In the distant past, the Catacombs of Cadera were a series of ancient structures located beneath the surface of the sacred moon of Jedha. Hidden within was a monastery, serving as a burial ground for an Order of NiJedha Monks. In the wake of tbe Death Star's attack, however, the moon's surface was sundered, all but annihilating the Catacombs and the monastery hidden within.

You have fallen into darkness. Deep below Jedha's devastated surface, you find yourself lost within the remnants of the Catacombs—only ruins now remain. As your eyes adjust, you realize only a few shafts of hazy, pale green light are all you have to see by. Every step, every breath you take echoes off of the cavern-like walls. You run a hand over a hand over one of the pillars adorning the ruins and feel the carved stone flake at your touch. That they still hold the ceiling in place above your head is a miracle.

You must tread cautiously. Taking careful steps forward, you feel the sickening crunch of skeletal remains beneath your feet. The hollow sound of shattering bones rings throughout the catacombs. Announcing your presence to whoever or whatever may reside here. The air is fetid and clouded with dust you stir up with every movement.

As you wander you realize these ruins are labyrinthine—a tangled maze of broken and collapsed tunnels crisscrossing haphazardly leading to who knows where. Each path you take is fraught with hazards or dead ends. From deep within the darkness, you begin to hear whispers—a constant buzzing in the back of your mind that quickly puts you on edge. The spirits of the dead slumber restlessly here. You must escape this place, but, before you can begin to search for an exit, you hear footsteps methodically moving toward you.

Tread lightly in the Ruins of Cadera... for you are not alone.

This was not part of the test. The air around him was thick with dust, and the rumbling hiss of soil and rocks sliding into place. Shanree covered his face, coughing through the choking dust as he examined his surroundings. Lacking eyes, he had no need to shield them, and the dark of the space around him made no difference. A Miralukan, the aging Colonel saw with the aid of the Force and here the Force showed him that his situation was as bad as it could be.

“Lottson,” He coughed again, “Lottson, can you hear me? Say something!”

From behind him some debris shifted. He turned to see a small woman emerging half-alive from a pile of some of the gravel and dirt that had collapsed in upon them. In a heartbeat, he moved to her and caught her as she fell forward. Zuza spent a long few seconds clearing her lungs with heaving coughs. She hacked up dusty phlegm and spat it out to the side.

“I’m fine, I think I can stand now” She pushed off of his arms that had been supporting her and climbed to her feet, “What the hell happened?”

“We don’t have time to figure that out, this whole place could fall-in on us at any moment. Come on,” Shanree raised a fist and from it an emerald blade of light slid into being with a nearly imperceptible snap-hiss.

Zuza pulled her own lightsaber out and activated it, adding a light blue-green hue to the subterranean chamber to Shanree’s deeper green, “No seriously, what happened? One second the sky is above us and the next you were–”

“I may have moved something I shouldn’t have,” Shanree said with no small amount of chagrin, “but we should wait to parse that until we know we’ll have the time to care.”

“Wait!” Zuza hissed, “Did you hear that?”

Shanree stopped and focused. All around them the tinkles and sprattle of settling sand and gravel was all he could hear in the otherwise tomb-like quiet, “I don’t–”

“Hush!” Zuza moved forward and raised the saber in her fist to try and peer deeper into the dark ahead of them, though her raised hand barely came above the level of his head, “There! Did you hear that?”

Unsure what he was supposed to be hearing, Shanree raised his own saber even higher, not that he needed the light source but to indicate he was trying to perceive what she was picking up on, “What am I listening for? Is something about to fall on us?”

“It is you who have fallen on me”, a rasping voice filled the air now that the dust was settling. It sounded as though it came from right behind them, from a mile away, and all around them.

“What the frell was that” Zuza’s momentary shock was easily felt through the Force.

Shanree’s mind was also racing but it quickly landed on the only reasonable, if that word had any meaning here, explanation, “I don’t think we’re alone.”

The voice cackled with wicked delight, “Who has dared trespass here in this sacred ground? Who has awakened me thus?”

Shanree ignored the voice, “Come on, let’s keep moving forward. We need to find a way out of here and find a way to com for help.”

