Taking a long, deep drag on his spice cigar, Cade Urbin stared up at the fuel dripping off the port side hull of his Ghtroc freighter the Tell. He studied the leaking unit intently, chewing on the spent cigar as if staring at the damaged shield housing long enough might be enough to miraculously repair the ruptured lining inside it. The despondent smuggler closed his eyes and with a deep breath sternly willed himself to wake up from this nightmare.

He was grounded with a crippled ship, somewhere on the edge of wild space on a barren rock known only as Abiss 72. When reality would not fade, he took a swig of Jawa beer from the dark bottle in his hand and gagged on the viscous brew. It tasted like axel grease, thick and metallic; so, he spit it out, but not before a trickle of the noxious booze escaped through his flared nostrils.

"Damn you, Squig!" he swore, stomach lurching.

Blinking back tears, Cade snatched the lit cigar from the corner of his mouth and snuffed it out against his glove, fearful that he might inadvertently blow himself and his ship into a fiery oblivion. The last thing he needed was an unintentional spark as a catalyst. He flicked the butt well out of range and then tossed the bottle of Jawa beer into the rocks behind it.

"Never trust a Jawa mechanic to just make a simple repair." Hands on his hips, the smuggler glared at the shield housing and shook his head. A bit of bantha poodu and a splash of Jawa beer was not going to fix the problematic fuel line this time. "Meddling vermin!"

Removing the armored unit from the hull in order to access the fuel line meant at least three hours of work, so he quickly retreated up the ramp into the freighter. Cade shrugged out of his black flight jacket, hanging it over a control panel just inside the corridor door before making his way into a narrow side passage to retrieve his tools.

He pulled up short, confused, when he stepped into the modest living room of a small house and not the cluttered disorder of his maintenance closet. Cautiously thumbing the restraint from his heavy blaster, he scanned the dimly lit interior. Furniture was overturned and in disarray. Evident signs of a recent struggle.

"Papa?" A wide-eyed toddler stared up at him from the arms of a kneeling woman dressed in a simple gray smock. A wayward crown of golden-brown dreadlocks covered his small head. "Papa, can we play now?"

"Maitias, please," the child's mother pleaded. Trembling visibly, she wrapped the boy in her slender arms and stared at the hooded figure standing over them. "I had to tell them what you did. What you were planning."

Cade felt gutted by a moment of guilt that was not his to claim. It was a fleeting sensation—soon lost, crushed beneath the weight of her betrayal. Igniting the lightsaber, the robed figure swiftly brought it down onto their heads in a single, fell stroke. The sinister droning of the blade reverberated against the low ceiling like a swarm of indignant hornets, as the lightsaber cast its crimson hue across the toddler's frozen face and dead eyes. Briefly captured on the polished hilt, Cade saw the twisted face beneath the hood, red eyes ringed with tears and madness.

Swearing the worst of Corellian oaths, the smuggler threw himself backwards into the brightly lit corridor of his ship. He hit the curved wall and slid down to the floor in shock. On hands and knees, he cautiously crawled across the deck and peeked inside, sweeping his gaze first left and then right to surveil the inside of the maintenance closet. All he saw were spare parts, empty shipping crates, and tools scattered across the floor.

"What the hell was that?" he gasped, sweating and panting in the threshold of the door. With one hand grasping his chest in terror and the other gripping his blaster, Cade cautiously stepped back into the equipment room without incident. "No more spice cigars for you," he whispered to himself. Removing a ladder and packing up the necessary tools for the job, the smuggler hurried back outside to begin removing the shield housing.

# # #

With little more than a thin atmosphere to shield it from an unrelenting sun, Abiss 72 was a victim to untold millennia of searing blasts of heat. The torrid conditions created a hostile environment where life could not flourish on the barren, craggy surface or even beneath it due to the stifling temperatures generated on the planet, even in the shade.

Cade had been fortunate to land in a narrow grotto through a series of canyon walls in the early dawn before the planet's scorching star took center stage. Shirt thoroughly soaked with sweat, he pushed his blast goggles over his brow and wiped his face on his sleeves. After three hours of banging, hammering, and swearing in the sweltering heat, the shield unit was nearly free.

In a final assault with a metal wedge and a hammer, the hull section shifted, and Cade gave it an overeager yank. Not expecting it to come away so easily, his strength sent the housing and him flying backwards off the ladder. Before he could hit the hard ground beneath his ship, the dazed smuggler felt himself being raised up and carried aloft by a crowd of rough, pinching hands.

Giving the goggles a toss, Cade blinked back tears and strained to see into the starless, pitch black night skies above him. It was damp and cold. His breath rose in coils over his face. His arms were outstretched, tightly tied to a steel beam by the wrists. Lying on a thick girder, he grit his teeth as the uneven steel slivers cut into the skin of his back. His feet were also securely tied against the beam by the ankles, and he was being carried through the street as rocks pelted him in the face.

