We followed Myren's lead in removing our eye protection and trekking slowly into the valley. Although we walked on solid rock, our boots made little sound, muffled by some property of the tense space.
It was nearly a quarter hour before we reached the clearing, a circle of hewn and fitted stone like the imprint of some massive hammer on the irregular valley. In the center of the space was a small recess, and here the old Master carefully produced a single crystal, unwrapped from several layers of cloth. He bent to place the crystal in the center of the clearing, and stood back as pulsing radiance outlined geometric hairline cracks in the circular surface. The light seemed to flow, not outward from the crystal, but inward toward it.
Nodding in satisfaction, Master Sebrek gestured around at the clearing, and then at me and Olana. "This is where you two will spend your nights. Be here by an hour after sundown. Attune to the crystal for at least an hour, and then be asleep by midnight. Here's an alarm to warn you to return to the temple proper before sunrise."
Olana asked, "What are we supposed to do?"
The old man responded by reaching to take her pack off of her back, unfolding the portable cot. "One night, you'll wake up and the key crystal will be missing. Bring it back."
"That's it?" Olana couldn't help herself asking.
Myrek rolled his eyes. "Of course not. The mists will manifest illusions from your mind, which you'll need to interact with to get the stone back. Well, his mind. Obi-wan attunes to the crystal; you just keep him company." He nodded to Dooku. "The Count and I -"
"Not quite yet, I'm afraid," Dooku interjected.
"Soon enough. Anyway, Master Dooku and I will sleep in the temple quarters at night, and we'll all convene together for meals and training during the day. This shouldn't take more than a week."
Among his other talents, Myren was a decent cook, and he'd brought a variety of frozen foodstuffs for our stay. Cold storage was plentiful on the ice planet of Ilum.
It was lunch on the second day when Dooku nodded to my left bracer. "I've not noticed any change in your dueling style since you added that piece. What is its purpose?"
"I use it as the interface for a combat computer," I explained, and I felt the incredulity from all other three Jedi at the table.
"Kid, I hate to tell you this," Myren chided, "but unless you've managed to put some sort of time-reverse circuitry in that thing, it's not going to help you in a lightsaber duel. You're already accounting for two or three tenths of a second in the future just from basic Force perception. Computers are necessarily slower than that."
"As a control scheme, yes." I slurped a spoonful of hot soup. "That's not how I'm using it."
"What do you suppose we'll see?" I asked Olana as we prepared to turn in for the fourth time. As cold as it was, we'd quickly pushed our bedrolls together on the first night. I always awoke first, and made sure to pry her arms from around me and reposition her in her own bag before she could wake up and feel embarrassed by it.
"The point of this," Olana considered, "is to confront your Visions, and their relationship to reality. So I suspect we'll interact with something from your Visions. Important people, maybe, or alternate versions of them. Live through different events."
"Well, hopefully it will give you more insight into what I've seen, then, in addition to helping me overcome my own issues."
At an hour past midnight, it wasn't the feeling of dread that awakened us, or the rasping of things moving around outside the clearing. No, it was the gunshots.
The loud cracks echoed around the area, and were only after accompanied by loud moans that I didn't immediately recognize. Olana sprang to her feet within moments of me, our lightsabers both coming to life in our hands. This eliminated the otherwise dark clearing: the crystal was gone, and so were the glowing patterns that had given us light these past nights.
"What was that loud noise? A small explosion?" Olana asked.
"Sort of," I explained. "That's what small arms fire from Earth sounds like. They use slugthrower weapons, pushing metal instead of plasma, so the vibrations are much louder."
"Earth, as in where your Visions supposedly came from?" Olana and I were each reaching our senses out, trying to determine what awaited within the mists. Nothing.
"That's what we were expecting, right?" I reminded her. "Something involving my Visions, something we can confront."
"And that something is?" she prompted.
"Let's find out." I gestured for her to follow me, and slowly approached the mist with my saber drawn.
I didn't make it out of the clearing before the thing shambled into view. The waxy skin and vacant expression above blood-smeared lips, the rotting eyeballs. I sent it flying away from us with a wave of my empty hand; it responded to the Force like an inanimate object rather than a living thing.
