Gray Tale, A Star Wars Rebels Story

Secrets of Temple II

The lower levels were different in a way that felt practical, which somehow made them worse.

The corridors widened out, the doorways grew taller, and drainage channels ran along the floor at regular intervals. This part of the temple hadn't been built to impress visitors or intimidate apprentices. It had been built so people could move equipment, bodies, and whatever horrible nonsense Sith alchemists considered a productive workday.

The air smelled wrong.

Thousands of years of damp couldn't fully mask the chemical tang baked into the walls. Old preservatives. Old reagents. The kind of smell that made my sinuses itch and my brain whisper nope on repeat.

Arachnae's photoreceptor swept across the first laboratory space we entered, and she went completely silent.

I understood why.

The murals here weren't history. More like... Sith-themed technical documentation. The kind you'd find in a medical textbook if medical textbooks were written by psychopaths.

Panel after panel showed procedures in clean, careful detail. Creatures were strapped to tables while alchemists stood around them with tools I couldn't identify and absolutely did not want near my organs.

Sithspawn creation, documented with clinical precision.

Exotic beasts had been captured from across the galaxy, surgically altered, and infused with dark side energy until their bodies stopped resembling anything nature had signed off on. Extra limbs. Armored plating. Bioluminescent organs grafted onto bodies never designed to hold them.

Real "we were so preoccupied with whether we could, we didn't stop to think if we should" energy.

Arachnae beeped softly and pointed her manipulator at the next sequence.

Hybridization.

Different species forcibly combined through surgical apparatus I didn't want to understand. Cages were built into the depicted walls, each holding something that was partially one thing and partially another, with enough wrongness in the proportions to make my skin crawl.

I kept walking as the panels continued.

The next sequence was incubation.

Humanoid figures, mostly Twi'leks, humans, and a few others I couldn't immediately identify, were chained to tables while visibly pregnant. Inside them, rendered through some alchemical imaging technique, were shapes that did not belong there. Monstrous silhouettes curled in wombs that were never meant to hold them.

The sequence ended with panels I refused to look at long enough to read.

"Arachnae, don't—"

Too late. She'd already rolled up to the most graphic panel in the sequence and was photographing it with enthusiastic recorder clicks.

BEEP beep beep beep!

"I said record the research documentation for knowledge preservation, not the—who am I kidding. You're recording the freak show, aren't you."

BEEP.

"I knew it."

The laboratory itself was a graveyard of ancient tech. Shattered specimen tanks littered the floor, with the glass degraded to powder and the metal frames warped by corrosion. Surgical tools had turned into rust sculptures on cracked stone counters. Holding cells lined the walls, each one fitted with dead force field generators and doors that had corroded open centuries ago.

Inside those cells were skeletons.

Lots of skeletons.

Some still wore the remains of restraints around their wrists and ankles. Adults, mostly. Humanoid. Probably the "host mothers" from the murals, because apparently the Sith saw a moral event horizon and decided it needed a basement.

Others were smaller.

Way smaller.

Child-sized bones lay scattered in the corners of cells, half-buried in dust and debris. Some looked like they had never made it past infancy.

I stared at one cell where tiny skeletal remains were curled against the wall.

My stomach turned.

Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and add "burn this entire temple to the ground" to my to-do list.

Arachnae beeped quietly beside me.

"Yeah," I muttered. "I see them."

I moved past the cells before I could think too hard about what happened here. My brain didn't need that trauma on top of everything else.

Near what might have been a desk, something caught my attention.

A small device sat half-buried under dust and fragments of broken slate. Holocron-shaped, sort of. The geometry wasn't quite right, but dark side energy radiated from it in a slow, pulsing rhythm.

Jackpot? Or trap.

"Oh hell yes," I muttered. "Please don't be a trapped Dark Lord."

I approached carefully.

Could be useful. Could also be a trap designed to explode my brain.

Fifty-fifty odds, really.

I reached out with the Force, just a light touch, and the holocron flared to life.

A distorted voice crackled from the device.

"—Log entry, day two hundred and fourteen. The seventh generation continues to exceed expectations. By allowing the viable offspring to mate with their humanoid hosts repeatedly, we've achieved a thirty percent increase in cognitive function. Intelligence metrics are improving with each cycle—"

What the fuck.

"—Sophros specimens remain the most promising base stock. Their natural resistance to the Force makes them ideal for crossbreeding programs. We've successfully created hybrids capable of basic tool use and rudimentary communication—"

The voice continued, clinical and detached, describing generational breeding programs like someone discussing crop rotation.

"—maternal mortality remains high, but replacements are easily acquired. The specimens show no attachment to their offspring, which simplifies containment—"

The holocron flickered.

Static washed over the recording, and the voice warped into something unintelligible before the device gave one final pulse and died completely.