"Burn him! Murderer!" an angry mob shouted in earnest. "Child killer! Traitor! Ke'dem!"

Ke'dem?

It was a Socorran word, a familiar term used among superstitious smugglers of the old guard who spoke of such inane things as ghosts or revenants. In Old Corellian the word meant condemned, but its usage was archaic, a relic from a forgotten age.

Cade struggled to clear the fog from his head. If he could just concentrate, for only a moment, he would wipe out the entire mob, crushing their windpipes or skulls, and escape. Their combined rage at his misdeeds was great, but insignificant to his own dark fury. Before he could summon the darkness to aid him, he was struck in the head from behind and rendered him unconscious. The very darkness he sought to harness—swallowed him.

When Cade finally came to again, he was blinded. Though unable to see, he could hear the murderous mob and the ravenous crackle of flames—a conflagration that devoured him, scorching and blistering his skin as the villagers burned him alive at the stake. He tried to scream, but his mouth, like his eyes, had been wired shut.

Writhing in terror, Cade fought to free himself, but to no avail. As the intensity of the flames consumed what sanity he had left, he found himself in a terrifying free fall through shadows. In a reversal of physics, arms and legs flailing wildly in the air, he was suddenly weightless and falling into darkness—falling into a damp sack that smelled of animal urine and manure, ash and scorched earth.

The sack enveloping what remained of his body was then dumped unceremoniously into a deep, rocky hole on a distant, barren world along with his scorched lightsaber that would not be burned in the fire. Someone muttered words, superstitious words, half in Basic and the rest in Old Corellian as they hastily refilled the hole and departed, leaving the grave unmarked. Though Maitias was gone, burned to ash for his crimes, his unadulterated rage had not abated. Not even in death.

Cade cried out in pain as he hit the ground, landing face first on the stony soil. Though winded, he rolled to his side and snatched the heavy blaster from its holster. "Who the hell is there?" He crawled toward the Tell, sweeping the gun from left to right and back again across his field of vision, but there were no viable targets. He was alone.

Barely able to hold the blaster in his shaking hand, Cade shoved it back into its holster and stared at his wrists. Raised, uneven welts crisscrossed the raw skin from where he had been tightly bound. The backs of his hands and palms were discolored and blistered, his fingertips blackened and scorched.

Through horrified eyes, Cade followed a single set of footprints moving away from him toward his ship. They were not his foot prints. The stride was too long. Too deliberate. Too confident.

"Time to get off this rock!"

Shield housing or no shield housing, he knew when it was time to fold. The emergency plan was to vent what fuel was left to avoid an explosion on lift off and then shunt the line, using what reserves he had to make low orbit. Once in space he could send a distress call and hope for the best. It was better than the alternative, which meant remaining planetside with whatever malevolent force inhabited the dead world of Abiss 72.

As Cade stood up, he felt a tremor beneath him. The stony ground liquified a meter beyond him, bubbling over with sand and stonedust and finally a dilapidated, burlap sack that reeked of urine and manure. Black ash and burnt earth spilled out through rotted holes in the tattered cloth along with a scorched, cylindrical object. Cade recognized the lightsaber and slowly backed away.

"Pick it up."

On his peripheral vision, Cade saw a hooded, black figure lurking by the ramp of his ship. He wanted nothing more than to turn his head and confirm it, but he could not move. A powerful weight pressed him back down to his hands and knees, forcing him to reach for the lightsaber. He grit his teeth and fought the urge by balling his hand into a quivering fist.

"Pick it up," the revenant commanded. "There is unfinished business."

Cade cried out in agony, nerves on fire, muscles seizing with spasms. As he retrieved the weapon, he was transported to a nightmare landscape: a small village of quaint cottages illuminated in the crimson glow of the lightsaber; frightened faces, awakened in their beds, cut down one by one—men, women, children; innocents consumed in a visceral rage unlike any he had ever known. With no warning, it would be a slaughter.

Cade Urbin was a lot of things; being a hero was not among them, but he was certainly no murderer. Dropping the lightsaber and rebuking its master, he snatched the heavy blaster from its holster, took aim at the leaking fuel line, and fired.

Ignited by the blaster bolt, the fuel sparked, immediately sending destructive energy through the ruptured line into the freighter's engines. The resulting explosion caused a fiery blast that initially drew all the surrounding air into the grotto and then swiftly unloaded it in a concussive wave of overpressure that brought the entire canyon wall down, burying the Tell and her pilot beneath layer upon layer of shattered rock and surface debris.

As the last stone shifted, a few thin, black tendrils of smoke rose from the rubble as the only evidence of any recent disturbance. A slight wind stirred across the canyon floor, dissolving the smoke and leaving no delineating mark of the unhallowed ground beneath it.