Disclaimer: Any recognizable names belong to George Lucas. I have no
special permission to write this story and am not making any money from it.
Author's Note: I actually wrote most of this story almost two years ago, and finished and I am now editing and adding finishing touches to chapters as I post them. Anyway, when I wrote this I had my own back story about who Qui Gon's was. It doesn't play a major part in this story, but I also didn't want to change the story by removing it, so I guess this is a minor AU.
Chapter 2
It was noon before they came within sight of the temple. Qui Gon rained in the Kybus and he and Obi Wan sat in silence for a minute, staring out across the pure gulf of space to the temple. The temple was at the end of a box canyon. A mass of terraces and lodges had been built into ledges or caves on the canyon wall, or right on the vertical rock itself like the whole temple complex was some kind of a plant that had grown there. A natural water-worn stone pillar rose up from the canyon floor and level after level of ring shaped terraces circled it. A web-work of bridges linked them to the main complex. A sentinel lodge perched on top of the pillar. The lodge's highest rooftop ended in a tall pole, and from the pole flew a banner emblazoned with the snowflake-like Allcircle, emblem of the Jedi. A wreath of large intertwined circles surrounding a star shaped pattern of smaller linked rings on a field of red.
The main Jedi temple was on Coruscant, but the Jedi by nature could not have just one center. So there were outposts, satellite temples, smaller, but still home to hundreds, built throughout the galaxy, on Kashyyyk, Corelia, Alderaan, Ithor, and here on Ferrio. The temples were safe havens for masters to train their students, and provided a constant home for the Jedi that wanted one. There were also proxeums, smaller centers of learning by action scattered throughout the Republic, and the Chu'unthor II that traveled the space lanes picking up new initiates from planets across the galaxy.
Qui Gon had never felt any burning necessity to make a home at one of the temples. His Master had been a wanderer, and he was content to be one, too. The Jedi themselves were his home, the sense of peace inside him was his home, the Force was his home. And yet he was glad to arrive at the Ferrio temple. Many Jedi together focused the Force, reflecting and amplifying it. The Ferrio temple was a warm beating heart of energy. He could tell Obi Wan was relaxing a little too, basking in the light side aura. Although he had been doubtful of the reports about the cave, Obi Wan had obviously been disturbed by what he felt there.
The Temple Master welcomed them in the main courtyard, beneath a spreading bloodsap tree. She was a small gaunt Ferrio woman, with a short mane of silver and red striped hair that almost seemed to shiver around her head even when she was still. Her face was stern and hard, her strong features etched like the stone cliffs, and her bright black eyes flashed like an edge of chipped obsidian. She wore pale gray-brown robes and carried a knarred ironwood staff.
"Come, Jedi." She said after accepting their bows stone faced, and led them up to her cell. She sat down on the floor with her feet tucked carefully under her knees and laid her staff down in front of her. Qui Gon and Obi Wan sat down across from her.
"When did it start?" Qui Gon asked in a low, grave voice.
"Master Kray took his apprentice to the cave three months ago. Somehow she found more than the darkness within herself. She was half conscious and hallucinating by the time Kray got her out, and when they got back to the temple, Kray was too. He is dead now. There was nothing I could do."
"What will happen to his student?"
The Temple Master's grim features grew even darker. A fierce sadness flashed behind her eyes, but they never flinched. "It will be difficult for her. The power over her is broken, she will continue training, but she is marked forever. The dark side will always be very close to her."
"Can I talk to her?"
"If she will speak to you, Teacher. She may not." She paused. "There was not much anger in her. More troubled students have come out of the vergence unharmed. Suddenly the cave grew hungry."
"The evil is somehow spreading." She continued. "It moves beyond the cave. Several of us have lost their speech. Perhaps until this thing is destroyed. Perhaps forever. One Master feels agony in the presence of any living thing. Three of my clan have left the order. They want no more to do with the Force after seeing this aspect of it." The Temple Master paused again. "The evil is spreading somehow. We all dream of it now."