A crack split down the center of the casing, and the whole thing crumbled into dust in front of me.

I stared at the pile of ash on the desk.

"Holy Christ, what the fuck?"

Arachnae beeped nervously.

"Yeah, no, I... yeah. That's... that's enough research for today."

Sophros.

The word stuck in my head like a splinter. I'd heard it before. Somewhere. Deep in the filing cabinet of childhood SWTOR memories.

But the connection wouldn't form.

Like remembering a song title from three notes.

Probably some side quest I skipped for the XP grind.

Knowing my luck, it's gonna be important.

Arachnae's photoreceptor shifted toward the far side of the laboratory, where a section of the wall had mostly survived the collapse.

At first I thought it was another procedure mural.

Then her light climbed higher, and I realized this one was different.

The mural covered nearly the entire far wall, though the center had been shattered by falling stone. Most of the main figure was gone, crushed under cracks and missing chunks of masonry. All that remained were the edges of something massive, the suggestion of too-long limbs near the broken sections, and dozens of chains leading inward toward the destroyed center.

Sith alchemists surrounded the missing figure, rendered small by comparison. Some were kneeling. Some had their arms raised. A few looked like they were trying to run, which was not the most reassuring artistic choice.

The chains ran from the shattered center of the mural to pillars carved with binding runes. Dead figures in Jedi robes lay scattered at the base, and thin carved lines ran from their bodies toward the missing creature, like something had been drawn out of them.

Arachnae beeped quietly, her photoreceptor aimed up at it.

"Yeah," I said. "I see it."

The inscriptions around the mural were damaged, but fragments survived.

"Specimen from Soph—"

"Binding protocols—[missing]"

"Failure of—[missing]—containment"

"Do not—[missing]—beneath the—"

The Sophros reference. Again.

I stared at the broken center of the mural, where all those chains led into empty, ruined stone.

Whatever had been important enough to paint there, time had taken most of it.

Or someone had destroyed it on purpose.

"Alright," I said. "Record what you haven't already and let's move. This room is giving me the creeps."

Beep.

"Yeah, I know you like it. That's the concerning part."

___

I started walking back toward the corridor, my mind tossing the options around.

Should I even bother going deeper?

Honestly, the deeper I went, the more this place felt like a dead end. A literal tomb. Everything of actual value had either been looted by the Republic, reclaimed by the Sith, or rotted into useless powder over the last three thousand years.

My grand hope of finding some ancient, fully functional ship sitting in a subterranean hangar was starting to look incredibly naive.

Real life wasn't a video game. There was no pristine, hidden legendary mount waiting for me at the bottom of the dungeon.

If I wanted to get off this rock, my best bet was still the Scythe.

Even with a fried nav-computer, it was still a modern starship. Trying to patch that up made a thousand times more sense than praying some Old Republic relic still had working sublight engines and a fuel tank that hadn't turned into archaeological sludge.

Then there was the calling.

That weird, magnetic pull I'd been feeling in my gut since we crashed had gone quiet.

Completely quiet.

Like someone had flipped a switch and cut the signal. Which made no sense unless Vitiate had been the one fabricating the sensation all along just to lure me down here.

Speaking of the old bastard.

I kept my mental shields locked down, expecting some kind of psychic ambush at any second. My head throbbed from the effort of holding the block in place, but the corridor stayed silent.

No whispering ghosts.

No creepy temperature drop.

No invisible hand trying to peel my skull open.

Did I actually manage to damage him that badly?

I doubted it. You don't survive three thousand years as a cosmic horror parasite by getting permanently put down because a kid scratched your spiritual furniture.

He was probably waiting. Watching. Let the kid wear himself out. Let the swamp do the work.

A cool draft brushed across my face.

I stopped.

The air was damp, and it was moving.

Wind.

Inside an underground ruin.

"No way," I whispered.

Arachnae let out a sharp, questioning beep.

"There's an opening," I said, turning toward the draft. "A real one. Leading outside."

I didn't waste another second.

I scooped Arachnae up under my arm, winced when one of her metal legs scraped my ribs, and started running toward the source of the airflow.

The corridor narrowed quickly, forcing me through a series of collapsed gaps in the masonry. I squeezed sideways through one break, ducked under another, then had to crawl on my stomach through a gap barely wide enough for my shoulders.

Arachnae complained the entire time.

Beep boop BEEP beep beep.

"Quit bitching," I grunted, dragging her behind me by one manipulator arm. "We're almost there."

For once, being trapped in a twelve-year-old's body was actually useful. An adult would have gotten wedged between the stone slabs and died in the stupidest possible way.

The air kept changing as we moved.

Cold. Wet. Charged with ozone and rain.

I scrambled over a pile of loose rubble and stepped into a massive hall.

