Once, it was the home to the witches of Dathomir, otherwise known as the Nightsisters. Tucked away in from the rest of the galaxy in an isolated cluster, the Nightsisters were able to draw energy from the planet itself, and pursued a type of ritualistic magic. They ruled over the population of Zabarak—Nightbrothers—and used them as a warrior caste to serve their purposes.

Then, the Clone Wars. The Nightsisters were pulled into the conflict due to the machinations of Mother Talzin and her rival Darth Sidious. This ultimately lead to the eradication of the Dathomirians and their settlements. The desolation was claimed by the Confederacy of Independent Systems after the last Nightsister fell.

Now, the planet known as Dathomir is a haunted skeleton of its former greatness. A perpetual crimson glow coats the planet. The bleak world has become an amalgamation of ruined forest, decrepit swamplands, and withered mountains worn to the sands of time.

In the desolate swamps, faint echoes haunt the graves of the long-dead witches, infusing the green fog that spreads above the damp ground. Dreadful whispers rumoured to be lingering incantations defend the world from intruders. Tall tales and rumors of zombies and ritual sacrifice alluding to grisly flashes of imagery.

The trees, large and misshapen, promise misery to those who touch their tortured bark and open themselves to the memories of the place. Eerie as the voices over the wind, the water beneath the fog appears red and bubbling, as if the land itself were pockmarked in cauldrons of blood to keep the incantations alive.

Creatures unaffected by the purge of the Nightsisters still remain. Snakes, reptiles and insects of varying lethality wander the wasteland. Reports have even said that rancors still roam freely.

This is Dathomir.

Prompt

Dathomir.

It was always a remote planet, full of mysticism and dark magics. Rumors, whispers of witches and heresy had always plagued the place. Such tales always included the inevitable ritual sacrifice. The dead rising from the grave. Man-hating fiends who would revel in torrid parties with their sisters. It was hard to determine which stories were true, and which stories you certainly hoped were false.

None of these stories trouble the Tarenti. The Clan of Life and Death, long some of the darkest practitioners of the Brotherhood, had certainly heard worse. Or had done worse themselves.

The Clan Summit of Tarentum has decreed that, under the cover of all possible secrecy and oaths of silence, no one is to know that the Clan of Death and her Grey Jedi sworn to Life are searching for the lost secrets that might otherwise revive the memory of the Nightsisters, and return the vaunted powers of the Tarenti to Yridia.

This is your mission. Bloodfyre has paired you with another member of your Clan. Enter the swamps with your Clanmate. Work together. There are secrets of power to be revealed, and the Summit needs them to gain an edge in the battles that Tarentum faces ahead.

Find the Orb of Daka, a Nightsister relic that may reopen the powers of Necromancy to Tarentum. Make your Clan proud.

Round 1

Members paired will enter the swamps and be met by guardian beasts, twisted versions of the natural denizens of Dathomir. These nightmarish beasts were warped by the power of the Nightsisters to guard their matriarchy. The beasts will stop at nothing to block your path and rend limbs from bodies in order to protect the secret tombs of the witches. You must succeed at all costs.

Round 2

Green mists fill the air as you tread deeper into the nightmarish swamps of Dathomir. The beasts have fallen back to lick their wounds, repulsed by your powers. Perhaps your former companion has fallen, or simply retreated to treat their own injuries from combat. A new companion arrives as the green mists sink lower to the ground, and the dead begin to rise. The fallen corpses of Nightsister and Nightbrother warriors have now risen to stop you. Press on and cull these forgotten fighters. Don't be held back from your ultimate goal of a Nightsister fortress!

Finals

At last! A cave awaits. As you stalk deeper, purplish flames erupt from ancient sconces. The realm of a Nightsister coven opens before you, leading to a great chamber. Purple flames spout from all around the exterior, revealing a wispy figure -- a witch! The ghost is attended by a great rancor, twisted according to the demonic desires of the ancient witch. The beast has horns, claws and tusks like no other creature you've laid eyes on. Her mocking laughter erupts and fills the cavern as she commands her beast to attack. Defend yourselves! Stop this witch and find the Orb of Daka!

Scion Tarentae was fuming. Not only did the beast have the gall to attack him so openly, it did so while he was taking a swig from the old hip flask. Plus it looked like nothing he had ever seen (although an old campaign on the fringes of the Yridia system came to his mind). He had his blaster at the ready and was shooting away at the rancor. It was a gigantic beast, the size of the cavernous opening itself. Parts of its head had withered away, revealing rotting flesh underneath, which singed and cauterized on contact with the blaster slugs. Most of its scales were of a motley hue, as if someone had decided to sew together the skin using whatever resources were at hand. It was unpleasant to look at. And its misty breath could be considered a beast on its own accord.

