Private Beneath the Wine-Dark Sea

[Har Har D'Saylyr]

::Vendaxa::

Leaving the Infinite Owlbear secured and cooling down on the shore, Har Har D'Saylyr dove headfirst into the calm waters of Lake Archenay and began swimming. Within seconds his small eyes had adjusted to the new environment and diminished light, but it wasn't his five senses he was relying on now. He was reaching out instead through the Force, a connection he still found both tenuous and welcoming.

Deeper and deeper the Gungan swam, finally activating the headlamp he wore to provide a beacon through the aquatic darkness where little sunlight filtered from above, until at last he touched down on the bottom of the lake. He alighted for only a moment, as if to convince himself it was there, before rising again, leaving a puff of sand, stirred by his movement, to settle behind him.

Now he swam forward, towards a dark rise beneath the water, until a large cave mouth came into view. Har Har treaded water just above the lake floor here, reaching out with the Force.

You be in dere, he thought. All dis time, an no one knew. Ah, but Har Har, he come to see you. Come out. Weesa talk.

Patiently the Gungan waited, feeling deep inside the power that lay within the cave. Then the power moved closer.

Meesa know you dere. Come out. Weesa talk.

Har Har turned his head this way and that, playing the strong beam of light across the cave mouth, until at last he saw the object of his search.

The acklay stepped fearlessly forward, cocking its head to the side to keep the light from hitting its eye directly. It was a massive creature even by acklay standards, fully fifteen feet tall, weighing perhaps two thousand kilograms. The most interesting thing, however, wasn't the creature's size; it was the way it regarded the Gungan who settled to the sandy floor in front of it. It looked at Har Har D'Saylyr as if it knew him, perhaps that it even had been expecting him.

Mesa greeting. In peles mesa comen. Meesa come to learn, said Har Har through his thoughts. Yoosa swallowed someding, meesa tink. Long, long ago, yesa?

Yes. The voice that projected itself into the Gungan's head wasn't the acklay's. It was older, wiser, and darker.

Har Har smiled. A Sith holocron.

Yes.

Meesa come to learn from you. Yoosa teach me. Meesa feed you, give you entertainments. No more alone. Okeeday? Har Har could feel the intelligence of the creature. Somehow the Sith holocron had increased its sentience, but it was still more animal than not, and therefore easy for him to mentally dominate.

Yes.

Good. Berry, berry good.

 

[Har Har D'Saylyr]

Days passed, as they were wont to do when one wasn't stuck in a time loop or frozen in some stasis chamber or other. Har Har spent most of his time underwater with the gigantic crustacean. It amused him that so few people ever thought to look under the water for treasure. Everything was out there, somehow. In the sky, in the stars. But here, beneath the seemingly tranquil waters of a lake on a distant planet, lay the memories of a Sith Lord; a Sith whose presence in the Force was so strong it had mutated the acklay that had swallowed its teachings, increasing its intelligence and raising its level of sentience.

The Sith, Darth Gravid, had committed the unpardonable sin, for his time, anyway, of believing that dedicating oneself solely to the Dark side of the Force would lead to the ultimate undoing of the Sith. He began to practice unfathomable things, like altruism, honesty, and empathy into his practices and his teachings. He also began gathering all the Sith teachings he could, both in written form and holocron, and then began destroying them. Some thought him mad, but then Luke Skywalker had thought the same of Yoda when Yoda destroyed the Jedi Tree Library on Ahch-To. Ironically, Gravid would place all of his own teachings into a series of holocrons, including the secret of essence transfer. Where the remaining holocrons were, or even how many more there might have been, were still unknown to Har Har, but he felt this was a good start.

One day, when his mind could take no more of the Sith's knowledge (or, more precisely, when Har Har had grown bored with learning and just needed to get away for a little while), he had swum about, trying to see if he could discover how the holocron got here in the first place. Some six kilometers from the acklay cave, he came across the likely culprit: the long-swamped wreckage of an early-Imperial era VCX-100, its hull blown open from above and behind, and no evidence of anyone having been inside. Likely by now even their bones had been eaten, if indeed anyone had still been within when the ship touched bottom. Har Har shrugged after he'd investigated an swam away. In his mind he'd decided that some treasure hunter or smuggler had found the holocron and, on their way from point A to point B, had been shot out of the sky, crashed, and died.

Honestly, it didn't matter one way or the other. The holocron's past was the Gungan's prologue, and that was good enough for him.

 

[Har Har D'Saylyr]

Har Har would leave the waters from time to time, returning with meat to feed the acklay. The nearby starport provided no end of choice cuts for a clever and exceedingly violent Gungan, and he was certainly one of those.

Har Har's favorites were the Wookiees. It was fun to watch the acklay skin the things before eating them.

Darth Gravid's holocron made mention of lightsabers, their history, function, and use. Har Har knew he couldn't train with one of the weapons underwater, but he still wanted one, so he set off to find the pieces.

On the world of Rydor Sextant, far enough off the trade routes that it remained reasonably untouched, the Gungan found an undisturbed bed of York coral, left, he assumed, from the Yuuzhan Vong War centuries ago. It was untended, and so a small matter for Har Har to set a well-shaped explosive charge, the detonation of which provided him with enough workable, still-living coral to begin to fashion a lightsaber hilt.

The crystal was next. As a side trip on his way back to Vendaxa, Har Har landed upon Pijal's Moon. Darth Gravid's library of data had included a compendium of places to find crystals suitable for lightsaber construction, and while there were any number of planets where he might have gone to mine one, Pijal's Moon seemed to call to him.

Next he travelled to Mox Henley, a planet known for hosting several Yuuzhan Vong settlements and, armed with a sack of stolen cred sticks, found a Yuuzhan Vong Shaper who was willing to form the coral he'd obtained into a comfortable hilt, fusing the mechanical parts of the 'saber along with it. He didn't insert the crystal there, however, as he still didn't have enough knowledge about attuning himself to it. Mustn't miss any steps, he reasoned.

So back to Vendaxa he flew.

 

[Har Har D'Saylyr]

Days turned into weeks. The Gungan spent much of his time now above the surface of the water, secreted in a nearby cave, meditating on the lessons of Darth Gravid, diving back down to try and absorb more information, returning.

Eventually, as things went, Har Har became discontented with having to draw the acklay out, appease it, touch its mind to draw on the holocron's teachings, and feeding it. It was little effort at this point in his training to call upon the dark side and stop the creature's breathing by closing off its airway. It was something Sith did, he supposed. The act done, he ignited his specially-designed yorik crystal-hilted lightsaber for the first time. He'd equipped it with a bifurcating cyclical-ignition pulse he'd learned of, in order to allow the weapon to be used under water; a useful tool for an amphibian like himself. The Gungan slowly drew the orange blade of the lightsaber (Orange! he thought. So that's the blade's color! Keeno!) down the torso of the dead acklay, swimming quickly away and using the Force to push aside the gallons of blood and dissected parts. He returned to the surface for a time, allowing the dead acklay's fluids to finish draining as much as possible, enjoying a meal in his ship before returning again at night to remove the holocron the acklay had swallowed so long ago.

Time to go, he thought, leaving the waters of Vendaxa for the final time.