and she'd have to continue the Sith Order on her own. Kill Caleb, find an apprentice… probably kill Darovit, too. If she agreed, she had to betray her Master to the Jedi, which would mark the end of the Sith and the first step in her long road of redemption and atonement.
'Bane's time is running out,' her cousin prodded. 'You have to decide.'
The two paths loomed large before her: alone into the darkness, or into the light with Darovit at her side. She spun the problem over and over in her mind until, finally, the answer came to her.
'Tell Caleb I agree to his demands.'
Bane opened his eyes slowly; his lids felt heavy, weighed down as if they were lined with metal filings. He could feel them brushing over his pupils, rubbing like sandpaper as he blinked against the harsh light streaming down on him. The brightness made him squint again as he tried to sit up.
His body refused to move. Legs, arms, and torso ignored the impulses from his brain to rise. Even his head couldn't budge. There was sensation in his extremities: He could tell he was lying on his back, and he could feel the rough grain of a burlap sheet or a coarsely woven cloth against his skin. But he was paralyzed, unable to move.
He let his eyes flicker open once more, and the brightness began to fade as his pupils gradually contracted. He was staring up at a low, sloping ceiling of simple wooden planks. A ray of sunlight beamed through a narrow crack in the wood, shining directly on his face.
Groaning he managed to turn his head to the side so the light no longer hit his eyes. The change of angle also gave him a better view of the room he was in: small, plain, and strangely familiar. Before he could match the setting to any of his memories, a figure stepped into his line of sight.
From the fact that he was staring directly into a pair of worn leather boots, Bane deduced that he was lying on the floor. The figure stood over him for a moment, then crouched down to look him in the eye.
The face-ten years older, but unmistakable-jogged the Dark Lord's memory. He had lain on this very floor over a decade earlier on the border between life and death, even as he lay now.
Caleb, he tried to say, but the only sound that came out was a soft groan. Like the rest of his body, his lips, tongue, and jaw refused to move. Bane tried to call upon the power of the dark side to grant him strength, but his will was as weak and helpless as the rest of him.
'He's awake,' Caleb called out loudly, never taking his eyes off his patient.
From outside Bane heard the sound of approaching footsteps. He tried to speak again, pouring all his strength into a single word.
'Caleb.'
His voice was a faint whisper, but this time the word was clear. The healer didn't bother to respond. Instead he stood up, leaving Bane staring at his boots once more. Bane heard the dull thud of running footsteps on the sand outside change to the sharp clack of boot heels on the shack's wooden floor.
'Let me see him!'
He recognized the voice of his apprentice, and his mind slowly began to reassemble the pieces of what had happened. He remembered the battle with the Jedi on Tython; he remembered unleashing a storm of Force lightning at the last of his foes. He remembered the kriffing shield the Ithorian Master had thrown up around him. After that, all his memories were of unbearable pain.
Somehow the Jedi's barrier had trapped Bane inside the center of the dark side storm. The electricity had enveloped him, millions of volts arcing through his body, cooking his flesh from the inside and throwing his muscles into an endless series of violent seizures that threatened to rip his body apart.
The energy had coursed through the orbalisks embedded in his skin, too. The creatures absorbed the power, hungrily devouring it until they became so engorged that the soft, pliant flesh of their underbellies had began to swell. Squeezed ever tighter against the unyielding chitin of their own exterior shells, they'd begun to burrow deeper into Bane. He remembered screaming as thousands of tiny teeth started sawing away at subcutaneous tissue, chewing through muscles, tendons, and even bone.
But burrowing deeper hadn't stopped the creatures from feasting on the electricity coursing through Bane's frying innards. They'd continued to expand until they had begun to pop, rupturing like overfilled balloons pinched beneath the hard shells.
Bane had stayed conscious through the torture of the electricity cooking him alive and the agony of the teeth burrowing into his flesh. But the indescribable pain from the chemicals released by the exploding orbalisks dissolving his body on a cellular level finally caused him to black out… only to wake up here.
A pair of boots stepped in beside Caleb's: the smaller feet of a woman, most likely Zannah.
'He's trying to speak,' Caleb said from up above Bane's line of sight.
He tried to tilt his head again, this time managing to look up toward the pair standing over him. Zannah noticed and crouched down to raise his head and shoulders. She slid a makeshift pillow formed by her balled-up cloak underneath his neck to support him. He felt her long, thin fingers on his back as she did so.
The contact brought a realization crashing down on Bane-the orbalisks were gone! That was why he had felt the coarse blankets against his bare skin. That was why he could feel Zannah's fingers pressing against his flesh.
'Orbalisks?' he managed to gasp.
'We had to remove them' his apprentice informed him. 'They were killing you.'
Bane felt the world going dim again, his body exhausted by the two words he had spoken. As he lost consciousness, he felt a pang of regret for what he had lost.
To Zannah's untrained eye, her Master looked much stronger when he opened his eyes again two days later. This time he was able to turn his head slowly from side to side, taking in the surroundings of Caleb's home and the nearby presence of his apprentice.
'What happened?' he asked.
The words were faint, his voice still raw and ragged.
'Caleb healed you,' she told him, adjusting the pillow she had taken from the Loranda and placed under his head and shoulders to prop him up. 'He saved your life.'
Four days ago such a statement would have been hard to imagine. Caleb had watched Zannah program the message drone and send it off to the Jedi, then warned her there was a strong chance Bane wouldn't survive the treatment.
She'd thought at first it might be a ploy, an excuse Caleb was giving to cover up his actions if he decided to let her Master die… or simply killed him. So she'd kept a close eye on the healer during Bane's treatment. Even though she knew there were a hundred ways he could end Bane's life without her having any clue as to what he was doing, Zannah hoped her presence might dissuade him from trying anything underhanded.
Now she realized how pointless her vigil had been. Caleb was a man of his word; he was burdened and bound by foolish notions like honor. He had promised to help Bane as long as she alerted the Jedi, and since she had held up her end of the bargain, he had made every effort to do the same.
Zannah had originally suggested moving Bane back to the Lo-randa's medical bay for the treatments, but Caleb had refused. He'd claimed the powerful energies coursing through the land around his camp gave strength to his medicine. Darovit had agreed, and Zannah, having felt the power of the place herself, had relented.
The healer had started by forcing a foul-smelling liquid he had concocted in his cooking pot down Bane's throat to counter the effects of the orbalisk toxins. Darovit had warned her that the poison was killing Bane, eating away at his body. But it was only when they began to peel away the orbalisks, beginning with the charred shells of those that had died, that Zannah understood the full scope of how badly her Master had suffered.
What lay beneath could no longer be called skin; it couldn't even be properly called flesh. A pulpy mass of green and black ichors released by the parasitic organisms mixed with oozing white pus and bloody red tissue from Bane's own body. Looking at the damage it was obvious, even to someone like Zannah, with no medical expertise, that the only thing keeping Bane alive was his power in the Force. His wounds gave off the gangrenous odor of spoiled meat,
