Later in the afternoon, the whole group proceeds to the residence of Rhoro Olan, the former collector of Sith artifacts. He seems to believe he is in serious trouble with some kind of authority, as he pours drinks with shaking hands.
Asked about his collection, Rhoro says that his artifacts all activated, charged with Dark Side energy, a few weeks ago on a date that lines up with the final Force tantrum. In response, Rhoro broke up the collection, sold what he could, and destroyed his records so that, even if tempted, he couldn’t try to get the artifacts back. He stored what he couldn’t sell far outsystem, on a rogue planetoid called Shoul.
As for the books, he acknowledges that he suspected they were stolen, as he acquired them below market rate at an impromptu auction. He says he sold the books to the Return of the Sith Reading Circle (RSRC), a group of concerned citizens.
Later, Sahl checks the website of the RSRC, and finds that they are on the path, but not all the way, to becoming paranoid inquisitors against supposed Sith fifth-columnists during the prophesied Return. The leader is a scarred veteran of the Droid Revolt, a standard charismatic strongman type, and his secretary is a puritanical middle-aged mother who believes that acting with the Dark Side will corrupt one into defecting to the Sith; but the rest of the group still seem relatively normal.
The next day, the group meets with Tulia, the Selkath mortician at Mettawi Central Hospital, to interview her about bodies that has been disappearing from the morgue. Tulia reports that the disappearances happened in the wink of an eye, often while an orderly was looking right at the body.
Dessa reaches out and feels a lingering Dark Side presence from deeper in the morgue. Tulia leads the group to a secure room, where the bodies related to an unsolved case are stored. The group has heard rumors of the case before: the bodies are of spacers and transients, ritually murdered and left where they would not be found for some days.
The group pivots to investigating the bodies. The victims all appear to have been young, though not all hale specimens. They have been mechanically drained of blood by a hose inserted in the jugular vein, and tattooed with Sith ritual geometries that Dessa is unable to translate.
Dessa probes one of the corpses and is pulled into a pitch-black mind palace. Reaching out, her hands touch the coils of an endless snake. In the real world, first the corpse, then Dessa’s rigid body, then all the rest of the corpses begin to chant names from the line of Sith Emperors.
Gai chops the corpses up, and Dessa pulls herself out of the mind palace, pulling the snake with her. She falls to the ground, feeling a snake writhe within her grasp. When she looks, the sensation of the snake disappears.
As the group leaves the hospital, they overhear an orderly telling security that the body she was working on disappeared before her eyes.
Deciding that they have delayed too long, the group sets sail for Kayan. Showering on the Starbird, Dessa looks down and finds that she now has a long, looping snake tattoo with no beginning and no end.
