The crew's time on Ryloth took a dangerous turn when Kel, the Kel Dor leader of the rebel detachment, contracted the group for a retrieval mission into the planet's frozen dark side. The target: an artifact buried in a place called the Ruins of Tal'ven, something the rebels believed could serve their cause. Two previous expeditions had been sent. Neither returned. Rather than spend more of his own people, Kel decided to send mercenaries instead.
The rebels outfitted the crew with environmental gear and four modified speeder bikes. Thrar, never content with stock equipment, spent hours further modifying the bikes to withstand the brutal cold of the dark hemisphere. The preparations paid off early when Echo pushed the freighter fifty kilometers deeper into the frozen wastes than the mission plan called for, his piloting cutting a significant chunk off the overland journey before the ship's systems forced them to land.
The first obstacle was the ice-ravine maze—a labyrinth of frozen canyons that swallowed their navigational signal almost immediately. Lost and running blind, the crew needed to regain contact with a pair of overhead satellites so Echo could triangulate their position. Thrar volunteered to climb. The Wookiee scaled the sheer ravine wall with the satellite receiver clutched in one hand, hauling himself up toward the edge—only to find he wasn't alone. A herd of Ice Borers—skeletal, wolf-like beasts with skulls that glowed a dull, sickly orange—prowled the ice shelf above, locked in a vicious dominance fight. Thrar pressed himself flat beneath the lip, one arm extended over the edge with the receiver, as the creatures snarled and circled mere meters away.
When one of the beasts turned toward him, Thrar hurled a glow rod over the pack's heads. The distraction bought just enough time for Echo to lock onto the satellites, cross-reference the data, and repath their route forward. The Wookiee descended without a sound.
The crew emerged from the ravine maze onto a vast ice plateau and rode for hours before the terrain split open beneath them. A river of liquid Rhydonium—volatile, highly flammable fuel—flowed a hundred meters below through a jagged fissure in the ice. Frenki, never one to pass up an opportunity, lowered a canteen on a length of rope and collected a sample of the glowing substance. They searched for a crossing and found a narrow ice bridge spanning the gap.
Echo, Frenki, and Thrar made it across, but the bridge cracked and buckled under the weight of the speeder bikes, leaving Tharal stranded on the far side. Worse still, on the opposite bank, the silhouette of something massive and four-legged materialized in the frozen haze—stalking them. The three who had crossed mounted their speeders and raced along the fissure's edge, searching for another way across while the creature shadowed their every move.
They found a second bridge. Tharal gunned his speeder bike across it, but the unfamiliar feedback from the narrow span—sheer drops on either side—caused him to overcorrect. The bike veered off the edge. By some miracle, the speeder didn't tumble the full hundred meters to the river below. Instead, it crashed into a shallow cave carved into the fissure wall by some large nesting creature, the impact destroying most of the eggs lining the floor.
Pinned beneath his bike with his blaster out of reach, Tharal watched the cave's occupant return—an enormous avian predator, shrieking in fury at the destruction of her nest. The Chiss grabbed the only weapon within reach—a flare gun—and fired at the ice ceiling, bringing down a shower of frozen debris. The bird didn't flinch. Thrar was already moving, dropping a rope over the edge and rappelling down to the cave. Together, the Wookiee and the Chiss fought the creature in the cramped space until it finally broke off, screaming its rage as it disappeared into the depths of the ravine.
The entire group descended into the cave and sealed the entrance, using their heat lamps to turn the enclosed space into a makeshift shelter. They rested there through the long, frozen night.
The next morning brought grim confirmation of what had happened to the first expedition. Frozen rebel corpses lay half-buried in the snow, their faces locked in expressions of surprise. Human footprints led from the bodies into a cave mouth. Inside, the crew found the third dead rebel and, moments later, the reason no one had come back. A massive Lylek—a nightmare of chitin and claws, native to Ryloth's deep places—erupted from the darkness, accompanied by a swarm of her young. The mother brought down the cave entrance behind the crew with a single devastating strike, sealing them inside with her.
Echo and Tharal opened up with covering fire, blaster bolts sparking off the Lylek's armored carapace. Then Frenki made his move. The Besalisk charged forward and hurled his canteen of Rhydonium beneath the gaps in the creature's armored scales—and lit it. The Lylek erupted in flames, thrashing wildly, crushing several of her own young in the frenzy. While the burning creature raged, Thrar sprinted to one of the side tunnels leading away from the central cavern and planted thermal detonators around the entrance. The crew ran to him. He blew the charges. The tunnel behind them collapsed in a roar of ice and stone, cutting off the Lylek and her brood.
But the detonations had destabilized the cave system. Ice cracked and shifted around them as they sprinted through collapsing corridors, until the floor gave way entirely and they slid down a frozen chute into a pool of warm, mineral-rich water. They were alive—but lost in the dark, deep underground. It took an entire day of navigating the cave system, fighting off smaller predators, and retracing dead ends before they finally found an exit.
And there it was.
The canyon floor dropped away before them, revealing a vast sinkhole—hundreds of meters across, punched into the ice like something enormous had fallen from the sky and never stopped. The walls were smooth, carved not by erosion but by hands. Spiraling patterns descended into the darkness, and between them, doorways—dozens of them, set in concentric rings toward a bottom they couldn't see. The air rising from the depths was warm. Genuinely warm. At the rim, half-buried in frost, a stone marker bore angular carvings that matched nothing in Twi'lek records—symbols so old that the ice had grown around them, as if the stone itself resisted the cold. Echo's sensors registered a faint energy reading from below. Not mechanical. Not electrical. Something else.
They descended the spiral staircase. Two Ice Borers prowled the steps ahead of them, forcing the crew to duck into one of the side chambers—ancient rooms, stripped bare by millennia, their purpose lost to time. The beasts sensed them anyway. A short, vicious fight in the doorway left both creatures dead, though not before their jaws found flesh.
At the bottom, the air changed. More Ice Borers lay dead on the floor—but these hadn't been killed by claws or blasters. The cuts were clean. Surgical. Tharal, educated enough in galactic history to recognize the signature, said the word the others were thinking: lightsaber. The crew stopped. The implications were severe. If a Sith—or something worse—waited below, they were walking into a fight they couldn't win. But the cuts on the carcasses were uneven. Unpracticed. Whoever wielded the blade wasn't a master. They pressed on.
The emergency beacon from the second rebel expedition led them deeper into the ruins. Frenki nearly jumped out of his skin when a shape materialized in the gloom—but it was only a statue, ancient and eyeless, standing sentinel over a forgotten hall. The beacon had been tucked behind its base. Someone had placed it there deliberately.
Then came the sound. The unmistakable snap-hiss of a lightsaber igniting behind them. The crew spun. In the green glow of the blade stood a young Twi'lek girl—blue-skinned, wide-eyed, alone—holding the weapon in a two-handed grip that trembled only slightly.
"Are you rebels?"