Kessel Run Week Four Challenge: Write a story between 100 and 1,000 words from the perspective of the Force.
4: As the Force Wills (Everyone, everywhen)
People like to say "as the Force wills," as though I deliberately manipulate every little thing that happens, everywhere, always. Which, considering much of what happens in the galaxy, would make me little short of a monster.
I'm not a monster.
Nor am I, frankly, interested in looking over everyone's shoulders as they decide what color shoe to wear or what drink to order.
People choose their own paths.
What I do is keep the overall course running smoothly.
Sometimes a trickle breaks off and goes in a different direction. Sometimes that trickle eventually rejoins the greater flow. Sometimes it doesn't. It's the latter case where I have to step in.
This wasn't such a case. It never was. The trickle that began when she was small stopped when her master died, pooling instead, moving neither forward nor back, a quiet, angry, despairing puddle that knew only that everything had ended.
When you have my point of view, you know that nothing ends.
The puddle began to creep back toward the proper flow when she met him. In fits and starts, certainly. It wasn't a drastic, immediate thing. He simply held his hand out and kept it out, and sometimes she spat and kicked and sometimes she took a step and sometimes she withdrew. But he was steadfast and she was no fool and there came a time when she saw the trickle of her life for what it had been, a diversion, a deviation, a course to be corrected, and she rejoined the greater flow of her own accord.
No need for me to do anything at all but watch, in her case.
That's one thing I excel at, watching. It is, after all, the essence of my work, to know where each drop is and where it should be and when to let it meander and when to pull it back.
And to answer when I'm called.
Only certain people can call. I have nothing to do with that. It's a mere accident of existence.
Some people demand, drag, claw. Her master was one such. I still answer—it is the way of things—but the results tend to be more deviations. Not always. Sometimes the path of the greater course is dark, there's no escaping that. But usually.
Some people merely connect.
Her connection was hesitant at first. There were sputters. But it grew gradually and steadily stronger, glowing, warming.
I noticed when it became bright and steady.
I say that I noticed. It may have been a moment, it may have been an eternity. The perspective I hold encompasses both lightning and the lifespan of all that has ever been. The measuring of time tends to be an indistinct process.
Yet there she was, not a raging fire, nor a guttering candle. A beacon. And I noticed. And I looked.
Where once she had been solitary, now she was embraced and embracing, engulfed and overflowing. Steady. Bright.
Happy.
Reaching out, as he once had to her, building the current as it should be, gently guiding the deviations, as she had once been, back into the overall course.
Back in line with my "will," as she would say. As he would. As their family would.
I do not manipulate, neither do I preordain.
But harmony preserves the course, the flow, the path.
And in rejoining the whole, she had herself become a creator of harmony.
As the Force wills.