Author's note: Here's the second of today's two chapters! We'll be back tomorrow with another one. Thanks for reading!

Chapter Forty-Four: Legions of Stone

Journal entry #7

Well, when Lor and I talked about finding things, we said to look in the gaps. We were more right than we knew. The whole planet is a gap.

After I made it to the Iliabath system, I started making blind jumps into the neighboring sectors. No rhyme, no reason, just probing. The last one was two days ago. When I emerged from hyperspace, I thought the sensors had to be detecting some sort of gravitic anomaly. There was a gravity well, but no world there. But then my eyes adjusted from the jump, and I saw it. A ball of lesser black foregrounded against space.

Malachor.

At first I was worried there was nothing left for me to land on, but then sensor data let me know there was a surface. It was just below a planet's worth of storm clouds. Unlucky for me I didn't bring my raincoat, I thought. But when I entered atmosphere—when I broke through the canopy . . .

Beneath the cloud cover, there's no storm of any kind. Thunder, yes. The occasional fork of lightning. But no rain, no hail, nothing. The ground is dry as a bone. When I stepped out of the ship, I started to itch all over—it's like electricity crawling all over your skin, building up static charge.

Some light from the moon manages to get through, however little is left by the time it filters its way down here. I can see my surroundings, my hand in front of my face. I can make out these words as I write them down. But I can't see the stars. In that way, this planet is a locked room.

Didn't have the stomach to accomplish much, besides finding this place. There'll be time enough to venture out tomorrow. Take the ship and head toward the strange readings that came through once I broke atmosphere.

Oh, Anakin, what have you gotten me into?

[later]

That was selfish of me. The Force got me here. Or I did. I know that.

I did dream of Anakin last night, though. Before the hyperspace jump had finished.

I hope he's safe.

Journal entry #8

Well, aren't you portentous, Madam Jinn. You're your only reader, there's no point trying to spook yourself. You're here now, and nothing ate you in the night. Really.

As I write this, I'm eating a fairly expired ration pack and watching the sunrise. By that I mean I'm watching the grey around me become slightly less grey. Some subtle shades of red, even, if one squints.

Setting out after breakfast. Those strange readings I mentioned haven't changed since last night. No life forms, but a bizarre energy signature. Whatever damage the Jedi and Sith did to this place, it's still here in some form. Will have to hope it's not radiation—imagine the embarrassment if I had to turn tail and fly home again just when I arrived.

Wondering when I'll abandon this little pretension and just start talking aloud to myself.

[later]

It's not radiation.

There are so many of them.

Journal entry #9

I took off and hovered over the field. Did my best to make a rough count. More or less a thousand.

The ziggurat on the other side is enormous. My ship's scanners aren't precise enough to narrow things down beyond this general vicinity, but it's where the energy readings are coming from. It must be.

The Force is screaming at me.

Or else voices in the Force are screaming at me. I can't make out any words, or distinct people, but I can hear them in my head.

When I first saw the field, I thought it was some kind of mass memorial. A commemoration of what was lost. But I think now I understand.

I think I know what happened here.

Qui-Gon Jinn stood at one edge of a field. Beyond, on the other side, was the ziggurat, a stone stairway leading toward the heavens, rising like a mountain from the earth.

Between them lay an army of the dead.

The statues were perfect. Each she had dared to get close to had a face so distinct, so minutely textured, that it was almost as if stone could breathe. The arrested motion of each combatant—charging, falling, locked in battle with a mate—defied gravity to such an extent that it seemed as though, at any moment, the field would burst to life, the two hosts resuming a conflict centuries past.

What were your names? Qui-Gon asked, looking at the graven stone closest to her—two warriors screaming, their blades crossed in a split second's crucifix, one reaching out as if to shove the other back. There was no way to tell which one was which—no black robes, no green or red plasma bursting from hilts, just grey rock.

It was a pattern repeated over and over in different variations. Jedi and Sith, roaring bloody defiance at each other, giving no ground, frozen in a silent parody of battle. Until Qui-Gon closed her eyes and tried to touch the Force.

Then everything shrieked.

Whoever this Darth Plagueis of yours was, Anakin, she thought, flinching as a distant crack of lightning illuminated the faces before her, I don't know.

But this, it would seem, is how he ended it.