“You will find no help here, Jedi. You will pay for your desecration of my grave and graves of my brothers and sisters!”

Shanree placed his free hand on Zuza’s shoulder and gently pushed her forward, guiding her through the encompassing dark around them. Soon enough the cluttered passage around them opened into a chamber large enough that the sound of their footsteps echoed around them. Through the Force, Shanree could see the circular shape of the walls and the hundreds of niches carved into the stone. Each hole was filled with votive offerings, funerary goods, and a single humanoid skull.

Zuza squinted and covered her eyes as the room was suddenly filled with the green-white light of ethereal flames rising from embrasures placed around the room. Shanree was suddenly on guard, falling into a fighting form without thought, as he perceived a shadow at the heart of the chamber. It was a Humanoid, wrapped in absolute darkness, that stood motionless at the center of the room.

“Who are you?” Shanree shouted at the shadowed figure, using the point of his emerald lightsaber blade to point.

The rasping voice filled the room, the sound boomed around them as it reverberated off of the stone walls and ceiling and through each of the burial niches so that it sounded like hundreds of voices spoke, “I am Abbot Vicend Praez and you have violated this holy place. You will pay with your lives!”

Zuza raised her hands earnestly, “Wait, wait-wait-wait! We didn’t mean to desecrate anything, we fell in here!”

The Abbot’s dark form raised an arm and from it flew a sphere of black nothingness. It hit the diminutive woman in the chest and slammed her up against the wall behind her, “SILENCE! The Jedi have come to finish what they began, but here you will only find your own end!”

Shanree placed himself in-between Zuza, who was quickly scrambling back to her feet, and the Abbot, “We aren’t Jedi and we aren’t here for you! We will leave if we can find an exit!”

The Abbot’s rasping voice cackled once more. He raised his arms above his shadowed form, “No one will be leaving here. Brothers! Rise from your slumber!”

They rose from the shadows. Between the grasp of the flames lighting the room, figures formed and grasped at the edges of the lights. Each one dragged itself, first a hand, then the rest, stepping free of their slumber.

Zuza closed the gap between herself and Shanree, her back to his as the spirits gathered around them. She couldn’t help but giggle, shaking her head.

“We’d make so many credits with this puppet show.”

“Only if we have a liability waiver for them to sign.” Shanree tilted his head, gravel still falling out of his ponytail.

The first spirit approached, the others shambling in its wake. Another snap-hiss followed as Shanree activated his second lightsaber; the duo stood still and watched until, as one, they both snapped into action.

Despite the ache in her joints, Zuza swept forward, she couldn’t flip and twirl around as she usually preferred to, but still spun on her heel, her cerulean blade gliding through the spirits.

As the light split them in half, the shadows making up their form dissipated with a hiss.

Shanree’s twin green blades swept through the shadows in a whirlwind. Erratic, yet every step succeeded, the shadows were unable to predict the path consistently. For every one that dodged, another was returned to its sleep.

The Abbot roared with rage, another sphere following his wrath toward Shanree.

The Mirakula saw the shape of it, turning with his lightsabers raised, blades crossed, and his palms facing the orb and pushing back.

The orb remained suspended for a breath, the only sound being Zuza’s continued fight, before Shanree shoved it upward toward the ceiling.

“YOU FOOLS! YOU DESECRATE THESE HALLS!” The Abbot’s voice rang over the rattle of stone, chunks of loose grout falling over the chamber.

Zuza was forced backward, avoiding being struck by the chunks and watching them pass harmlessly through the spirits.

Shanree swept through the shadows separating him from the Abbot, trying to close the gap and calling out, “Please, stop this! Allow us to leave or-”

The Force cried out, and Shanree stepped aside in tune with it, avoiding another smaller orb being shot toward him.

“The hard way it is.”

Zuza cussed in Sy Bisti upon spotting the cluster of shadows now focusing on defending the Abbot. More continued to manifest, slowly but still too many. She swung round, swiping aside another spirit with a hiss. Her breaths were coming in heavier, struggling to regain herself.

Note to self, don’t get buried in rocks again. Ever.