"There are no children here, no initiates." Qui Gon said half to himself, a sinister realization coming over him.
"No. The young ones have been sent to safety. This is no longer a place for innocents. But my clan" she said emphatically, meaning the temple's Jedi "and I will not surrender to this evil."
"It took Kray because he tried to help his Apprentice?" Obi Wan ventured, feeling a little out of his depth. But he had a strange feeling that Qui Gon himself was a little puzzled by what lay in those wise black eyes, and it didn't seem to bother him.
"Vengeance is of the dark side." Qui Gon said softly then looked up at the temple master. "Obi Wan had a vision when we were at the cave. Of the past that created the vergence, and then of something else."
"What did you see, Learner?"
"Connections, a web." The vision flooded back as the force sharpened his memory. "Like a fractal, or a plant sending out runners, or axons in a nerve."
"It seemed to look back at us." Qui Gon added.
"You are not the first Jedi coming back from the cave to say that." She settled her hands on her knees. "I think the cave is sentient. If not that, predatory. An evil thing in it's own right."
He closed his eyes and sighed. "I've never heard of or seen anything like that before, but it sound right. How else would it be able to attack ones so close to the light side so viciously?"
* * * * *
Qui Gon could feel the student's misery before he even stepped into her room. It was as if her mind kept up a muttered chant of despair through the Force no matter what direction her thoughts went in. It almost swept Qui Gon along with it, it went so deep. He felt a blackness start to seep into him. Exorcizing the vergence would not make her pain any better, the damage had been done. He would have to remember that. But he did not hesitate as he keyed the door (not hanging curtain of cloth like most of the other rooms in the temple, a thick, sliding sheet of metal) or steel himself against the empathetic pain. This was one of the hardest and most vital things a Jedi needed to learn, to face suffering with an open heart.
The room was almost completely bare of personal possessions, even by Jedi standards, and yet looked cluttered, the objects in apathetic disorder. As Qui Gon looked over the room he began to understand why it was so empty, the knowledge simply entering his consciousness as it so often did. She had next to nothing because she had given away or destroyed everything she had had when she lived with Kray.
The student, who's name the Temple Master would not say, because to the Ferrio using someone's name was a source of dominating power, was of a species Qui Gon had never met before, humanoid from the waist up and serpentine from the waist down. She sat by the window, resting back on the coiled loops of her lower body and tail, shoulders back, head unflinchingly up. Her coal colored hair was sheared in a Padawan's short prickly crest, but the cord of her braid had been cut.
"Mang." Qui Gon whispered softly from the doorway.
"Temple Master told me about you, Master Jinn." She kept looking out into the open air of the canyons, but Qui Gon felt Force senses wrapping around him and scrutinizing him like a million eyes and feelers. "Enter."
He took slow steps into the middle of the room and stopped in the middle of it. He could feel she was not afraid, not of him, but to go any closer would have been cruel and disrespectful.
"Do you know what happened to me in the cave?"
"The demon attacked you and your Master. That's all I know."
She looked at him silent and hard. Her eyes were dark bronze, slit pupilled and eerily wide. "I went down into the cave, Master Jinn. Only the mouth is narrow, just below, it opens out. A shaft of light comes down from the entrance. I heard something moving in the dark corners, but I couldn't sense it or see its heat. I tried to track it, but the sounds kept jumping across the cave, always far away from where I was. Then Kray grabbed me from behind. Kray attacked me, he dug his claws into me. Kray was going to kill me and leave me down there with the dark side. I couldn't escape so I wrapped myself around Kray and squeezed. He didn't stop until he stopped breathing. That is what I remember, Master Jinn."
Qui Gon frowned, feeling guilty. Mang had obviously adopted the Ferrio way of using names, and was subtly punishing him for speaking hers. And desperately trying to control the memory of her dead Master.
"You know that's not what happened."
