XI. VOID

There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.
Jorge Luis Borges

—

"We are so glad that you could join us, lust-toad."

Zekk heard her voice, and then he was conscious again. His pounding head and the cold dread in his gut told him he was in trouble. With effort, he willed his eyes open, and saw her. Alema Rar's face hovered inches away from his own, smiling.

"Our hunter has become our captive. Do you see? There is Balance in all things."

Undercity at twilight, perched, watching through the scope the expanse of airspeeders flowing before the cantina where Master Durron had scheduled the meet, Force tingling with possibility, watching them standing on the broad walk in the dim light and then the sudden ripple of death, spinning but too late, spinning before he knew, scarred blue skin and shining white teeth smiling as the blackness took him—

"Oh, stang," he groaned, his stomach churning. He was utterly defenseless, inches away from one of the most unstable Force users in the galaxy.

No, this was not good at all.

"You are not Leia Solo, but you are an incongruity in need of balancing, and your presence here still gives us great joy." She reached out with her remaining original hand, brushed his cheek. Were he not so tightly bound, he would have had to suppress the urge to draw back.

"Our Master said we could have all the fun we wanted with you."

"I'd rather you didn't," he rasped.

Zekk knew from the characteristic way his body ached that he had been hit with a couple stun bolts—enough to fry a non-Jedi. Even if he did break out of these bonds, he wasn't sure that he could stand—let alone walk. His connection with the Force was weak, and it gave him no strength—all he could feel in it was Alema's glittering malice.

Alema was sneering back at him when his vision blurred back into coherence.

"Yes, yes, you think we aren't attractive. Of course. Mangle us, and then jeer at our ugliness. How we hate all of you. How your hypocrisy shows when held up against the solemn work of my master. And how satisfying to see you brought here, at last in your just place. How would you look with a few less appendages, Zekk? How about a few dozen acid scars, inflicted just so? Did you ever, perhaps, stop to wonder what it was like for us, when we were eaten alive? All this we can show you."

She held her knife up to his face, traced it with an unbearable lightness across his exposed neck. "We get to see you bleed. See, sorrow that Jaina Solo feels is sorrow that her mother feels." She drew it closer, deeper, almost imperceptibly, with a malevolent slowness. But her bloodlust was unrestrainable, radiating out of her and through him. She pulled the knife backwards so fast that he couldn't track it, angled it towards his throat, and his heart leapt in his chest—

"Not just yet." The voice was familiar. He couldn't place it. Not Jacen himself, but an awful lot like him. "Remember Balance, Alema."

"But—"

"After all his crimes, why should you give him a merciful death? Why should you let him go that easily? Make him wait. Draw out his suffering. Make the waiting into suffering. After all, how long have you had to wait? He is one of the Jedi who betrayed you. Let him taste what you have tasted."

She stopped, considered this, still holding the knife aloft. Her hands were shaking with the adrenaline. After a long moment, she mastered herself once more.

"No, of course. It would not serve the Balance if we ended your misery quickly, lust-toad, satisfying as it might be to see you bleed out here and now. You ought to suffer like we have suffered."

Her smile widened, her eyes sharpening with malice, and he was lost in their blackness. "You see, Zekk, we have suffered so slowly."

His bonds tightened, and now he realized that they were alive, digging into his wrists, writhing around him, drawing him deeper. Alema watched, her mad smile vibrantly white.

"You will see what it is to be one of us: lost. See what it is like to have nothing at all but how much it hurts."

Then the pain began to mount, dull as it broke skin, tearing through him, hammering, pulsing, blooming. Time seemed to cease, but for the pain's rising pitch, and he could no longer see, and he reached to the Force, but all he could feel was malice and the Vonglife wrapping around him, constricting him, strangling—

Zekk hung in a void that deepened, an infinity that defied itself by growing, ever growing, lost to time. Oh, he had suffered before. But this was worse, because there was no hope. He had failed the Order in its darkest hour, he was at the mercy of Alema Rar, who knew no mercy, the Force gave him no breath of sanity, no promise of rescue. Time ran somewhere far beyond his perception, and he hung forever.

—

"The True Gods decree that life is suffering, and give us pain to demonstrate their truth. Pain is our teacher, our taskmaster. All life shrinks away from pain, because the Gods are pain. Do you understand?"

