Author's Note:
There is a high likelihood this will not make that much sense to the average reader. This was the result of discussion with my brother about a particular NJO character and what happened to him in the novels, which then spun into this little short. This assumes everything post-NJO did not happen (or rather, happened but in a drastically modified and not stupid way.). That is to say: Dark Nest, Legacy of the Force, Fate of the Jedi, etc. Those series were monstrous and objectionable on just about every level from basic structure on down.
Anyway. For a brief overview and context: This is Coruscant a decade+ after it's recapture and the end of the war. The Grey Zone is the slowly expanding rebuilt sections of the world that push back the vongformed life and new biosphere. The reconstruction is slow and in fits and starts, and still more than half of the planet is jungle, plains and forests.
The Grey Zone is many years away, they say.
It's how distance is measured these days. Not in meters, kilometers; in lightyears or parsecs, but in years. Everything is together now, for better or for worse: sometimes it feels like the universe is twenty square miles on a side.
The people we rub shoulders with, the claws and tentacles and graspers and hands we touch every day when we go about our lives: these are things few us of could imagine not so long ago.
There's a warrior who lives in that minshal, over there. He refuses to touch anything that was made artificially. We don't tell him some of the wheat we buy might've been harvested by a droid. He does love the honey bread so much.
A rodian drives the circuit of our village and the three neighboring ones every few months. He comes in a howdah atop a mon duul – if you listen some nights, you can hear it lowing deep in the jungle. When you hear it call, that's when to start stashing away some things for trade.
The couple who help maintain the temple used to be part of the GA. Their regiment had been wiped out in the fall and they were left behind. They found faith in the long nights and hungry days during the shaping, and when everything smashed together at the end their faith that was so similar to that of the Shamed was all they had left.
In the market, there's a woman who makes the children laugh. They gather around her stall, the shards of yorik that compose the structure strung with vines and little blue flowers. She makes wreathes of the stuff, crowns and ornaments and she gives little twists to the younglings. She sticks her tongue out them and makes faces and winks and presses them little crystals of sparkbee honey. I heard from an intendant that stayed an evening in the common house, he took me aside and he asked me where she was from. I said I didn't know, and he told me what her markings meant. The Yuuzhan Vong, they kept to themselves mostly. Maybe it was still some shock. Maybe it was shame. 'We are all Shamed Ones now,' I had heard once. But I'm getting away from it. The intendant, he sketched some markings in the dust, and I recognized a few. 'A priestess of Yun-Yammka. One of the bloodiest, too. The burned swirls around her ears, up onto the drawn skin of her scalp. Here. She's the blood of thousands on her hands, at least.'
She makes the children laugh. There's more every year.
There's a lot of Shamed Ones too.
We still call them that, and they still call themselves the same. There isn't really anything else that fits. It's a way they say it, though, that sticks in your ears. Shamed. They were Shamed. Once.
But no longer.
The priest of the temple is a Shamed One. His assistant was an intendent. We joke about that sometimes.
And we all go to pray.
That's a thought, isn't it?
The Yuuzhan Vong remade the world, and sometimes I wonder if they remade us too.
The intendant isn't the only visitor to come through. We've had others. They come in, sometimes by air, sometimes by growling repulsorlift, sometimes by silent tsik-vai. Stay an afternoon, an evening, a week. They're all going somewhere and it isn't here. Sometimes it's surveyors. Other times it's just drifters. They'll stay for a time, and we'll get some news of the rest of everywhere. It's how we stay current on the Grey Zone.
They say its many years away.
When we stand at the edge of the village and look at the jungle around, it's hard to believe this was ever anything else. That it could ever be something else.
One of them, one of the drifters, is one who stayed. It's not that uncommon. But with him, it was like he'd accidently found what he was looking for. He's an old man, lives right at the edge of the jungle. He wandered in about two dozen or so years back and just sort of stuck. You'll never see him at the common house, only sometimes will he work the fields. He's been coaxed sometimes to speak at temple. He speaks well, and always briefly. Yun-Shuno is his favorite. No one is sure who he was, before he came here.
Some are convinced he was a shaper. He healed a quednak, and that was enough for some of us. Others will swear he was a warrior: that the ooglith he wears is to cover up his rank and scars. He killed two raiders once, before my time, but the story is well known. It's a popular theory that he was an intendant – he speaks too well, at temple, in the rare times you can coax more than a sentence out of him, and his advice is always sound. A few say he was Shamed. I think he's just Luk Esh, I think that he wears the ooglith to pay tribute to the old ways, like the warrior says, and I think that's all that matters. We all have pasts. We don't need to shoulder those of others.
But we'll guess. And maybe we'll be right, but it's never the goal. And Luk Esh is Luk Esh, so he'll just look at you with his one good eye and the empty socket of the other, and shrug.
He can tell the best stories. Some think he was a priest because of that. Even if he never likes to speak in temple. It's because of how many tales he has. If even half are true, then he's been from one side of the galaxy to the other. Or at least known those who had. Makes you wonder what he found here.
You can't hear his stories in the common house either; you have to find him when he sits by the pond. There's a maw luur in there, a little one, and he says it reminds him of other times. If you can find him there, and bring a little broth, you can usually tease out a story. He'll start off slow, but then when he gets into it, sometimes it won't be until the stars fade and the sky lightens before you have time to get home. But they all end sometime, even his longest.
I'd ask for Ebaq. He does it justice.
He says that one day our village will be gone. That the world will have turned over, and shrugged, and tossed it away in the dust. But it's not mean. He's not saying it to warn. Or even threaten. It feels like he's amazed when he says it, like he's really, really grasping that all this, all that we've made, all that is, will just end one day. That in the blink of an eye it'll be like our little village with the pond and the fields and the grazing quednaks and our prized minshal will be a memory, a wisp and: gone.
It sounds like he's grateful that he gets to be here before it is.
I was wrong. It is a warning.
He's warning us to enjoy what we have.
It's why we measure distance in time. It's like we've always been here, but we're just waiting on the world to catch up.
The Grey Zone is many years away, they say.
Maybe one day it'll crawl out here, over the mountains, across the river, and crawl right up the dusty street to the doorstop of the temple. Maybe it'll eat up the pond and the quednaks and the minshal too, and the priestess with her garlands and the warrior with his honey bread; the temple and the statues of the gods and Jedi.
You might think Luk Esh won't be here when it does.
I think he will.
But the Grey Zone is many years away.
And the maw luur needs to be fed, the quednaks watered and the batteries changed on the lumes.
There's broth on the stove. Maybe I'll go looking for him tonight.
I wonder what hidden tales he has left to tell.