in Ro’s inner sanctum, that Dis had learned they were heading to Rystan on a private mission—not that they could have taken the Gaze, of course. The ship rarely left the Nihil’s base on Grizal, and even then split itself into a smaller secondary craft that left the bulk of the Gaze behind, but even that would be too cumbersome to make it through the ice field in one piece. They needed something smaller. They needed the Squall Spider.

“How long until we clear the badlands?” Ro asked, resting a gauntleted palm on the back of Dis’s seat.

“Just a few minutes, my …”

Dis swiveled in his chair to face his leader. “I still don’t know what I should call you. My Eye? Sir?”

Ro’s thin lips curled at the obvious distaste in Dis’s voice, his dark eyes glinting in the red light that streamed in through the viewport.

“You can call me … Marchion.”

Dis’s chest swelled. He had never been one for the chain of command, which was probably why he had stayed a Strike for so long; that and the fact he’d spent most of the last decade in a reedug stupor. But now look at him, on first-name terms with Ro himself. No one called the Eye Marchion, not even Pan.

“I still think it would’ve been easier to use a Path,” Dis said, finally bringing the Spider out of the ice field to slingshot around Rystan’s weak star.

Ro walked over to the vacant gunner’s station to recover his mask, which had remained on the console ever since they had left the Great Hall.

“But then I wouldn’t have seen a master at work,” the Eye replied, wiping the mask’s frosted visor with his sleeve. “You’re every bit as impressive as your heritage suggested you would be, especially now that you’re free from your … affliction.”

Yeah, he was free all right. Ro had made Dis throw what little remained of his stash into a trash compactor back on board the Gaze. His mind was clear for the first time in years, his connection to the Force stronger than ever. There was no way he could have made it through the ice field when he was on reed. He owed Ro so much.

“And to think we had a Force-user in our midst all these years …” Ro continued, checking the filters of his mask. “Scarspike was a fool. I’m glad he’s dead.”

You’re not the only one, Dis thought, but kept the thought to himself as the Spider dropped into Rystan’s thin atmosphere.

“Have you ever been to a tidally locked world?” Ro asked.

Dis shook his head.

“They’re fascinating,” the Eye told him. “One face constantly angled toward the sun, its surface little more than charred desert.”

“While the other’s a frozen wilderness,” Dis said, the blasted terrain not inspiring much confidence. “So where do we land?”

Ro pointed at a band of barely habitable land that ran between the two extremes. “There.”

“Is there a spaceport?”

“Not exactly.”

Ro directed them to a patch of barren ground, clumps of rollweed tumbling across the wasteland.

“Are you sure this is the place?” Dis asked as the landing gear deployed. “There’s nothing here.”

Ro merely smiled as he slipped his mask over his head. “Oh, you’ll be surprised …”

CHAPTER TWO

The Cyclor Shipyards

Not long ago, Padawan Bell Zettifar would have been excited by the sight that stretched out beneath him. He was standing on an observation platform in the largest hangar he had ever experienced, just part of the vast shipyards that orbited Cyclor, a relatively small green-and-brown planet in the Mid Rim. Below, gleaming bright in the hangar’s floodlights, was the vision in polished durasteel known as the Innovator. The starship, now hours from launch, was a technological marvel. Over 300 meters long and bristling with the latest scientific and medical equipment, the Innovator was quite simply the most sophisticated research vessel ever built, a fact its designer—the famed Aqualish engineer Vam Targes—had told Bell himself when he had arrived at the shipyards.

“It runs on a network of no fewer than forty-two intellex-grade droid processors, don’t you know?” Targes had informed him as they strode through the ship’s vast operations center on a whirlwind tour, the engineer’s vocoder whirring excitedly as it translated Vam’s native Aqualish to Basic.

“That’s very … impressive,” Bell had offered, only to be told in no uncertain terms that it was considerably more than that. It was outstanding!

“The entire network is supported by a multi-motion framework of my own design, one that rivals the Jedi Archives on Coruscant, if I do say so myself.”

Bell didn’t know if that was true, but he hadn’t wanted to contradict the engineer. This was Vam’s moment, after all, or rather it would be when the Innovator arrived on Valo in a couple of days. The ship was to be a showpiece at the upcoming Republic Fair, the latest of Chancellor Lina Soh’s Great Works. Soon millions of festival-goers would be marveling at Targes’s achievement, and if they were anything like Bell, they would be dazzled. The Innovator boasted state-of-the-art cybernetic workshops alongside multiple bioengineering labs, analysis stations, research facilities, and a medical library second only to the Docha Institute on Dunnak.

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