A/N: There was a delay in updating this because FFN is going through some document upload issues right now, but I figured out a way to get around it by pasting into an older document in doc manager. Have some Huei.
As I explained early on in The Silent Song, Huei's name was originally Hui (灰) grey, in Mandarin. But I added the e for those unfamiliar with the pronunciation to make it easier. This chapter is based heavily off Dave Filoni's exploration of the Nautolan's homeworld and the Gampassa sea-cycle (the Gampassa are giant turtles with Nautolan cities on their shells). You can find the explanation on youtube under the Battle of Mon Cala featurette for TCW season 4.
Huei of Glee Anselm
The Nautolan boy is born on the precipice of a new age.
Even as his mother enters the last stage of her labour and pain swells anew in her swollen belly and back, a shudder runs through the city, and a cry bubbles into the cobalt water.
"The Gampassa is rising!"
It is a pivotal moment that comes only every few hundred years for this city – a historical city, one of the first of Glee Anselm to build on the backs of the giant turtles, the Gampassa, and take its half-millenia cycle for their own generations.
The new mother is told to push.
She does, and it is as though the trembling of the city is her own. This egg is not cooperating. Outside, the currents are moving through the open window and rushing into the cool water of the one-roomed cottage on the outskirts of the city, now – warmer, brighter, with the fresh-warmed plankton of a sunlit sea.
Three kilometres below, past shell and skin harder than duracrete, the Gampassa has stirred from its underwater cycle, and is rising to seek air and light once more.
Nearly every occupant of the city have gathered in the streets of the city now – the old and the young, each standing on the thrumming, ochre-streaked shell-surface that makes up their streets, feeling the currents press down on them from above, racing and building into a torrent.
It has been nigh on six hundred years since the beginning of the last cycle – the diving of the Gampassa. There is not a single Nautolan alive from that last age – an age of sunlight and air, and water the sapphire blue of a bright-lit sea. The city has been lit with sea-jelly glowlamps on their circular roofs, and the sea has been a soothing grey-blue for as long as anyone can remember.
Grey-blue fliters to midnight, midnight blue bleeds into to cobalt, cobalt lightens to cerulean, then azure, and a bright white light that lances through the water like gold-wrought bars.
But as Nautila flickers in excited giggles and whispers around the gathered multitudes, the linguistic pheromones of the language tinting the currents with excitement and expectation, there is a newer cry from within a cottage – one exuding the simple, confused scent of a child.
The mother is handed her new son, and smiles down at the wriggling tadpole in her arms, brushing away the remnants of the gelatinous egg still covering him. Navy blue skin, with slate-grey eyes and a tiny, perfect mouth.
Then there is a great roar of rushing water, and the crystalline world of water and bubbles drops away at last.
The city stands still before an unbroken blue sky that arches down to meet the horizon, a curved line ever in the distance.
The sound of the wind, and the air on their drying skin.
Sound is clearer and crisper than any have ever heard before.
Someone laughs, and conversation erupts; in Basic, not Nautila, but there is crying, and shared laughter, and joy.
In the cottage, the new mother places her child in a warm tub of seawater, in the warm rectangle of light under a window; light from Glee Anselm's sun that has not touched any in this city unfiltered for six hundred years.
She climbs in with him, and holds him tight as sunlight warms them both.
"My little Huei," she says, as only a Nautolan speaking Nautila can; with her head-tresses whispering I love you in scented words. "Huei Tori, my little grey sea-bird; child of the sea and sky."
Over the trickling of water slipping away under the door, the cry of sea-birds is sounding.
(:~:)
Late in his second year, when little Huei's arms and legs have finally lengthened enough to bear his weight out of water, his mother takes him for his first proper walk out in open air.
They sit where the curve of the Gampassa's shell meets the sea, gentle waves lapping at their webbed feet with the edge of the city expanding on either side of them, running a kilometre to their right and left before peeling back away along the curvature of the giant shell. There is construction work busy on landing platforms for air transports all along the shore; there is half a millenia's worth of air travel to be expected before the Gampassa dives again.
"What do you think of the sea, my darling?"
"Gampassa," Huei replies, stubby head-tresses bouncing. It is an impressive word for a two-year-old, to be sure, but Nautolans all learn the cycle of Glee Anselm at a very young age; it is in their bedtime stories, their childhood games, their songs. The ever-flowing cycle of air and water, sky and sea.
"Yes, the Gampassa holds our roots to the sea."
"Gampassa," Huei repeats, patting the shell beside him as his small feet make splish-splash noises in the water.
A tremor runs through the city, one that its inhabitants take no notice of; it is simply the movement of the creature that supports them.
Huei's mother smiles. An adorable coincidence, for the Gampassa to shift so when Huei spoke.
Huei stands carefully, on unsteady feet. "Gampassa!" he shrieks delightedly, with the high-pitched voice of a toddler speaking a new word he adores. Chubby hands are thrust into the air.