No sooner had it left my sight than two others bounded into view, clumsy but no less single-minded in their approach. My senses told me they were no more alive than the ground; whether this was the nature of the Force illusion clearly powering this, or the fact that they were dead, I had no idea.
"What are these things?" Olana asked. More had appeared from the opposite side of the clearing; Olana sliced through two with ease.
"Not sure," I admitted. "The obvious answer is, 'zombies,' reanimated corpses from Earth fiction, but," I nodded to the one I had just pushed back, who was wearing the jumper of a space-fighter pilot, "they're dressed like Galactics, not from Earth."
"There are stories of Sith reanimating corpses," my Padawan pointed out. "But what would that represent, in this context?"
"I really have no idea. If we -" My speech was cut off by searing pain as I felt something puncture my left shoulder. I felt it hook into my flesh, pulling me back with tremendous force, and slashed out with my blade to sever whatever connected me to this new threat.
The mantis-like form of the Yam'rii, now missing its upper claw, was visible moments later. Like the other forms, it bore the markings of injury and shambled with the off-cadence of death, even as it clicked its mandibles aggressively. Other clicks could be heard behind it.
"Oh, I get it," I said as I pulled a small anti-personnel grenade from my belt. "The corpses are all the people I've killed. If the Yam'rii count, we're looking at a bit over four hundred altogether, so be prepared." I thumbed the contact and rolled the explosive out into approaching mob.
"Are we supposed to fight through them to find the crystal?" Olana asked.
"No need," a gravelly voice said as a man stepped into the clearing. In one hand he held a Glock pistol; in the other was a small girl not more than three. The girl wasn't dressed like him; he wore jeans and a button-down shirt over a prodigious stomach, while she was dressed in the smallest version of a youngling's Jedi garb. I looked into the set of eyes that I'd always found to be ice-cold, no expression ever visible, even when I had them on my own face. "Hand it to her, sweetie," he said in a softer, smoother tone, limping badly as he hauled the small child toward my Olana.
The little girl held the glowing crystal carefully in both hands, and without a word handed it to my Padawan before burying her face in the man's flabby chest. "Go ahead," he prompted. "Put it back, Olana."
A fresh group of shambling corpses emerged from the mist, but were just as quickly chopped down by a pair of Jedi blades. The pair in Jedi robes followed. An old man, weather-worn and scowling, entered side-by-side with a young woman wearing just as serious an expression.
Olana turned to me, then at my nod, sank the crystal quickly into its place in the clearing. The moans, and dull scraping sounds, both ceased. A Toydarian corpse, halfway out of the mists, fell to the ground as though incinerated.
"Sorry to short circuit things," the man's voice growled again, "but the zombies were scaring O-Lana. And I have the Glock, so I figured this was fine." He panted audibly, his voice changing tone again. "Dearest, Obi-wan is here."
The girl immediately popped up and looked around, fixating on me with a huge grin. She leapt from her perch with abandon, he and I collectively made the transfer without dropping her.
"And so we arrive," the old man intoned, his weapon sheathed as he approached us. "And confront the follies of youth. Or perhaps its greater wisdom?"
"I'll go ahead and tell you: I wasn't any wiser back then," the adult woman said. "Quite the opposite." She stepped up to Olana, and there was no concealing the resemblance. A decade and a half had added almost a foot in height, but these were clearly phases of life of the same person.
"Hey guys," the large man spoke up to the two older Jedi as he checked and holstered his firearm. "Don't take this further than it goes. We're manifestations of their minds, not the other way around. We won't actually be any more knowledgeable or wiser than they are."
"Who are you supposed to be?" Olana was looking from one person to another with confusion.
"The past and the future. Or, a lost future, anyway," the old man replied. "Obi-wan Kenobi, Master in exile, hiding from the Empire. Safeguarding the remaining hope of the Galaxy."
"General Olana Chion," the young woman said. "Jedi Knight. Loyal to the Republic, fighting to the end."
The other man finished. "She's three-year-old O-Lana, recently of Kegan, now starting her training at the Jedi Temple. And I," he turned to my Padawan, extending a hand warmly, "am Adam G. Pugh, attorney at law. Nice to meet you."