Zekk did not. He knew nothing but the void and the voice, whispering.

"Only the unfaithful flee from the whip of the Gods. You must understand. When we suffer most, we are closest to them. When we do not flee from pain we become most like them, build ourselves most in their image. The creator butchered himself to make us, reached the zenith of pain with suffering and joy. Here, in the Embrace, you are the closest you can come to the real song of the Force. Tell me, Zekk. What is the pain whispering?"

"Is Grand Master Durron alive?"

"I'm afraid not. Everyone runs out of luck sometime. What is the pain whispering, Zekk?"

"Nothing," he said, his voice dry, cracking. Nothing but pain, forever, meaningless and horrible.

"In the beginning, there was only Yun-Yuuzhan. Only when Yun-Yuuzhan chose, in his infinite kindness, to tear himself apart, piece by piece, did existence come into being. Pain is the heart of all things we can know. Pain is not the absence of meaning, or the destruction of meaning—it is the core of it. I have given you a gift, and I have exposed myself to great risk in doing so. I have prolonged your life long enough for you to understand. I want you to understand. What is the pain trying to tell you?"

"The Vong gods were lies," Zekk murmured.

"Yes, they were. But a good lie has a seed of truth. Pain, that is—its power, its omnipresence—are true, even though Yun-Yuuzhan was a falsification. The Vong were cut off from the Force, so they reached to the next closest thing—the Force's proxy."

But Zekk was farthest from the Force at the moment he was most in pain, feeling it dimly, a faded memory. He could not think, only suffer.

"You only have one chance, Zekk. You need to be strong."

"Let me die."

"I will, if you want it, and I will even promise you that it will be merciful and quick. But in exchange, I want something. You have to listen to the pain and share its lesson with me. I want to know what you see in there."

"No more. I can't. I can't."

"Well, you'll die anyway. But you know Alema: it might be years from now. You might die in her tender mercies—of old age."

He wanted to groan, to scream, but there was no air in his lungs. He wheezed. The prospect of spending years here was dizzying, nightmarish. This voice was robbing him of the precious little strength he yet had.

"You can die now, because you are too dangerous to allow to live, or you can die when she gets tired of using you as her pincushion. It's your decision."

"What difference would it make?"

"No difference. All the difference in the world. You have to decide. If it helps, consider that if I don't get what I want from you, I'll have to try and crack open another Jedi."

"What are you?" Zekk asked.

There was a pregnant pause. "I am a student. I am a teacher. What are you?"

The question stung, because he did not know. All the words he had used to describe himself seemed to peel away before the white hot furnace of the Embrace. Zekk. Jedi. Friend. Human.

"Ah—very good. You've stumbled upon the first key realization. Words are lies that you build as a wall between yourself and truth. Let it fall away. Know the Embrace, better even than you know yourself."

He tried, but words were the only thing holding him above the precipice, the only thing between Zekk and the void.

"Let go of them. Words are less than the things they describe. Let go of the word void. Look at what all this really is. Find what I'm asking you to find."

"I can't."

"You will. Remember Myrkr, when you reached the nadir of hope. Remember every wound, every ache, every loss. Do not fear them. Use them. They are the best part of you. Embrace them."

He remembered, remembered blaster wounds and lightsaber wounds and emotional wounds. The pain made echoes of burned flesh and sorrow and suffering—beneath the hail of thud bugs, stomach sliced by Ben Skywalker, he knew that Jaina did not love him—and it compounded, and compounded, and for a moment, all he was was pain. Something washed away.

When he could feel it again, the void was no longer a void. He saw shapes in the white, patterns, the branching of nerves like roots burning, patterns that grew as he watched. Wrapped in Vonglife he could not feel, the Force began to explode into life, bounding past what he had known. It was eternity, and in it he was watching himself, watching the Force, watching the headquarters of the Galactic Alliance Guard through the branches of pain, the pain that was life, watching the gaunt pale face of Ben Skywalker smile before the writhing Embrace of Pain, watching himself locked in it. Dancers and dance.