Mang nodded. "Temple Master has told me that again and again. She has protected me. She says the demon got inside Kray and killed him. It got inside both of us, but Kray helped save me. She showed me her memories of Kray bringing me home. But what I remember hasn't changed."
She unfolded her arms and braced her hands on the windowsill. Qui Gon saw a bracelet around her right wrist, almost hidden by the sleeve of her baggy tunic. A leather thong, dark against her pale skin wound around her wrist several times and threaded through a rough, dark green crystal. Qui Gon saw an invisible globe of energy around it as it caused a delicate but profound shift in the pattern of the Force. A chiasamus stone.
"She takes care of you. Did she give you this?" He held his hand out towards the crystal, frowning slightly. Was Mang in that much danger?
"I asked her for it. I will never be sure what happened in the cave. At least with this I can know the dark side doesn't still have me."
Qui Gon was impressed by the Temple Master's devotion to her foster Apprentice. Chiasamus stones were among the rarest minerals in the galaxy, she must have worked long and hard convincing the temple to give her a crystal for Mang. The were treasured, not for their appearance, similar medium hard, translucent green crystals could be found in abundance all across the galaxy, but chiasmus was as rare as rain storms on Tattooine. It was their microscopic structure that made them priceless, that created a resonance in the Force that was extremely painful to Force sensitive. Some crystals affected the light side, others the dark side. A darksider could not stand to be in the same room with the crystal Mang was wearing.
Her taught posture and hard hollow look didn't change but Qui Gon felt less of her pain and grief. Not necessarily because she felt better, but because he was causing less of it and she felt faintly less hostile. He sensed she accepted his presence and moved quietly to stand by her side in front of the window."
"Hasn't the Force been able to show you what is true and what is not?" He asked.
"No," She said, looking down the canyon to where the cave was. "The Force can't do everything." There was no bitterness in her voice, but there was a matter-of-fact emptiness that hurt Qui Gon's heart.
"Then why do you continue your training?"
"I don't know." A pause. "But I will." She said with raw determination.
He relaxed a little in a moment of relief. She had great strength. The nature of her strength reminded him so much of himself, so many times lost, hurt, and blind, not knowing if anything could save him, but finding something that might save him and struggling along with it as best he could.
"Some day you might be able to see the truth, like learning to spar blindfolded. I've seen and felt things that no one should, but little by little, you can grow back. You really can." She hissed far back in her throat. "Not always. Sometimes something inside someone breaks and never gets better. Once Master and I were searching for the killer of a young woman. The second I met her father the Force told me he would never stop grieving."
"You may be right, but I feel that you will."
She turned and looked at him. "The Temple Master told me about you. Your foreseeing isn't worth water on Mon Calamaria."
"Your right, but I still feel it. And I know that whatever happens you will be a Jedi." That meant many things, and it didn't necessarily mean she would heal, but it was a life and better than despair and nothingness.
Author's Note: I actually wrote most of this story almost two years ago, and finished and I am now editing and adding finishing touches to chapters as I post them. Anyway, when I wrote this I had my own back story about who Qui Gon's was. It doesn't play a major part in this story, but I also didn't want to change the story by removing it, so I guess this is a minor AU.
Chapter 2
It was noon before they came within sight of the temple. Qui Gon rained in the Kybus and he and Obi Wan sat in silence for a minute, staring out across the pure gulf of space to the temple. The temple was at the end of a box canyon. A mass of terraces and lodges had been built into ledges or caves on the canyon wall, or right on the vertical rock itself like the whole temple complex was some kind of a plant that had grown there. A natural water-worn stone pillar rose up from the canyon floor and level after level of ring shaped terraces circled it. A web-work of bridges linked them to the main complex. A sentinel lodge perched on top of the pillar. The lodge's highest rooftop ended in a tall pole, and from the pole flew a banner emblazoned with the snowflake-like Allcircle, emblem of the Jedi. A wreath of large intertwined circles surrounding a star shaped pattern of smaller linked rings on a field of red.