Scion found that it was unpleasant to fight as well. Not in the “oh wow here’s yet another beast inside an underground dungeon” manner, but in the whole environment that had been made to fight in. The purple flames silhouetted everything and created shadows that danced and created illusions of an audience that had come down to watch the fight. The witch had been singing in a throaty and croak-laden voice that seemed to hit unnatural highs and deep lows, as if channeling the essence of hatred and twisted magick into the beast. He was making barely a dent on the rancor’s armour, as it shrugged off every blaster bolt on its body. Scion himself was water, avoiding every attack thrown at him with all the grace that his old body could muster. He had a feeling that the witch partially tapped into the Force when she was singing a new verse, and if he had enough time to disrupt this ritual, he would perhaps have a fighting chance.

‘If only someone would keep this - whoop - bloody rancor - duck - away from me’

As if to answer his request, a voice rang out from the entrance to the cavern, “Not this Krathing thing again”. Scion saw the far more unpleasant face of Kazarelth, and grinned. Fodder for the rancor.

“No, you know what, screw this, I’m going back,” he said, and turned around to the entrance of the cave complex. In reply, a section of the tunnel collapsed in front of him, with the howling laughter of a few hundred witches echoing throughout the cave. The rancor also howled, although it was difficult to say whether it was in response to this event, or a general howl that it used to express a variety of violent thoughts.

It was now Kazarelth’s turn to fume. He jumped over the flames encircling the makeshift arena, and headed straight for the witch. Noticing this, the wispy ghost cackled and vanished from her spot, leaving behind an eerie silence punctuated by the growls and swipes of the rancor.

“Took you some - oof! - time,” Scion said, shooting two more blaster bolts at the rancor while evading a handful of claw.

“I took the scenic route,” Kaz responded, “and these things are a pain to kill. Kah showed me how.”

The rancor, bereft of a guiding song, was agitated. Scion saw that it did not have any eyes to speak of, and was now madly attacking and swiping in all directions. This would have been an advantage, except that the beast was so large that even its guesswork attacks had a wide enough arc to be dangerous. As they figured out a plan of attack, the witch materialized on one of the alcoves above the cavern, and started singing her song of hatred. Scion immediately shot at her, knowing that it would be easy for a Force user to deflect bolts coming from a distance. And she did. The bolts harmlessly avoided her and crashed into the rocks near her. This experiment gave him enough data to conceive a plan.

“You do? Excellent,” Scion said, “I hereby give you the honour of killing this one too.”

“Krath damn it!”

He shot at the beast a couple of times before Kaz took over, slashing at the beast’s hands with his lightsaber. It did not do much, armoured as it was, but it got its attention.

The Tarentae then impelled the Force to push himself away from the ground. As he coursed through the air, he aimed for the witch in the alcove, lining up a precise blaster shot. As it left the barrel, he extinguished the flames of the Force around the witch, and saw her visibly strain to keep up the song and her control over the beast. He smiled, but it was shortlived. The blaster bolt was sucked into a force field around her, a sphere on which the bolt slid over and then was deflected without any apparent effort on the witch’s part. As he plummeted to the ground, he saw Kazarelth repeat the same feat that he did. Only, he was taking off from the shoulder of the rancor. The Chiss raised his lightsaber and careened into the rock-face where the witch was, but as he brought it down, she disappeared into wispy smoke.

As he landed, less gracefully than the Tarentae, Kazarelth had a suggestion which Scion anticipated and did not like.

“I think she is scared of lightsabers, Scion. You have two of them, no?”

Scion groaned as he holstered his pistol and unsheathed his lightsabers. A deafening howl from the rancor prevented him from igniting them. He saw Kazarelth being lifted bodily by the howl and thrown behind him, as if it was a physical explosion.

He saw the witch descend on top of the rancor, with silvery-green reins that shimmered and attached themselves to the rancor’s mouth. She was actually riding the beast.

Scion ignited his lightsabers, just as he heard a groan from behind him and a quick “I’m alright!” as Kaz got to his feet and ignited his own lightsaber. The battle was on.

The rancor, unhindered now by its blindness, transformed from a haphazard menace into a precision instrument of death. Like a gas it seemed to expand to fill all the available space in the cavern, and it was all Scion and Kazarelth could do to stay away from all its sharp, stabby bits as they sweeped, slashed and pierced at them. The witch’s song intensified, Scion imagined, as she envisioned the two Tarenti crunching between her monster’s knifelike teeth.

