"Thank you, Saram."
Braze wandered farther into the room, gently allowing the Force to flood his senses once more. He moved without any particular destination, following faint pressures that gathered behind his eyes as he searched for something… anything that might prove useful.
He passed a curious glance toward their former Sith assassin.
"Rare doesn't mean effortless," he murmured as he reached beyond the present, attempting to pierce the veil left behind by years of silence.
"Being able to 'touch' an ability isn't the same as mastering it… Mastery requires enough power and endurance to use it, and enough control and precision to decide exactly how to wield it."
He pressed his palm against the nearest console and the vision of the room opened beneath his hand.
Not as it stood now, though rather how it was... countless people had known it. Light spilled from terminals that had long since been fallen dark until today. Robes whispered past him as the soft padding of boots crossed the floor in hurried, overlapping rhythms. Near a hundred conversations crowded into his thoughts, though none came complete enough to understand.
…the western relay…
…mission reports are overdue…
…tell the Council nothing until we know…
Braze's fingers tightened against the console as the impressions shifted through him as he tried to find a focus.... Faces passed without names, and hands entered codes that dissolved before he could read them. Pangs of emotion shot through the different glimpses of emotion bleeding through as they banded outwards and slammed in to his chest... Anxiety drenched in exhaustion followed by the lingering pressure of secrets accumulated within the very stone of this room until he could scarcely tell one memory from another.
Then one presence drew nearer and clearer in to the blurry focus... A man stood before the terminal.
His features refused to settle as clearly as Braze would have hoped.... Braze caught only scattered details from the blurry visage: dark hair falling loosely around a weathered face, a charcoal wrapped shirt beneath an asymmetrical coat, made of worn leather creased by long use. He carried himself without the ceremonial bearing of a conventional Jedi. Narrow pouches lined a low belt, and metal charms and coded cylinders rested among the tools of a courier or thief. A circular weapon hung against one hip, six folded blades concealed within its dark housing.
He might have passed unnoticed through any Outer Rim port as some dusty traveler.
Yet beneath the grime, the scoundrel's silhouette held an unmistakable discipline of calm and confidence.
The man's mismatched hands moved quickly across the terminal as bare fingertips pressed keys... File after file appeared beneath them, each marked with symbols Braze could not hold in focus.
Names blurred and the Assignments vanished with a few touches.... everything from safehouses, contacts, and extraction routes collapsed into empty fields.
The man paused over one final directory and he stared at the screen for sevral long moments... a pang of sentiment hit Braze tempered witha bitter meloncholy sorrow.
For a moment, Braze felt his reluctance as though it were his own as the weight of years compressed into a single held moment and tightened breath. These were the lives of those who had been burried within the darknesss... choices no Council chamber had ever laid witness to, and people who had entered the darkness with no certainty that anyone would ever remember them.
A soft whisper of a quiet voice barely reached him through the accumulated noise as a sentiment washed over him.
They cannot hunt what no longer exists.
The man entered the final command and warnings spread across the screen coupled with authorization requests, preservation protocols and a demand for credentials the figure either did not possess or no longer had the right to use.
The console's light bent around his fingers; locks opened without keys, their mechanisms yielding beneath a touch that felt less like slicing through security and more like persuading the system that the records had never belonged there at all.
The memory fractured suddenly and Braze felt the man turn sharply toward an unseen sound. His hand dropped near the plain metal cylinder concealed beneath his coat, while the other hovered close to the circular weapon at his hip.
The impression dissolved beneath an eruption of conflicting voices.
Someone has accessed the lower archive.
Seal the terminal.
He was never here.
None of us were.
Braze tore his hand away from the vision of the past as the present rushed back with enough force to leave him unsteady. His breath came in shallow, heaves as his fingertips trembled.
"There was a man here," Braze murmured as his somber jade green gaze remained fixed upon the console
. "A Jedi Shadow, I think… or someone trained like one.... I couldn't tell whether he was hiding something he had done…"
His eyes narrowed upon the vacant terminal.
"…or protecting everyone who had done it with him." 
Xan Deesa
,
Braze
,
Saram Kote
