The Force seized his mind.

Awful visions flashed before his eyes, things he could not understand, cast in a sickly purple light. Jedi, many he knew, friends and colleagues, horribly mutilated, fighting battles they could not win against awful things that lived in the dark. Things that lived in the deep.

The Jedi, those who survived, were fleeing. Not retreating, but fleeing.

The visions spiked into his mind, the Force screaming some sort of warning or prophecy at him, shearing through his consciousness, and they would not stop.

Elzar fell to his knees, blood dripping from his nose. This did not feel like an unknowable, avoidable vision of the future.

This felt inevitable. Certain.

Evil, horror, sweeping across the galaxy like the tide.

He saw Jedi dying, screaming, and himself last of all, unable to escape what was coming.

Slowly, agonizingly, the vision receded. Elzar returned to himself. He gasped, and more blood spattered the deck.

What had he just seen? What had he seen?

The worst was not the chaos; the battles; the pain; the unknown, monstrous horrors surging out of the dark. It was what he had seen on the face of every single Jedi the Force had shown him.

The greatest enemy of all.

Fear.

Marchion Ro reached inside his tunic and pulled out an object of stone and metal, a rod, three hands long, carved and incised with symbols—screaming faces, fire, chains. It looked as if it had been melted once and re-forged. As his hand touched the object, it began to glow, a sickly purple color that somehow overpowered the star-bright lighting of the prison deck.

This thing was almost as fully to blame for what happened to his ancestors as the Jedi—but that was an old story, and this was a new time. He could accomplish what they had not.

The rod grew warm under his hand. It felt almost alive, breathing. He showed it to Loden, whose eyes narrowed. In the purple light cast by the object, the Jedi’s face looked strange. Dead.

“A fearsome and carnivorous plant based species that will serve as a red herring for the Nameless during the first phase of storytelling. The Drengir will be positioned as a legitimate threat over the first half of Phase I as they kill Mygorgo the Hutt and spark an interplanetary gang war. However, they are a smokescreen for the real enemies of Phase I (their name literally an anagram of Red Herring). We will see them wiped out around the time of the Republic Fair, by the real threat—the Nihil. The Drengir have played into Marchion Ros hands, distracting Starlight Jedi long enough for the Nihil to gather their various cells and tribes into a fleet.”

Claudia Gray writes in Master and Apprentice: “Only through sacrifice of many Jedi will the Order cleanse the sin done to the nameless.” It seems from this quote and the above description the Nameless will be the High Republic “Palpatine” and the end of Phase 3 will show the Jedi triumph over the Nameless, but at a cost of who they once were as a Order.

Also as far as the second picture it would seem the Nihil are planning a huge attack after the YA novel Into the Dark which will be the height of Phase I?