<em>The pain was excruciating.  Like a million suns exploding at once the searing heat laced through the Mandalorian’s body.  Screams echoed into his mind, tore at him across the expanse of time and space.  He could feel each strike, every explosion and the snuffing out of each life.  That sensation played over and over inside his mind so many times that he lost track of the times.  During the slumber there were good dreams as well, but this was no dream but a vision.  Whether of the past or the future he might never know.  Mandalore was or would be no more.  He knew whose ships launched the attacks that would finish off the lush world he had called home.  They were his own.<br/><br/><strong>Traitor</strong>…<br/><br/><strong>Traitor</strong>……<br/><br/><strong>Coward</strong>……..<br/><br/>The words were new ones from a new voice.  A woman’s voice called to him.  Through the darkness of the dreamscape she emerged.  The armor was familiar, a Mandalorian warrior.  She was bloodied and honored, a seasoned veteran of conflict and destruction.  Shadows bleed from her as if releasing her into the world he knew.  A blink of his eyes was all that it took for her blaster to emerge.<br/><br/><strong>You will not survive me.</strong><br/><br/>From somewhere he heard the laughter of his nightmares.  Darth Rion’Ca was a voice never to be forgotten.  A mechanical, inhuman creation was his laughter that now grew with intensity and force.  Kydan Oriss could feel that sound pushing him out and upward.  He was being evicted from his own dream, thrown from his own vision.  Staring upward he could see the red eyes of that metallic mask on him and the cold grip that had nearly ended his life one time before.  Needle tipped fingers pressed into his throat and venom choked his veins while fluid congealed in his lungs.</em><br/><br/><br/>A coughing fit forced the gel-like water from his lungs.  Eyes opened to near darkness while around him the gel subsided until he was alone in his tube.  Around him a hiss of air escaped, and the canopy slipped away so that cold, stale air rushed onto his face and into his now empty lungs.  He was almost certain that the contents of his stomach had joined the gel.  Of course that would mean his stomach had contents which even now the organ rumbled to let him know this was not the case.<br/><br/>The room was dark, bleak even.  Memories flashed of bright lights and smiles when he had laid down to rest.  Now the room seemed like a tomb, a mass grave.  Lights flashed in a rhythmic pattern like an alarm sounding.  Then the sound started to come into focus as indeed an alarm was sounding.  Ear splitting could not begin to describe the pain.  Yet this was not all that Fate had in store for him as the very earth seemed to quake and bend.  Dizziness afflicted him and he spun even as the world around him seemed to shake itself loose.<br/><br/>Kydan Oriss had probably had better days but now he was awake.  He had been summoned to serve.<br/>