He understood the tragedy that had befallen his Order, had befallen the galaxy, as he saw that Ben's blue eyes, Luke Skywalker's eyes, were flecked with gold. He was watching Ben Skywalker one moment, stars the next, understanding how life was pain, and unlife was pain, and that pain ruled the Force because pain was the Force.

The pain was whispering truth, and he understood Ben Skywalker. Ben had felt something like this too, as he fell into darkness. And though Ben spoke with the confidence of his master, who Zekk could feel gleaming far across space and time like a beacon to all things that suffered, the boy still wondered if he had truly glimpsed truth in the Embrace, or had merely gone mad in it—and he was willing to throw as many Jedi as necessary into the tender mercies of the Embrace to see if he alone had broken. He wanted a Jedi to confirm the validity of that enormous epiphany which had driven him into Sithhood, wanted Zekk to use the power of the transcendent moment, should he reach it, to scry the future.

An unending expanse of pain greeted him, a place where nerves shivered, stretched raw and red, golden threads of potential that were really ligaments drawn taut into infinite wires. He could have spoken of a galaxy aflame, a tide of darkness rising and falling once more, victories and failures and deaths and births, truths and untruths, but he felt the time that tempered pain, felt his epiphany burning away even as he held it. He would speak one solitary truth, the only truth that did not burn, savoring the spectrum of pain in his beaten lungs, his aching jaw, his desert-dry throat.

"You weren't wrong, Ben. There is truth in pain. A hell of a lot of truth."

"I thought so. What have you come to know?"

It was a little truth that he chose to offer up, not the prophecy or vision Ben Skywalker sought in the immense scale of a universe of agony, but it was a truth nonetheless. It was a truth that enveloped the spiraling galaxy, and Ben Skywalker's eyes. It was a gift fit for a Sith Lord and his apprentice—a truth that enveloped lies, a truth that was a lie, a truth that they understood but could not understand.

"We are all wheels," Zekk said. "And we are all trapped. What has come before, will come again."

Ben Skywalker stared beyond his captive in the Embrace, appearing much older than the teenage boy he was in his spotless Guard uniform, in the ashen bags under his tired eyes, in his perfectly erect posture and careful probing presence. He waited for a moment for more, but all was silent again.

"As if I didn't already know that. You know, it will be quite a waste to throw you to the dog. You don't have to die today. I could pull some strings, get you out from under Alema. I'd have to put you on ice for a few years, but I would bring you out as a candidate for apprenticeship when the time comes. You have potential, obviously."

"Not interested. We made our bargain."

"Fair enough. Admirable. Of course, I'll get nothing more from one of Yun-Yuuzhan's chosen few. I have no further means by which I can coerce you. You've set aside a profound worry in my mind, for which I am grateful, and you held up your end of the bargain. So."

"Goodbye, Ben."

"Goodbye, Zekk. She can take nothing from you but your life. We both know there are far worse things to lose than that."

Ben turned and left, speaking into his commlink, never looking back at the Jedi Knight he had known since his earliest days at the Academy, never looking back at the Jedi Knight he had nearly killed months ago aboard the Falcon—never looking back at the Jedi Knight he was sentencing to death at the hands of Alema Rar.

"Of course I felt it. I know you wanted to have your fun with him, but our master would not be pleased if we risked letting something that dangerous escape," he said, and the door slid shut with a quiet woosh behind him.

Zekk hung there, in the afterglow, watching what would become of the sound he had been. His death would be unknown to all but a few, felt distantly by the Jedi who had known him. There was no record of his capture here to classify, and there would be no evidence of his passing to find—Alema would leave behind scant little in the way of remains for Galactic Alliance Guard spooks to dispose of. His love for Jaina—and he knew now that it had always been a love, no matter how he had tried to escape it—would go unrequited. His Order would suffer, buckle, gasp for life. Condemned by the son of the man he had admired most, slain by the broken woman he had hunted, killed without Ganner's chance to even fight back. So much for dying like a Jedi. He had to admire the Sith, Jacen Solo and Ben Skywalker, in the end. They knew the Embrace well.

It was all pain as Alema Rar descended upon his helpless frame, slicing with skill born from personal experience, inflicting horror beyond horror and laughing as he bled out into a Force painted in shades of torment, sad and beautiful and eternal.

Zekk remembered blue eyes flecked with gold.