Chapter 14: Epilogue (Ben)
Ben did not have a first impression of Auratera. His memory of their arrival on the planet was only of the joy on Rey's face as she stepped off the Falcon onto the green earth of their chosen home-world. Most of Ben's memories in the months after his return to the light were of Rey's blinding smile.
He was continually amazed that her smiles were for him. If the force had given him that as a vision Kylo Ren would have ceased to exist immediately.
Instead, the force had given him a vision of their joint destruction of Exogol, and a vision of Rey sitting on his lap in the TIE Whisper, telling him that she would return with him to the First Order.
It had shown him Rey wearing her black, First Order clothes, standing with him in the throne room, their hands clasped and held triumphantly in the air.
The force had shown Rey visions of their love, but it had only shown Ben what they must do. If he was honest, Ben held a tiny grudge against it for that reason. However, whenever he began to resent the force, he remembered how mercilessly Kylo Ren had strangled all hope in the existence of love from his mind after Rey's rejection. Perhaps in those circumstances, he had blocked out those visions of her before they could manifest.
They made a home on Auratera near the ruins of the old temple, called Acablas. The name was chiseled in the stone over the entrance. It took them months to fully explore and understand the vergence there, and it was over a year before they made any alterations to allow the light and the dark to meet.
The Falcon was their home for the first year. They made connections with the inhabitants of the villages and towns across the planet. While they were met with suspicion and fear, the world was a supremely peaceful one. Visitors were rare, and were only the relatives of those who had fled Auratera in generations past and knew the way back.
Once the Auraterians trusted that Ben, Rey, and Chewie were not bringing the galaxy to their doorstep, and with it the threat of occupation and war, they were kind and welcoming. They led simple lives, in small tight-knit communities. Each village seemed to have a different, specific artistic tradition. Artisans traveled from village to village, trading crafts and entertaining their neighbors.
The days were long, and the nights were rare, thanks to the two bright suns of the system. The light of the force was strong and it seemed to give everyone and everything on the planet boundless energy. It was easy to forget that one's body needed rest, and easy to ignore the signs of exhaustion. The local traditions involved rituals and holidays to ensure proper rest and renewal, but often children resisted sleep until the night came, sometimes to the point of delirium. It was not unusual to see young Auraterians with dark, sunken eyes playing with alarming vigor outside their homes.
Rey loved the long days, and sometimes she resisted rest with as much stubbornness as the village kids. Whenever it rained, which was often, she would put on one of the Auraterians' customary large rain hats and wander through the forest. Ben and Chewie stayed on the ship on those days – Chewie because it would take him ages to dry off from the rain, and Ben because he did not enjoy de-mudding the sticky, clay-like earth from his boots after a hike.
Once they settled in on the planet, Chewie came and went from Auratera. One day he returned in the Falcon with news. Ben Solo had been pardoned and was free to roam the galaxy. His mother wanted to see him.
She was on Naboo.
Rey did not know that Naboo was the home-world of Emperor Palpatine, and Ben did not have the heart to tell her. There was a lot of history Rey did not know about, since she had not attended a formal school on Jakku. She learned languages out of necessity as a child, and an old woman had agreed to teach her how to read in exchange for portions. Her memories of her parents were few and fuzzy, but she did remember attending a small village school before they sold her for drinking money.
"I remember learning numbers there," Rey told him. "Not much else."
When they arrived on Naboo, their desire to do so without fanfare fell apart immediately. The Falcon was recognized and they disembarked to the stares of many curious bystanders. Ben noticed Rey's hand moved to her saber staff, and he took her arm in his. Luckily, Chewie's presence was enough to make the crowd back away.
Leia met them with a welcoming party of Rose, Finn, Poe, C3PO, BB-8, and R2-D2. Rose stepped aside to coax the last member of the greeting party from behind her generous, flowing robe.
"This is Kori," she said.
It was the boy formerly know as FR-9982. He did not seem to have grown much since they rescued him from the Supremacy, but he looked healthier and he smiled shyly.
Many of the children from the Supremacy had found homes with families on Naboo, as had many of the former stormtroopers that rebelled. Poe was running a flight academy off-planet, and Finn was in charge of helping the stormtroopers transition into civilian life, finding work and homes across a variety of systems in the galaxy.
"Hello," Kori said. "You were the one who put me on that ship."
The boy pointed vaguely to the Falcon.
"I still don't understand how you did that," he said.
"We used the force," Rey said, crouching down next to him.
"I've heard of the force. Rose talks about it, and so does Finn," said Kori.
"So does Ms. Leia," said Rose.
"I know," said Kori. "She said when you come to visit, you might show me your lightsabers."