One advantage of the rancor being such a voluminous opponent was that it was nearly impossible to miss. In between mad dodges, both Scion and Kazarelth were both inflicting massive gashes across the beast’s flesh that should have been causing it incredible anguish. Any other creature would by now have been slowing down, pulling back, or making some attempt to defend itself but this abomination was doing nothing of the sort. Mottled flesh sloughed off in chunks with each swing of the lightsaber, exposing blackened, twisted bone underneath. Where arterial blood should have sprayed out in fountains there was nothing but black bile and pus dribbling out. Where muscle and connective tissue should have been hewn to dramatic and crippling effect, the beast showed no sign of slowness or even of being injured at all. It was as if none of the beast’s corporeal form mattered at all: the immense body was nothing more than a marionette driven by the the witch’s cacophonous song, and an ebon torrent of the Dark Side of the Force.

Scion tore a huge gash in the rancor’s side that bulged open and vomited forth gallons of thick black fluid. As the opening passed near him a second time, the Tarentae thought he saw a hollow space inside. He leapt directly at it, shoulder first, and plunged through to the inside of the rancor. Within the gargantuan cavern of a ribcage where one would expect to find a heart, lungs, liver and the other organs typically enjoyed by a living creature there was nothing but the black fluid sloshing from side to side as the rancor moved. It stank of decay, and where it seeped through Scion’s clothes and boots it stung his skin. The old soldier’s eyes quickly began to burn from the fumes. The smell was so foul he could taste it.

A light shimmered in the air at the center of the space. It resembled a body, glowing in yellows and greens but haloed with an aura that seemed to be nothing less than the pure absence of light. It reminded Scion of an event horizon. The aura’s pure nothing pulsated, edges like flames dancing. They began to reach out for him. Fingers of blackness, of empty seeking out to engulf anything living and extinguish it.

Instinctively, the Tarentae held his lightsabers in a defensive posture in front of him. The black flames licked at them and they trembled. Sparks leapt off them and the blades wavered, seeming to be pulled into the blackness.

The Tarentae tried his best to focus, but it was difficult. The Dark Side seethed all around him, coursing through the pulsating nexus in incredible quantities. Not since he had seen Masters Bloodfyre and Caerick pull the VSD Corsair from its orbit on Koros had he seen the Force flow in such amounts. He centered his mind on the energy flows, envisioning the warp on a loom. Gingerly, he plucked one strand after another and severed it. As each thread broke, more of the flame concentrated on him. His crimson lightsabers churned and boiled, becoming more and more unstable with each lick of the flame. Sparks flew into the air in every direction, only to be sucked into the emptiness and disappear. Around him, the decaying body of the rancor finally began to slow. The movements were becoming slower and less coordinated. A section of rib collapsed, and the flesh it had been supporting sucked inward toward the licking black flames. Scion kept his focus, cutting strand after strand of the witch’s power.

The rancor began to churn and howl - as if a concentrated shot of pain had been injected into its body. This was not too far from the truth as Scion was summarily ejected from the rib cage of the beast, with a resounding thunk. The beast wavered as Kazarelth stopped to process the whole absurd scene. He could see the swirling threads of the Force with greater clarity now that there were a mere handful of them on the verge of snapping. The witch’s singing had developed a veneer of desperation, as if she herself was teetering on the edge of oblivion. She held on to the deranged beast as it went through the final motions of un-life. The purple flames around the cave-hall flickered and died as the witch lost control over both her magick and the rancor. It continued its post-facto howl of pain, while Kazarelth kept an eye on the unmoving body of Scion. He picked up signs of life from the fallen Battlemaster, and felt the Force sewing together much of his ravaged body. He wanted Scion back in the battle; there was not much he could do if the beast came crashing down on them.

And then, on cue, the beast collapsed.

The lurch and the fall thundered across the cave system. It narrowly missed the Tarentae’s body and Kazarelth nimbly avoid it (being conscious was an advantage in situations like these). At first the only consequence of the event was the mild shower of loose rocks and stalactites that added to the bruises from the fight. But then the rumble of the crash intensified, reflected and resonated from the deepest corners of the caverns. The makeshift arena was on the verge of collapse, and across it there were several exit points, visible now as there were no purple flames to hide them. The witch had disappeared once again but the Krath could see traces of her emanating from one of the exits. The rumbling intensified and in a split second the Chiss used as much of strength that he could muster with the aid of the Force and dragged the Battlemaster towards the exit point the witch had used. Using the last dregs of his strength he bodily picked up and threw Scion over the opening’s threshold.

And then the cave collapsed. A massive boulder narrowly missed Scion’s hands and crashed as a permanent blockage to the tunnel - with Scion and Kazarelth on either side of it. The Chiss saw more such boulders placed over the tunnels just for such an event. He ran and jumped to another tunnel just as its permanent door closed behind him, unsure of what the journey would be ahead.

