The Hope touched down sort of awkwardly. Rey was nervous and she couldn't really hide that. She was a good enough pilot – quite good, really – but everything seemed heightened, strange, like operating in a dream. Gannaria's air control hadn't cared about her leaving, and she was grateful not to have to force her will on anyone else just to get off that world with her cargo full of berries and river water.
Now she was here, her hands trembling on the flight controls, the Jedi temple just concealed behind a tangle of vines. She'd seen the huge complex from above and had known what it was without a doubt. The planet was dominated by hulking pyramids, with cracking plazas around them and ancillary buildings clustering about, but everything was covered over by the jungle, slowly reclaiming the abandoned spaces. This pyramid, the temple complex, stood on the top of a hill. She had no choice but to settle the Hope downhill from the temple; while it was small enough, it was long in the wings and needed a flat surface. A plaza, once carefully tended and now seeming to be snapped in half with green plants snaking upward through the crack, served the need. She opened the door and it lowered to the plaza surface, landing with a metallic clunk that seemed overloud in the virtual silence of the abandoned planet.
She picked up her bag, the one that contained the Jedi texts, and checked once again that her lightsaber was at her hip. No animals, sentient or otherwise, had appeared; likely no ships had been here in the decades since Luke's visit, and surely the planet's fauna was terrified by her sudden arrival. She closed the door behind her, the boarding door raising back up into the ship, and she was entirely alone. Cut off.
It was not humid here, not like Ajan Kloss, but comfortable like Kashyyyk. She knew she should leave the texts on the ship, but their weight on her shoulder was a comfort, like carrying the wisdom of the ancient sages. She'd made sure that she ate something before this perhaps-final adventure yet her stomach turned over as if starved for days, and the meditations hadn't helped to calm her. Only action, she knew, could cure what was ailing her. She drew in a deep breath and began her walk uphill to the temple.
It was a masterwork. Heavy stones had been fit together so tightly that a sheet of parchment could not slip between them; each one was carefully carved so that the stone bowed out toward the middle and curved back to where it touched the next. The stones were dark and rough and perhaps a bit damp; dark vines crept up the walls as high as her head and beyond, spreading their broad leaves to catch the sunlight. They sprouted a cone-shaped fruit, deep violet and nearly glowing; tiny white flowers encircled the fruit like a crown, and, upon closer inspection, she could see that their centers were a deep blood red. Rey cocked an eyebrow at the sight, hoping that this would not be some sort of sign.
She had to search for the door, therefore, hidden beneath the vegetation. She found it only by running her hand over the wall, slipping her fingers through the vines and leaves, feeling for a surface that differed from the heavy stones. At last, she found a smooth spot; when she pressed her hand in deeper, her whole palm could lie against polished rock. This was it, the door, though she could not yet see it. She drew her hand back and examined it. No damage, though what had she expected? She could tug down the vines, maybe, and reveal the entirety of the door, but that seemed like a fool's errand. The vines were thick and well adhered to the stones. Instead, she drew her lightsaber, ignited it, and carefully, deftly, sliced through the vines. They hissed as the heat of the plasma burned through them, but the act was as precise as scalpel and they fell away neatly, leaving as little damage as possible to the plants.
Now she stepped back to see it. The lintel of the door was carved with glyphs of some sort, each in a box and representing some sort of animal, mythical or otherwise. The lintel extended past the supports, which were smooth and carved not like animals but like the vines that were working so hard to retake the temple. The door itself was taller than she and very grand. Clearly everything here was meant to impress.
Three figures were carved shallowly into the stone of the door. At least, they looked like figures: like the animals on the lintel, they were highly stylized. But they were different, elongated rather than squared off. They were so lightly drawn that they seemed like etchings into metal, with no tool marks or even scratches from the vicissitudes of the local flora. If she looked at them just so, they seemed to be people, but blink or turn her head, and she lost the image and could see only the lines.
Rey was so entranced by the seemingly shifting image that it took her several minutes to realize that the door had no handle. How could she enter through a door with no handle? She leaned toward it, overcoming her inexplicable resistance to touching it, and ran her hands over the surface, the edges, the top and bottom, searching for some way to open it. She dug her fingernails into the stone and cursed in a way that would make Lump proud, but she could get no purchase.
"No," she whispered to the stone. She had not come this far to not even get a chance. She pushed instead of pulled, but the door did not yield. She pounded a fist into the stone, but not even an echo returned to her. Anger, the anger she'd come to know these months, the mute fury at the utter unfairness – the absolute injustice – of her life rose up again. It started in her stomach, a cold feeling, and crept up into her chest. She groaned and ground her forehead into the unbearably smooth rock, and the rage flooded down her arms and out her fingers. Sparks shot out from her and scrabbled over the door, dissipating harmlessly and ineffectually into nothing.