Yet, they can’t have fallen that far. Cracks had wormed their way across the ceiling, some even delving onto the tops of the walls.

“Shanree! I’ve got an idea!”

The Colonel followed her gaze. Above them a large brazier hung from thick, rusted links of iron. Initially confused he slashed through the head of one of the shambling spirits and opened himself to the Force, seeking to understand her intent. The spirit vanished with a barely perceptible scream as the smoking halves of a skull clattered to the ground. His attention was drawn to the deep fissures along the walls and domed ceiling of the burial chamber, and then to the anchors that held the chains in place to suspend the fiery embrasure above them. Beneath the green-white light of the brazier stood the Abbot’s shadowy form.

It’s worth a try, he said inwardly.

His feet slid into a horse saddle stance as he drew in a deep, measured breath. Shanree allowed the shorter woman to fend off the spirits lunging their way towards them as he reached up with his hands towards the hanging brazier, gripped at the air with his fingers around the hilt of his lightsabers, and then pulled downwards with the force of his entire body. There was a sharp, snapping sound as the anchors holding the chain links snapped away from the rock walls that secured them. Deep, groaning shudders reverberated through the chamber as the fragile and already weakened stone around them cracked and shifted under the sudden loss of weight. The brazier fell down atop the Abbot’s form, showing the room in glowing embers and sparks of coal, propelled by a wave of green-white flame that fanned outward in a brief flash of violence as it hit the ground.

The shadowy silhouettes of the spirits were blown outward, as if stripped from their core by some immensely powerful explosion, leaving only an alien but still humanoid skulls that fell to the ground. Zuza tackled Shanree around the waist as a rock loosed itself from the ceiling and collapsed to the chamber floor. Her impact took the air out of his lungs but thankfully carried him out from under the stone. It hit the floor with a boom that scattered the dust in the air away from them momentarily. Shanree groaned and reached for the back of his head, which had seemingly taken the brunt of his fall.

Zuza pulled herself off of him, “That wasn’t what I had in mind…”

Shanree pushed himself up on his elbows, “I didn’t exactly have time to discuss it at length. Did we get him?”

They listened in silence for a moment, again surrounded only by the sounds of their own lightsabers and the tinkle of settling gravel and dust. Zuza pursed her lips, “I don’t–”

The fallen brazier flung itself into one of the chamber’s walls. From beneath where it had landed, surrounded by the fallen debris of the ceiling, unfurled the shape of the Abbot, “You will suffer for your desecrations!"

The Abbot’s black form raised its arms with a great sweep, “Rise! RISE! DEFEND YOUR PLACE OF PEACE!”

Again the spirits crawled from their burial niches along the walls, sometimes crawling out from under fallen pillars and masonry. Shanree scrambled to his feet, following Zuza, “You have any more ideas?”

“Umm,” she looked around desperately, “wait!”

Shanree lashed out at several spirits that approached from his side. Their shadowy forms vaporized like gas as his emerald sabers passed through them, leaving only a humanoid skull to fall to the ground with a hollow thunking noise, “I don’t think we have time to do that, Lottson!”

“The skulls! Destroy the skulls!” She was already in motion, her foot landing atop one of the skulls now littering the ground around them.

It shattered under the impact, accompanied by a barely perceptible scream. Shanree’s mind raced, tracing Zuza’s unspoken logic. The skulls of the long deceased monks were placed in the niches from which the spirits crawled. When the Abbot raised them from their slumber they took that skull along with them, a core around which their ethereal shadowy bodies attached themselves. No skull, no bodies. Everything clicked into place and he was immediately onboard. Shanree went on the attack, his dual lightsabers whirling like scythes threshing grain. He had no time to track Zuza but he trusted they were now on the same page. Abbot Praez hissed with each banished spirit and destroyed skulls, a piercing noise he accompanied with more orbs or pure black energy. Shanree danced under them, moving like the wind itself around and below the attacks, with each step taking him closer to his next target– the Abbot himself. If the spirits were tied to their skulls, then it tracked the Abbot was too.