The space opened around me, wide and circular, with the far walls swallowed by shadow. Rain poured through a huge break in the ceiling, drumming against the stone floor and spreading into a shallow pool across the center of the chamber.

I looked up.

The ceiling had caved in completely above us, leaving a jagged opening to the stormy sky of Dromund Kaas. Heavy rain fell through in sheets, cold and relentless, and for a second I just stood there staring at it.

A way out.

An actual way out.

Then I judged the distance and immediately hated reality again.

The opening was at least thirty meters up. The walls were slick with rain, black moss, and centuries of organic slime. Climbing that without a grappling hook, jetpack, or functioning sense of self-preservation was going to be miserable.

"Alright, so we have a chimney," I muttered, setting Arachnae down. "But no ladder."

Arachnae shook herself off, spraying water from her chassis, then swept her headlamp across the chamber.

The beam passed over a raised stone platform in the center of the hall.

I walked toward it, boots splashing through the rainwater.

Huge iron rings were bolted into the stone. Heavy chains lay shattered across the platform and the surrounding floor, each link thicker than my leg. Rust and mineral deposits had fused some of them to the stone, turning the whole thing into one ugly fossil of bad decisions.

I stared at the chains for a long moment.

Then I looked at the platform.

The ring pattern. The central placement. The way the chains had once spread outward from the middle toward anchoring points around the hall.

"Wait..."

Arachnae beeped quietly beside me.

I turned slowly, looking from one chain to the next.

"Doesn't this look like what we saw earlier?"

Her photoreceptor angled toward the broken chains, then back to me.

"The mural in the lab," I said. "The one with the missing center. All those chains leading inward."

Boop... beep.

"Yeah. That's what I'm thinking."

This wasn't just some random holding area.

This was the actual binding site.

Whatever the Sith had painted in that broken mural had been chained here.

I stepped closer to the platform, keeping Hett's lightsaber raised. The crimson glow slid over the wet stone and caught on deep gouges carved into the floor.

Scratch marks.

Huge ones.

Each groove was wide enough to fit my hand inside, and they ran in long, ragged lines from the center of the platform toward the exits. Some crossed over each other. Some dragged up the base of nearby pillars before fading into darkness.

Whatever made them had spent a long time trying to get loose.

I let out a slow breath and glanced at the broken chains.

"Absolute nightmare of a bio-weapon," I murmured.

If the ancient Sith had gone to the trouble of forging chains this thick, they weren't taking chances. This thing must have been a walking ecological disaster with claws.

"Well, thank the stars I'm thousands of years too late to get introduced," I muttered to Arachnae. "Whatever was in those chains is long gone. Probably died of starvation or rotted into dust before the Republic even had a capital."

Still, the word from the holocron crawled back into my head.

Specimens from Sophros. I looked down at the gouges again.

For some reason, my mind felt unusually curious about this thing. It felt like a itch to be scratched. The psychometric echoes on those marks felt very attractive. 

Normally, touching anything in this temple was a fast track to a mental breakdown, but these were only scratch marks in stone. 

It was a calculated risk.

Which was the fancy way of saying I was about to do something stupid and wanted it to sound tactical.

I knelt beside the nearest gouge, keeping the lightsaber raised so the red glow filled the groove.

"Just a quick peek," I told Arachnae.

She turned her headlamp toward the upper gallery instead of answering, scanning the dark spaces above us.

Very reassuring.

I pulled off my glove and pressed my bare palm against the damp stone.

Carefully, I let my mind slip into the shallow edge of psychometry.

I expected the usual residue. Fear. Anger. Pain. The scrape of claws. The strain of chains. Some distorted impression of whatever had been trapped here.

Instead, I felt nothing.

I frowned and pressed my palm harder against the stone.

There was no trace at all.

Stone held memories well, especially inside a dark side nexus this strong. Even a mundane animal scratching a wall three thousand years ago should have left something behind.

I pulled my hand back.

What the hell...?

The answer came as the temple went silent around me.

The dark side static vanished first.

Everything disappeared at once.

The Force, that constant background ocean I'd spent the last two years learning to navigate, was suddenly gone. I couldn't feel the rain, the stone, the moss, Arachnae, or even the faint hum of life in my own skin.

A cold, wet breath brushed the side of my face.

A low clicking sound vibrated through the damp air, close enough that I felt it against my ear.

I spun, bringing the lightsaber up in a frantic defensive arc.

The crimson blade lit up the thing behind me.

A massive, hairless head hovered inches from my face, purple-grey skin stretched tight over a skull that looked too long to belong to anything sane. Two milky, useless eyes sat deep in its face, and beneath them, the mouth split open around a thick mass of black tendrils.

The tentacles twitched toward me, wet with dark slime that smelled like rotten meat and old copper.

[To Be Continued]

A/N: ehehe, i fell asleep and forgot to update on time....