"You were ordered to bring the girl… to me!"
In the vastness of the dark chamber, a single, weak, ray of light shone down, creating an uneven circle of grey upon the floor. There was something beyond the light—something as large as the dark, and it hissed as it spoke again:
"Do you need to be reminded of what happens when you disobey?"
She sucked in a breath of stale air. The memory of pain flashed through her body, causing an involuntary shudder. She knew what would happen. She knew exactly what he could do.
"I was… too weak," she murmured, and with horror, moved to cover her mouth. The voice that issued from it was not her own. The voice she spoke with was—
"Yes," hissed the darkness, "you are too weak, and too uncertain, and too… afraid, but when I am done with you, there will be nothing left but the dark… the powerful, unyielding dark."
Beyond the light, something moved. She opened her mouth to scream as a withered, rotting hand rose from the dark, and stretched its fingers toward her.
"You will learn, and pain… will again, be your teacher!"
Crackling ropes of blue fire shot from the hand and arched toward her, striking her body in multiple places, and as it burned and paralyzed her body she opened her mouth again, and a scream issued forth, the deep scream of a man in unendurable pain.
With a gasp, Rey jerked upright and reflexively threw her arms around herself. It took a few seconds for her to realize that she was not being tortured by an invisible enemy, and a few seconds more to remember where she was.
The wind had picked up again. It raced over the flat, barren expanse of muddy wasteland, and in the distance, where it encountered the only obstacle to its progress, the walled city of Ka'vec, it whistled and moaned its discontent. The sound made Rey think of ghost stories she had heard as a child, and she shivered reflexively.
The wookie gave a soft cry. He was stretched out on the ground nearby, and in the dying firelight, Rey could see that his eyes were open and watching her.
"I'm alright," she answered. "Bad dream."
He could have stayed behind on the Falcon, and she had told him as much, but Chewie rarely left her side these days. After delivering her to Luke on Ahch-To, Chewie had returned to D'Qar and placed himself and the Falcon at General Organa's service, but there had never been enough work to do or missions to fly to keep his loneliness at bay. Chewie missed Han, and though he never spoke of it to Rey, she could feel his hurt and his anger whenever he was near.
When he returned to Ahch-To, ordered to escort both her and Master Luke back to the Resistance Base, he had greeted her warmly, with a hug and a few pats on the head, and ever since had followed wherever she went— a self-assigned body guard. Rey didn't object. He was lonely, and she understood him, and besides, she had long since learned that it was never wise to argue with a wookiee.
"Where's Master Luke?" she asked, noticing the empty bedroll on the other side of the fire.
Chewie lifted his hand to indicate the sharply-inclined, mud slope they had sheltered behind, and whined low in his throat.
"You're right," she agreed. "No one's getting much sleep tonight."
Rey threw back her blanket and reached for her saber, recognizing that she no longer felt comfortable when she was awake and it did not hang at her side.
"Stay here," she said, "I'll be back."
Scrambling up the muddy hill as stealthily as she could, Rey reached the crest, and rubbed the muck from her hands on large, flat rock. Master Luke stood on the other side, facing something she could not see.
"Can't sleep, Master?" she asked jumping up on the rock and crossing it to drop gracefully down beside him.
Master Luke did not react. He had probably known she was approaching from the time she left her bed. Standing beside him, she could see the walled city of Ka'vec spread out far below. The red and purple lights of the night district reflected from the stone walls, casting the entire city in a pinkish sort of glow.
Ka'vec was a city of outlaws, on an abandoned planet, in the outer rim territories—and this was always the case with Master Luke. It was never to beautiful, lush, pleasure planets that he took his padawan. No, their missions were always to meet with dangerous people in forbidding places where secrets were whispered in exchange for money or favors.
Although the First Order had suffered devastating losses after the destruction of Starkiller Base, they had been quick to regroup. There was already a new menace to the decimated Republic. A new weapon which no one had ever seen and no one could describe—though many of the Resistance fighters had witnessed the aftermath of its use—Rey included. She still remembered walking though the smoldering ruins of Affa Bal Zid. Not a single living being remained—only corpses. A city of dead bodies which looked to have died while fighting each other—though some appeared to have ended themselves. Cities of dead bodies continued to be found, and still they had no explanation for it.