Finding his opening, Shanree lunged. His left hand saber came down vertically at the Abbot’s head. Moving impossibly fast the Abbot caught the saber’s green blade of coherent light in his black fist. The Colonel hacked down through the Abbot’s wrist with the saber in his right, eliciting a violent hiss from the dead man. Shanree crossed his blades with viper-like speed and drew them across the neck of the Abbot. The Abbot’s shadowy body vanished as Shanree was flung backwards by an unseen force but he landed on his feet. Zuza rushed the center of the chamber and without hesitation plunged her cerulean blade through the skull laying there. It was almost anti-climactic that the skull’s destruction was not accompanied by an explosion, or a preternatural wind, or the Abbot’s wailing scream of agony. There was only the sizzle of bone as the saber’s blade contacted the Abbot’s ancient remains and a nearly imperceptible moan that died like a fading wind.

Feeling the moment as well Zuza chuffed, “That’s it?”

Shanree barked a laugh, “You wanted something more?”

“Well no,” she withdrew her weapon and toed the skull with a single blackened hole atop of it, “I just thought there’d be more… a ‘you haven’t seen the last of me!’ speech or something…”

“Come on”, Shanree allowed one of his sabers to retreat into the hilt before he placed it back in its sheath over his shoulder, “we still need to find a way out of here. I have a recommendation to write.”

“A what?” Zuza didn’t move as he started examining one of the two ways out of the Chamber.

Shanree didn’t stop his investigation as he answered with non-chalance, “Anderson asked me to evaluate your suitability for the OSI.”

He didn’t anticipate her exploding temper, “That rat cuddling muddle-fudger! I already told him I wasn’t going to join his frelling agency!”

“I’ve got my own problems here!” Shanree called back, not sparing a glance as he spun through the crowd around him.

“Send the next explosion up!”

“What?!”

“UP!” Zuza repeated, losing focus on Shanree as she swept Phausis through another shadow.

Shanree had to carve his way forward to the Abbot. With the cluster around him, he finally discovered what those shadows did when they reached you.

What should have been the shadows hand lashed and clawed onto his armor. It pierced through in the scant moments it had to try before Shanree’s lightsaber split it shoulder to hip. The claws disappeared with the rest of it, leaving bleeding wounds behind as the first piece of evidence these things ever existed in the first place.

There was no time to waste as the Mirakula swept forward, cutting through the Abbot’s core.

For a moment, he and all of the shadows dissipated with a scream of rage echoing around the room. Zuza came to a relieved halt, her hand placing pressure on her chest and leaning back to breathe.

They simultaneously noticed the gathering of energy in the room between them. The face of the Abbot was visible for a moment, then another orb manifested. It gathered flames and gathered the very air around it in a whistling maelstrom that was then ejected at Shanree.

Shanree set his left foot behind him, hands forward and finally understanding Zuza’s plan.

He grasped the orb within the Force, not stopping its momentum but redirecting it as if up a ramp. With a crash, the ceiling was shattered. He dropped to one knee, changing his grip on the Force to hold above him, barely keeping his stance as stones and debris rained down upon them.

Amongst the din of crashing, a small voosh noise undercut the hubbub.

It took a moment for everything to stop moving so Shanree could begin to shift again. He heaved a piece of rubble aside with a wave of his hand, exhaling harshly afterwards. Zuza was airborne, little flames spouting from the boots and despite her being wobbly she seemed to have escaped relatively unscathed. Sunlight beamed into the destroyed temple behind her.

Though she was now tunneling toward him at a breakneck pace.

His body reacted too late to the Force’s warning of what was behind him. Zuza’s hands hooked under his arms a moment before it struck, the duo rising into the fresh air.

They looked down, watching the scowling spirit disappear into the distance as Zuza pressed the jetpack boots on. Though, her arms quickly began to shake, the pain in her chest gathering and gravity taking its toll.

“I’ve got it.” Shanree called, waiting a moment and preparing for the rush of air when Zuza released him.

The ground wasn’t perfectly flat, but it was enough to roll off the impact moments before Zu dropped down beside him, an arm wrapped around her stomach. She raised the other, her palm facing toward the Mirakula.

“High-” She then looked at the hand, chuckled nervously and dropped it.

Shanree tilted his head slightly, “...Hello.”