He looked hopefully at Rey, then at Ben.
Rey laughed and said, "Of course we'll show you our lightsabers."
She stood up and said, "This is mine."
Rey ignited the dual yellow blades of her saber staff and twirled it slowly a few times in front of her body. Kori's eyes lit up immediately.
"Wow..." he said softly.
He tore his eyes away from Rey's staff and looked at Ben.
"Can I see yours, too?" he asked.
Ben obliged, and Kori jumped as the white blade of Ben's lightsaber was ignited.
"Whoa," he said, looking up as Ben lifted the saber in the air for a moment. "Those are so cool."
"There's one more, actually," Rey said. "Do you want to see it?"
"Yeah!" asked Kori.
Rey smiled and took Luke's lightsaber from her belt. She held it out to Finn, who looked at Leia and waited for her to nod before he accepted it. He grinned as he swung the green saber in the air a few times for Kori.
Before they returned home, Ben and Rey took Finn back to Ahch-To and trained him in the art of lightsaber dueling. They were warmly welcomed by the caretakers.
Finn became their student, though he was nearly done training by that time. They took him to the mirrored wall, and waited outside as he entered the cave behind the mirror to meditate on truths hidden and unpleasant. Finn left Ahch-To with a mission – to start an academy for force-sensitives. There would be no lightsaber training. Even if they wanted to train students to fight, where would they find the kyber to build weapons? Leia and Finn would hire academic teachers and they would teach the children to meditate and find balance and guidance in the force.
Now that Ben's named was cleared, he and Rey traveled the galaxy righting the imbalances in the force created by thousands of years of separation, fear, and hatred between the worshipers of the light and the darkness.
It was not until they'd traveled every corner of the galaxy, and returned to Auratera for a long, much-needed rest in their green home-world, that they considered training a new generation of force-wielders. It was the final fear they must face – would they be able to train students without losing them to extreme views? The Jedi and the Sith were dead, but their beliefs and actions still rippled through the galaxy. Their stories remained.
Though Auratera remained forgotten and sparsely inhabited, there were more than a few force-sensitives in the population. Something about living on a planet that held such a strong vergence seemed to affect the biology and bloodlines of the people there. Steeped as they were in the light side of the force, they had no fear of the darkness. They did not even have a name for it – or so Ben thought for quite some time.
Death on Auratera was a rarely a tragedy. There was virtually no sickness, and it was unusual for anyone to die from anything other than old age, all going peacefully in their sleep. Children were rarely injured, seemingly from immense good luck, despite carrying on recklessly as children do.
Ben kept detailed journals of their adventures across the galaxy, and he wrote volumes about life on Auratera. In doing this, he discovered that the tranquil existence the inhabitants enjoyed was not without a darkness of its own. It became clear when they began to identify the force-sensitive children, spending a great deal of time in the villages interacting with them as they played before and after school.
Children sometimes disappeared, never to be seen again. Ben suspected the worst from the beginning, when the other children seemed to have no memory of their playmates once they were gone. Finally, Rey was able to get one of the children to tell her the truth – or rather, the truth as they understood it.
"He went to the healer," the girl whispered furtively.
The healer was not a person, as Ben and Rey learned when the girl drew them a map. The healer was a second vergence hidden deep in the heart of the thickest, wildest forest on Auratera. There was a reason no villages bordered the dark woods. It was the planet's dark secret.
"How did we miss this?" Rey asked in horror, as they stood in the humid forest, staring down at a dark pit lined with thick vegetation, emitting a familiar cold darkness.
"It might be the only planet in the galaxy with more than one vergence," said Ben.
It took months for them to work out that most of the children had visited "the healer" at some point in their lives, when they had been disobedient or otherwise naughty. The majority were so traumatized after meeting the darkness of the force for the first time that they never dared to disobey or be unkind again.
The ones who were brought back a second time never returned.
Perhaps all it took was a peek into the pit, and they were drawn in by the darkness. The plants growing along the walls were not found anywhere else on the planet.
Ben and Rey knew what they had to do. They felled the trees and burned down the dark forest, and in doing so revealed themselves as force-wielders to the Auraterians. Then, they waited.
Eventually, parents of force-sensitives came to them, asking them to help their wayward children who struggled to conform to the pure lightness that overwhelmed their world and their culture.
No more children on Auratera were abandoned to the darkness in secrecy and shame. They came to live with Ben and Rey, and learn about the balance of the force, in the shadow of the ruined temple, on a low hill that rose just high enough to give sight to the demolished dark forest in the distance, where the darkness still lived, now doused in the light for all to see on the long, bright days of Auratera.