The bounty hunter that Master Luke had tracked to Abafar had called the weapon 'Dark Moon', but had either been unable or unwilling to tell them anything other than the name of a prostitute whom he had heard if from. The bounty hunter had subsequently died when a pack of void striders had apparently gone mad, surrounded the poor man, and ripped him to shreds with their beaks. Strangely enough, void striders were not an aggressive species, and there had never been an attack before or since on record.
"He's close," Master Luke whispered, nodding his head.
"Who?" Rey asked, though she knew the answer.
"I can feel his pain… and I think that you can too," he answered.
Kylo Ren. The leader of the Knights of Ren. The monster who had murdered his own father, and almost destroyed Master Luke by slaughtering his young students.
"I don't care about his pain!" Rey hissed, wrapping her hand around the hilt of her light saber as though it could comfort her.
For a while, Master Luke said nothing, he merely watched the glowing lights of Ka'vec as they bobbed against a strong breeze. It would rain again soon. It always rained on this particular wasteland of a planet, and when it fell on your skin it burned a little. Nothing grew around Ka'vec, it was a void of flat, muddy stretches of land. The city was built of stones dug from the fields of mud, and during the day, looked to be almost abandoned as the rest of the planet.
"In the old days, the Jedi Academy would only train younglings—children who were little more than babes. Do you know why?" Master Luke asked.
"So that they weren't poisoned by the Dark—by things like fear, and anger," Rey recited.
"Fear, or anger… or love. A Jedi must not have such things as familial attachments, or loyalties to individuals. The younger they were taken from their homes—the better it was thought to be for them."
Rey stayed silent at this. It seemed cruel to her, but Master Luke never spoke without having a point to make, and she wanted to know where he was going.
"My nephew was born at a time when there was no Jedi Academy. He began to show great potential from the earliest age. We could all see it—even Han, but it was a problem we always put off to a later time. There was so much to do, so much to rebuild, so many fights to finish—and I was the only true Jedi—the last. Even after we rebuilt the Jedi Academy on Yavin 4, my sister believed that it would be better if she could teach him to suppress it. After all, she had done so herself for many years, but my nephew and his power… were a resource that the Dark desperately wanted. When Leia refused to train him in the Light, she unknowingly opened him up to the Dark."
"But she loved him!" Rey insisted, angered that any blame for Kylo Ren might be leveled at the General. "He was surrounded by family, by people who loved him! What makes a boy turn to the Dark when has a family, and love, and sh—"
"The Dark Side doesn't tempt us with pain or death… not at the beginning. The Dark Side sees our desires and offers them to us as gifts."
"And what gift could it have offered to Kylo Ren that he didn't already have?" Rey demanded.
"When the boy was still very young, and Leia still a respected presence in the Senate, there was a plot against her life. A young Twi'lek, a slave girl belonging to an old and powerful ally of the Empire, approached her on her way to the Senate and tried to stab her. The girl was acting on orders from her master, and was only a weak threat at best, but my nephew…" Luke's words trailed off as though he could see the events unfolding before him.
"My nephew raised his hand to her, and in an instant, snapped her neck and flung her body aside without ever touching her. He thought his mother would be pleased with him. Leia was terrified. She saw our father in him, and realized that in allowing him to form attachments to his family, she had opened a path to the dark side in him."
"How would a little boy know to do such a thing?" Rey asked. "Where would he learn to use the Force in such a way, if he was only ever taught to suppress it?"
"Snoke," Luke said, his voice barely above a whisper. "We didn't know it then, of course, but Snoke had already found him, was already speaking to him through the Force."
"So she sent him to you," Rey surmised.
"She did. She sent him to me, and he did not want to go. He thought it was punishment. He thought his mother no longer wanted him, that she feared him and sought to hurt him. And his father- he blamed his father the most. He believed that if Han had been there, he could have prevented the whole incident. If his father had been there to protect his mother, that he would never have had to use the Force. When he arrived at the newly established Jedi Praxeum on Yavin 4, he was a volatile combination of rage and misery, but I tried, Rey. So help me, I tried."
"You did your best Master Luke," she soothed.
She had never heard him speak of Kylo Ren before, and had respected his silence by never asking.
As a Jedi she knew that she should have compassion for all living things, but Kylo Ren surely, was a being beyond the reach of compassion. Even knowing what had started his transformation did not inspire her pity.
"I don't know," he whispered. "I just don't know."
Below them, the red and purple lights of the night district began to wink out as far to the east, the sun began its slow ascent in the hazy sky.
"Wake up the wookiee," Master Luke ordered. "It's time to go."