Rey let herself sink to the ground on her knees. She'd been hoping, begging, for the chance to try again, to fix what had gone wrong on Exogol. To repay what she could not deserve to have received. Most of all, to restore to him the opportunity he'd never really had the chance to grasp. Hot tears of frustration, of desperation, overflowed and ran down her cheeks, dripping onto her pathetic, dirty dress.
"Please."
Only silence replied. The stone temple, unmoved by her prayer, stood as implacable as the moment she'd landed.
But then.
A clink of stone on stone resonated from somewhere within. Her ear, pressed against the door, could just hear it. Then a scraping sound followed, deep and low, stone sliding on stone. The door, unfathomably heavy, moved under her fingers. It slid inward, almost imperceptibly, and then to the left, sliding, grinding, and disappearing into the wall itself. In just a minute, the entire slab of the door had slid open and away, leaving the entryway to the dark temple yawning and passable.
She gaped up from the ground at the huge open doorway, not able to believe what her eyes were telling her. With a sharp jerk, though, realizing that the door could close again just as quickly and with just as little warning, she climbed to her feet. Her blade was holstered at her hip, but she was quite sure that there was no use for it inside. The bag over her shoulder could only slow her down from what she knew she'd have to do in haste, so she set it behind a low, overgrown tree. She could not say why the temple had decided to let her in, but she would never be more ready than she was, so she entered.
There was no atrium or foyer to the temple. It simply began, with the ceiling sloping upward at an absurd angle. This was the pyramid, unapologetic and vast. The floor sloped downward, her feet told her; she drew her lightsaber after all and used it as a lamp. There was little to see but darkness at the edge of the light it cast. She swallowed hard, feeling her heart in her chest, feeling her blood in her veins, and began to follow where the temple led.
Down, slowly and gently as if on an intentional grade, the floor sloped. She went slowly, unsure of her footing, even as she felt something urging her onward. Was it the Force? The temple itself? There was no way to know and, she somehow knew, no time to consider it. She went down the slowly sloping path as the walls around her slowly, slowly closed, until what had been a space as wide as the temple was only wide enough for one or two to pass. An impossible darkness surrounded her, growing as the diffuse light from the doorway faded and there was only the light from her blade - not that there was anything to see. The darkness was, however, not malicious. It seemed curiously familiar, almost comforting. If she could have assigned a personality to the absence of light, she would have said it was welcoming. It led her on until the floor stopped sloping and became flat.
Then the ground turned cool. She lowered the lightsaber to shine on it, and she realized that it was slick and glossy – it was no longer floor but water. She was standing on water, water as firm as ground but cool and perfectly, absolutely smooth. Where her feet touched it, it rippled slightly, but the ripples were damped and did not spread. She lifted her eyes and she could see that ahead of her the corridor widened again and a soft light glowed from far ahead. She extinguished the saber and took a step forward. She did not sink. Another, and still she stayed above the water. Her eyes on the light glowing up ahead, she began to run. She didn't know what was waiting for her in that light, but the anticipation drew her, forced her toward it.
A chamber of stone was waiting. She could not see the source of the light, but the chamber glowed. It was at least as large as the pyramid above, the ceiling invisibly high overhead. Rey passed a spot on the rough stone wall, a spot that was being-sized and as shiny and dark as the water beneath her feet. She peered in as she passed; nothing, not even her own face, was reflected back. The dark called her on, and she followed, past another spot of gloss. Only blackness shone there as well. But the third spot was not blank like the others: she paused, ignoring the tickle of the darkness that tried to urge her on. It was like looking into the mirror in her room on Naboo, but dark like obsidian. A figure, a human, was crumpled on the floor over another being. They were both dressed in black, but the one lying on the ground was as bald as an egg and the one crouching, his body heaving with effort, was pleading with him. Sparks shimmered over their heads. She could hear nothing of the scene, but she could feel the desperate longing and pain as she watched. But this was not her story and, after a moment, she had to pull her eyes away. When she glanced back up, they were gone.
The darkness called her and she went on. She looked back over her shoulder and all she saw was darkness again, like night closing her up inside the pyramid. She moved toward the light, the shadows pressing her forward past other glassy patches on the walls where other people's stories played out and vanished as soon as she passed.
"Where are you taking me?" she asked the nothingness. "I'm not here for any of this."
And then she stopped, and the glassy spot on the wall in front of her seemed to demand her attention. She looked into it, and, she realized, she saw what she had come for.