A muffled roar vibrates through the water, sending narrow, high-peaked waves shuddering away from the shoreline. The sea-birds foraging for food on the shore take to the sky as one in a multitude of rising wings, screeching in indignation.
Huei is laughing, despite having fallen backwards hard onto his rear, long kelp-fibre tunic tangled around his bare feet.
His mother stares at him with one hand pressed to her heart.
A soft clearing of the throat behind and above them. "Pardon the intrusion."
Mother and son look up the gentle swell of the Gampassa's shell up to the edge of the city, where a tall figure in brown cloak and hood is standing.
Huei stares up at the figure curiously, and notes with some wonder that it seems to feel the beat of the Gampassa's heart as he does, throbbing through their feet and up into their own.
The figure speaks again, and Huei's mother answers.
And then there is a longer conversation that Huei tunes out in favour of saying hello to his friend the Gampassa again, because there are many complicated words he has yet to understand, and this language of starlight and sea-song is simpler.
The stranger comes often to visit them in the weeks later. A few times at night, when Huei is supposed to be asleep, he wakes bleary-eyed to the sound of his parents arguing, though he does not understand the noise.
And then comes the day that Huei is handed to the stranger along with a large bag containing necessities and his favourite foods. Huei uncomprehendingly copies his father and mother's waves goodbye, and does not understand why she seems to fold in on herself as the stranger takes him away.
In the airy halls of the Temple on Coruscant, Huei soon forgets his friend the Gampassa, and the salt-sweet air of Glee Anselm. He adapts with a dogged sort of determination that his crèche-masters find adorable. He stops shouting after the first few months in the crèche, when he finds quiet obedience is rewarded more than cheek. He is the first to understand any new teaching, the first to fall in line when the masters call for order, and the first to learn to bow.
In meditation, he simply sits quietly, and soon learns to feel the thrum of Coruscant's trillion inhabitants. Memory echoes of a greater presence he once felt, singular, not these multitude points of light; but then it slips out of his mind's grasp, and he lets it be.
Everything changes the day he is given his first training lightsaber.
Talent, Huei finds, is something that can be cultivated. He throws himself into his studies with an intensity that impresses his teachers; conquers every subject before his peers, turns sparring into an art form and his own natural grace into lethality. He strives for achievement and perfections more than any of his peers.
And then he catches the eye of Master Dooku, and his world is transformed for the third time.
On the first day of his apprenticeship, Huei brings his small bag of belongings with him into the quarters he will share with his new master, and stands attentively as he is spoken to.
Master Dooku has very specific standards, and he expects his padawan to live up to them.
Huei is awake before the dawn bell every morning; rubbing the grit from his eyes, he takes care of his morning ablutions and meditation alone, and has breakfast on the table by the time his master wakes an hour after.
The mornings are taken up by classes; classes he must remain first-placed in. He knows by experience now that any slip-up will be met with a solid month of extra training. The afternoons fly by in solid four-hour sessions of lightsaber training – Huei takes to Makashi not with any natural inclination for it, but he studies at the way his master moves and simply goes to imitate it, and imitate it well.
'Saber mishaps happen, sometimes. Master Dooku does not allow him a proper lightsaber, not yet. A training 'saber set to its highest setting will burn on contact, but without serious injury. If the injury is not too severe to allow him to continue, his master is nice enough to let him see the healers after the session is over.
Then there is dinner, which Huei cooks, too, other chores, and study assignments into the late watches of the night; and then the blissful, empty oblivion of sleep before another early awakening.
Huei adapts to this new schedule with some difficulty, but chalks it up to his own inadequacy. He is sure his endurance will improve with time. Sometimes, he supposes the difficulty is Master Dooku's way of making him a better Jedi. And then he gives himself a mental swat. It is not his place to suppose.
Rarely, after a grueling training session, his master gives him leave to go to the Room of a Thousand Fountains. When that happens, Huei often finds a secluded corner of the room, strips off his sweat-soaked tunics, and wades into the river in his underclothes.
There, drifting in the current with his eyes closed and the cool scent of the water moving through his headtresses, he imagines a sea, as only vague infant memories can bring to him – endless water, and the Force so constant and unchanging that it seems like an infinite song.
But there is no sea here, in this sector of Coruscant; no sea-birds to sing to him, or starlight come night.
So his apprenticeship continues, until Ilum, then Ventrux.
Huei finds himself adrift.
For the first time in his life, he is afraid of the sea; of diving into a dark, lightless ocean, never to rise to the surface again.
But then the Force buoys up under him like the shell of the Gampassa, long ago beyond the reach of his memory, and gives him a new master.
And the cycle brings him to the surface again, where the sunlight he cannot see is warm on his face, and lances through the Force to far-away Glee Anselm, where the Gampassa crosses oceans, and the sea-birds sing.
Next up: Baby Obi-Wan, the young crown prince of Stewjon.
Also, if any of you watch anime and are interested in an Attack on Titan AU for Star Wars, I've got a new chapter of that up on my tumblr.