Scion came to in another minute, unsure of the ringing in his head, the soft, singed skin of his fingers or the various minute bruises that he seemed to have picked a rash of. The darkness of the tunnel enveloped him like a lost lover. He reached out first for his blaster which was absent. A curse followed from his lips as he reached next, on instinct, for his hip-flask, which was mercifully present. He took a swig of it, and realized that the rancor had made him spill much of the alcohol before he could enjoy it. Another hiss of a curse followed before he unholstered one of his crimson lightsabers. The ignition rang out across the tunnel system, serving as the sole stringed instrument to the drum circle that was the rancor’s erstwhile home. In the rumbling dusty darkness the Tarentae saw a pair of eyes ahead, reflecting the dim glow of his crimson ‘saber.

“Kazarelth?” He called out. He heard a lowing followed by a deep throated growl.

“I guess not…” Scion said before igniting his second lightsaber.

The second lightsaber sputtered and sparked when it ignited, its blade wavering and inconsistent. Scion frowned at it for a moment before shutting it off and putting it away. He'd have to mend it after this disaster was over.

"This just gets better and better," he murmured to himself.

Navigating by the muted red glow of his weapon and the aid of the Force, the Tarentae gingerly began making his way down the tunnel. The growls emanating from below beckoned; their siren song lured him toward an inevitable end.

Kazarelth stood staring at the fallen rocks for a moment before cracking a relieved smile. He brushed his hands together - the universal sign of finishing a job well done - and turned toward the entrance. He jogged through the massive stone archway, down the seemingly interminable staircase, and through a great hall or two. He retraced his steps though a number of passages until finally coming to the outermost cave entrance. He stopped for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the dim red light of Dathomir's daylight. He took in the view of the putrid swamps, the unsettling green mists, and the miles and miles yet to travel to get back to Tarentum's base camp. Drawing a deep breath, he stepped across the threshold.

WHUMPH

The ground around the Chiss leapt up into the air, and suddenly he was falling. Everything went dark, but the thundering growls he heard were unmistakable. The rancor was very nearby. By the sound of it, Scion was still fighting it. Kazarelth rubbed his eyes instinctively, but just ended up mashing loose dirt into them. He drew his lightsaber and tried to settle his mind, while blinking furiously to try to regain his vision.

A massive set of claws raked across Kazarelth’s torso, sending him sprawling to the ground. In response he unleashed a storm of lightning in the general direction of the arm, hoping the rancor would be as difficult to miss as it had been earlier. He was rewarded with a guttural howl and the smell of burned flesh. To add to his good fortune, his vision was becoming clear again.

The cave was wide, with a relatively low ceiling. The rancor could not rise to his full height, and Kazarelth immediately pieced together what had happened. Something had made the beast try to stand, and he had punctured a hole all the way up to the surface, where Kazarelth had been standing.

“Where is it?” roared Scion. “Where is the Orb of Daka, witch?”

The Chiss peered through the darkness, and he could make out figures at the far end of the cave. The one with the lightsaber must be Scion, he thought. He began to make his way around the perimeter as quietly as he could. There was no reply from the witch, just more of the atonal song that seemed to be the power animating the rancor’s disintegrating corpse. The aging Battlelord had her backed up to the cave wall, his lightsaber to her throat, and was shouting curses at her with all the might and fury of a practiced drill sergeant. The massive beast raised its arm in a last ditch effort to swat down both the pair.

Powering through the pain from the substantial rancor claw wounds across his chest, Kazarelth broke into a sprint as the arm began to descend. He leapt high into the air, saber raised, and hacked the arm off at the shoulder. It nearly crushed Scion and the witch anyway, missing the two by mere inches. The witch’s song stopped suddenly; her eyes wide with pain.

“What the frak?” bellowed Scion, obviously in some kind of a mood.

“You’re welcome,” Kazarelth replied sarcastically.

He approached the witch, leaning in close to her and reaching into her mind with his own. Her mind was strange to him. It was twists and turns just like the passageways deep within the cave systems. It was hardened. Her brain was a fortress. She had been trained for this. But so had Kazarelth.

The Chiss felt along the seams and into the cracks. He explored the dead ends and forks, searching for fears and memories. Her life had been mostly rituals and training. Study of the ways of the Force and Dathomiri magicks. Knowledge of the local flora and fauna, of history and lore. Attachment to her sisters and their way of life. That’s it. Kazarelth flooded her mind with images of the caves empty. Nightsister bodies rotted in piles at the entrances while Tarenti hauled their treasures out onto waiting transports. The witch’s screams brought a smile to his face.

It was only a matter of time before he had the information he needed. She broke down under the constant barrage of images, weeping and screaming at the realization that she had failed to defend her home from the two intruders. Kazarelth spoke softly to her in between sobs.

“Tell us where to find the Orb of Daka, and this will all be over,” he said.

She told them where it was. Finally.

Kazarelth nodded to Scion, and the witch’s disembodied head dropped to the floor. The two men stood up, brushed themselves off, and descended deeper into the cave system to retrieve their prize.