She wondered whether the figures that dotted the battlefield were in stasis, the cries one endless moment that had stretched on since the moment these people had been struck down. Or whether they'd had plenty of time to sit here, encased in their own shapes' amber, and realize what had happened to them. If they'd only then begun to scream.

Unbidden, a searing heat bloomed in her gut—she cried out aloud, petrified even as she did so that the sound would somehow bring the battlefield shooting back to life. She recognized that pain—that of a lightsaber chewing through her midriff, into her spine. The last thing she'd felt in the fight with Maul, before falling into blessed unconsciousness.

What would it be like to never stop feeling that moment, the closest anyone could come to death without crossing over? What if it was the sum total of one's existence, forever?

"A small price to pay," she whispered to herself, staring out across the gulf of flash-petrified bodies. "For balance."

Journal entry #10

What did you bring me here for?

Whatever it is that lies in the ziggurat must matter. It can't just be the weapon Plagueis used to wreak this atrocity.

I promised Anakin answers. I promised Jesmyn answers. There must be something in that temple that has them. That gives a meaning to this waste.

One thing, at least, I'm sure on. I know why the histories don't talk about this place. I know why the Jedi have made themselves forget its existence.

Well. Most of them.

I've been thinking about that last dream of mine, in the lighthouse. Dooku told me that, for four hundred years, Yoda has lived on Dagobah. According to Obi-Wan, he's eight or nine hundred years old.

The things that took place here—the hole in the Order's record-keeping—happened roughly four centuries ago.

Probably nothing. But my mind has plenty of time to wander.

Not much else to do, really. Except stare at what Plagueis left me behind for company.

Journal entry #11

There's an old myth—not a Jedi one, something I read in university. About a river that leads to the underworld, one lined with the spirits of the dead. Two coins to the ferryman, the story goes, and you may find passage across.

If that ferryman gives tours of the planet Malachor, I'd be ever so grateful were he to pay me a visit.

I tried passing them, finally. Worked up my nerve and stepped past the closest statues. Made it a few rows in, whistling to myself and pretending I wasn't scared.

The screaming grows louder the further you go. I walked as long as I could, but if I hadn't turned back it would have killed me. Silly, to think that about a sound, but I just knew. The Force, maybe. Or maybe I've been close enough to death before to sense these things. Either way, my body felt like I was on fire. If I'd gone a step further, I have a feeling that fire might have ceased to become a metaphor.

Flying over them won't do it. The statues lead right up to the temple steps.

I am, quite simply, stuck.

Well, no. That's thoughtless of me. I can turn tail and leave anytime I want to. None of them can.

It occurred to me, as I waded through them for as long as I could stand, that I don't know which of these statues were Jedi, once upon a time, and which were Sith. There's no light or dark to their presences that I can detect, just overwhelming pain and fear and incomprehension.

I suppose it should still matter to me. But somehow it doesn't.

Journal entry #12

Of all people, I find myself thinking of Mace Windu lately. Poor Mace. Take an overgrown child, give him a lightsaber, march him off to Hutt Space, and then act surprised when he comes back different? What did the Jedi expect to happen, I wonder.

Shatterpoint, as far as I'm aware, isn't a gift one can learn. You either have it or you don't, one of those quirks of the Force. A pity. I should have asked him more about it when I had the chance.

Anyway. He's not the only one I think of, looking out at these things. I think of Qlik. Obi-Wan. Luminara and Kit and all the others. I picture them locked here, endlessly, unable to free themselves.

What I keep telling myself is that the Order cannot have deliberately left these people here. I think I believe that. They would not have been that cruel. It's far more likely that, once they realized the scale of what happened to the Knights who were sent here, they simply decided to seal off this breach in their history. No references to the battle save in the barest of terms, no visits to the planet to leave a memorial, no empty plinths in the Hall of the Fallen. Shame was what drove their silence.

And the Sith, of course, wouldn't have given a damn. Or what was left of them wouldn't have, anyway.

I wonder if that's really any worse.

Journal entry #13

I've made up my mind.

I came here to find Anakin some answers, and that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make it to that ziggurat, no matter how long it takes.

But first, I'll need to get there.

A fork of lightning flashed blue against the clouds, its flare illuminating row upon row of the fallen. A few moments later, thunder followed, but it was muted, weak, a low background to the insect chorus of screams that skittered through Qui-Gon's head all the time now. In the distance, the ziggurat loomed, a towering shadow that stood stark against a planet of black.

