November, 4008 ABY
It had been five years since I arrived in Dathomir.
I was seventeen when I met her, the one who saved my life.
A Lesser Nydak had torn through my shoulder and nearly crushed my ribs. I remember the sound of its roar, the burning in my lungs as I screamed, the bite of its claws
And then, silence.
Followed by her voice.
"You scream like prey," she said.
I looked up. She stood over me like a shadow wrapped in robes of black and red, with pale skin tattooed in jagged spirals. In one hand, she held a curved blade slick with the beast's blood. In the other, green fire danced between her fingers, humming with a power I didn't understand.
"Who… are you?" I gasped, struggling to catch my breath.
She lowered her voice to a whisper, cold and steady. "Alive. And if you want to stay that way, you'll come with me."
Her name was Kaelrah.
She was a Nightsister. And though she claimed no rank among them, the others whispered when she passed, as if she was something older, something sacred.
Their fortress was carved into the side of a cliff, an open wound in the stone, ancient and alive. The air always smelled like ash and bone. The walls bled red when it rained. And in the distance, the Dathomir forests howled like they were mourning something.
I lived among them for a year's.
They did not trust me.
I did not trust them.
But Kaelrah… Kaelrah saw something in me, something I never saw before.
She trained me,
day after day,
Every lesson introduces a new type of Pain.
She taught me how to fight, not with a lightsaber, but with the tools of the dead, bone knives, whips laced with poison, claws of stone. I learned how to move without making a sound. How to disappear into the wind. How to listen to the dark. I learned the old chants, the songs that bled magic from the soil.
At night, I'd lie awake, bones bruised, muscles torn, skin burning from spells gone wrong. And Kaelrah would sit beside me in silence.
"You are not Jedi," she once said, her voice soft but sharp. "You are not Sith. You are something else. Something forgotten. That is why you were brought here."
She taught me to read the bones.
She taught me how to understand the darkness .
She never smiled. But she never turned away, either.
As months drove by, the other Nightsisters grew to accept me. Not as a brother, but as a creature forged in their own fire. We hunted together. We bled together. And when the stars screamed at night, we listened as one.
I began to feel something I hadn't felt since Tatooine.
Not peace.
But purpose.