Drip, drip.
The rain fell, but other than that, the air was silent. Barriss Offee looked out from under her hood at the darkened jungle surrounding them. It was not actually night, just rainy. In the distance the howls and screeches of cannoks and maalraas were heard as they competed and died in the grisly game of life.
Barriss looked over at her master, Luminara Unduli, who was cloaked in a similar hooded garment. However, unlike Barriss, Luminara was deep in meditation. Barriss decided to do the same. She had always had trouble calming herself and entering into deep trances, especially since the war started, but for some reason, Duxn made it even worse. It was as if the entire planet seethed with rage. Closing her eyes and trying to sense the surrounding life and its patterns made her heartbeat accelerate and her breath quicken. Still, she decided to at least try.
Thuuummm! Drip, drip.
She closed her eyes and focused on the sounds of the jungle. At first it was a cacophony of nature, animate and inanimate sounds mingled to create a single blooming confusion, but one by one Barriss picked out and identified each sound and subsequently ignored each. One by one the sounds went out, the smell of rain followed and with it so did the pinpricks of stiffness that came with sitting for so long. The only thing left for her conscious mind to perceive was the Force itself as it flowed from the jungle to her and out to the cosmos beyond. Again, the anger, the fury of life echoed.
She wondered what could be causing such a sensation. The jungle is and always has been a violent and savage place in which all appearances of civilization are stripped away and the beast inside is laid bare, but this was different. It was as if the pulse of life was covering something deeper, like a wound slowly healing. Slowly, Barriss pushed aside the rush of adrenaline and replaced it with serenity as she probed the Force.
Crack! Thuuummm!
There it is, she thought. The root of the problem. Deep in the the jungle lurked the dark side, a tainted presence. The jungle, in its natural state, was an equalizing force. The light side, if such a name is even an appropriate description, was the Force as it appeared in the flourishing of life. It is the Force in its purest state, the flourishing of life. But this state could not exist on its own, for the corrupting influence always came wherever there was life. The light and dark were not two opposite but equal sides, for the Force abhors all dualisms. Rather, the dark was a privation of the light, but a necessary one. Like a benign tumor, balance consisted of containing the growth.
In the jungle, the dark side was erased and replaced with the flourishing of life, and even the purest beings were turned towards savagery. Grey did not consist of balancing a dualism, but in embracing the natural ebb and flow of things. But in this jungle, something was off. Something seemed to be feeding the corruption. The dark side, long ago, had been entrenched here, and even though the source was gone it became a self-sustaining corruption, like a storm hovering over the ocean. The jungle was the fuel, and the dark was simply the pattern that the currents of life coalesced into.
Screech! Crack!
Barriss waded into the waters, sifting through the currents to the echoes that guided them. At last, after stripping back all life, she came upon the echoes of the dead. The jungle was full of the dead. After all, thousands of generations of animals were born and died in the jungle, one generation feeding upon the next in a macabre cycle as the jungle consumed more and more victims. Most of the echoes were dim, background noise, but when the cycle was disturbed- shifted out of balance- with more death than usual, the echo stood out.
Are there more alive or dead? so asked the ancient riddle. Alive, for the dead are not as the joke went- but this answer is not entirely true. As the ancient sages have always speculated, what is cannot not be and what is not is not what is. For just as matter cannot cease to be in the physical universe so is there no true death in the Force. As she dove deep beneath the depths of the ocean, the hands of time seemed to wind backwards.
There were blaster bolts and explosions. A man stepped on a mine, then lay on the ground dying. He wore a uniform, but Barriss could not tell on what side he was on and in what era he was fighting in. A massive droid that looked like a flying tank crashed into the ground and exploded. She then saw a woman with a lightsaber behead a man in massive metal armor. Before she could identify either, the entire jungle lit up with artillery fire. The screams of the dead echoed in the Force all these thousands of years later. Barriss did not know who these people were or what they were fighting for. She did not have time to learn the history of every planet they went to. The ancient battle remained buried in the jungle.
Snap-hiss!
Her eyes shot open at the sound of a lit lightsaber, and she saw her master launch herself forward and slice a probe droid in half. Luminara deactivated her lightsaber immediately after destroying it. Barriss walked over gripping her own weapon.
"The Onderon Militia captain was right," said Master Unduli, "The Separatists know we are here. We should be going."
Barriss nodded as they began walking back to camp. On their way back, Barriss thought back to the broken droid. It would soon sink into the mud and be forgotten about. Soon, the Separatists would invade and lose possibly millions of droids to the jungle, and the Onderon Militia would stand against the droid forces only to lose thousands of men and women to the blaster bolts and explosions. As Barriss thought about this, she realized that they were all just echoes as time pushed into the future, a future all too similar to the past.