Before her, a human man lay frozen, his face a rictus of agony. A lightsaber blade had speared through his left shoulder, was still there even now, petrified for centuries. Though the stone made it harder to tell, he looked young, maybe even younger than Anakin.

She had no way of knowing who he'd been, what he'd fought for. An entire being had, in a flash, been reduced to an essence of pain and nothing more.

The air here always crawled with electricity, but as Qui-Gon slowly raised her hand, that power gathered closer, seemed to coalesce around her. A deep, wet cold started at the base of her spine and flowed outward across her entire body as her hand drew nearer to the stone, as if she were somehow walking into a wall of frigid oil.

Her fingers hovered inches from the statue.

For a long moment, she stood there, stock still as the being that lay before her, waiting.

No voice spoke. No hidden guide whispered at the back of her mind.

Jinn, she told herself through the pulsing screams, it's about time you made a decision on your own.

Hand met stone.

The shrieks of the dead slammed silent as if exposed to vacuum.

And then another wail burst open in Qui-Gon's brain, annihilating any ability for conscious thought. It was this statue's, she knew that, but with every second it ground on the more it felt indistinguishable from her own (maybe I'm screaming too maybe that's what this is oh no what if I can't get OUT).

Pain bloomed in her shoulder, a white-hot fire that should have eradicated her nerves' ability to feel but instead just continued, a torch chewing its way through her skin. That sensation she knew all too well, a lightsaber burning its way through flesh, so close to her face that she could smell charring meat. She should have flinched away from it, done her best to hurl herself backward off the blade, but right now it was like a life preserver thrown to her in the midst of a shadowy sea—she clutched at the pain, held it, let it burn away the scream and bring her purpose back into focus.

Grinding her back teeth together as she took the fire into herself, she opened her eyes. The face before her was no longer stone but flesh, still frozen in a single moment of enduring torment—for a horrified instant, the overpowering wail still echoing through her head despite her newfound clarity, she felt the certainty that it was her face.

Biting down harder, she let her own keening moan build in the back of her throat, then pushed outward with the Force as hard as she could.

The statue's cry built to a fever pitch, enough that Qui-Gon felt an overpowering urge to take a drill to her eardrums, to dash her head against the rock, to do anything to make the noise stop—

And then all at once it burst, her consciousness snapping back into her own head with such force that the absence of pain felt almost as overwhelming as the pain had.

When she opened her eyes, nothing stood before her.

A small pile of ash lay at her feet, no more than that of a small campfire. It was the same grey the stone had been, smoldering faintly. As Qui-Gon watched, its last embers cooled from orange to black, a thin trail of smoke wafting upward from them.

For a few precious moments, she felt a wordless exhalation of relief. Hers, but more than that—whoever she'd just set free sighing a grateful farewell.

Then it had gone, and the army of screams returned. Really, Qui-Gon knew, they had never left.

Swaying, she stood there, looking out at the battlefield that lay before her. At the pyramid beyond.

Thunder rolled.

Journal entry #14

I can't.

Journal entry #15

Oh, cheer up, Qui-Gon. Beginnings are beginnings! Of course this looks bad. But all you have to do is keep your perspective.

It has been . . . a long two days. I'll give you that much. But it's work worth doing. Work that should have been done centuries ago! And just think, you'll be able to hold this over the Order's heads for the rest of your life once you get back. All their dirty work accomplished for them, by you, all on your lonesome. Surely that's worth mastery. Or a bigger bedroom, at least.

Well, if you choose to go back to the Temple. If Jesmyn will follow you there.

That's a long way off. Focus on the here and now, Dooku would say, or the here and now will never be done with you.

Twenty statues down, a clear pathway before you, answers beckoning ahead, and plenty of rations in the ship. And there's that spring you found today! Brackish, but water is water.

Just settle into it. Put this journal down and get back to writing once you've made some progress. It won't be long.

[No further journal entries were made.]

Jedi Archives: The Great Scourge

And when the armies of the dark lords descended upon the temple, they unleashed a Great Scourge. Jedi and Sith were consumed in its fire; the few who survived warn of its fury. The temple is tarnished, cast aside. Silenced forever.

Never return.