The main Jedi temple was on Coruscant, but the Jedi by nature could not have just one center. So there were outposts, satellite temples, smaller, but still home to hundreds, built throughout the galaxy, on Kashyyyk, Corelia, Alderaan, Ithor, and here on Ferrio. The temples were safe havens for masters to train their students, and provided a constant home for the Jedi that wanted one. There were also proxeums, smaller centers of learning by action scattered throughout the Republic, and the Chu'unthor II that traveled the space lanes picking up new initiates from planets across the galaxy.
Qui Gon had never felt any burning necessity to make a home at one of the temples. His Master had been a wanderer, and he was content to be one, too. The Jedi themselves were his home, the sense of peace inside him was his home, the Force was his home. And yet he was glad to arrive at the Ferrio temple. Many Jedi together focused the Force, reflecting and amplifying it. The Ferrio temple was a warm beating heart of energy. He could tell Obi Wan was relaxing a little too, basking in the light side aura. Although he had been doubtful of the reports about the cave, Obi Wan had obviously been disturbed by what he felt there.
The Temple Master welcomed them in the main courtyard, beneath a spreading bloodsap tree. She was a small gaunt Ferrio woman, with a short mane of silver and red striped hair that almost seemed to shiver around her head even when she was still. Her face was stern and hard, her strong features etched like the stone cliffs, and her bright black eyes flashed like an edge of chipped obsidian. She wore pale gray-brown robes and carried a knarred ironwood staff.
"Come, Jedi." She said after accepting their bows stone faced, and led them up to her cell. She sat down on the floor with her feet tucked carefully under her knees and laid her staff down in front of her. Qui Gon and Obi Wan sat down across from her.
"When did it start?" Qui Gon asked in a low, grave voice.
"Master Kray took his apprentice to the cave three months ago. Somehow she found more than the darkness within herself. She was half conscious and hallucinating by the time Kray got her out, and when they got back to the temple, Kray was too. He is dead now. There was nothing I could do."
"What will happen to his student?"
The Temple Master's grim features grew even darker. A fierce sadness flashed behind her eyes, but they never flinched. "It will be difficult for her. The power over her is broken, she will continue training, but she is marked forever. The dark side will always be very close to her."
"Can I talk to her?"
"If she will speak to you, Teacher. She may not." She paused. "There was not much anger in her. More troubled students have come out of the vergence unharmed. Suddenly the cave grew hungry."
"The evil is somehow spreading." She continued. "It moves beyond the cave. Several of us have lost their speech. Perhaps until this thing is destroyed. Perhaps forever. One Master feels agony in the presence of any living thing. Three of my clan have left the order. They want no more to do with the Force after seeing this aspect of it." The Temple Master paused again. "The evil is spreading somehow. We all dream of it now."
"There are no children here, no initiates." Qui Gon said half to himself, a sinister realization coming over him.
"No. The young ones have been sent to safety. This is no longer a place for innocents. But my clan" she said emphatically, meaning the temple's Jedi "and I will not surrender to this evil."
"It took Kray because he tried to help his Apprentice?" Obi Wan ventured, feeling a little out of his depth. But he had a strange feeling that Qui Gon himself was a little puzzled by what lay in those wise black eyes, and it didn't seem to bother him.
"Vengeance is of the dark side." Qui Gon said softly then looked up at the temple master. "Obi Wan had a vision when we were at the cave. Of the past that created the vergence, and then of something else."
"What did you see, Learner?"
"Connections, a web." The vision flooded back as the force sharpened his memory. "Like a fractal, or a plant sending out runners, or axons in a nerve."
"It seemed to look back at us." Qui Gon added.
"You are not the first Jedi coming back from the cave to say that." She settled her hands on her knees. "I think the cave is sentient. If not that, predatory. An evil thing in it's own right."
He closed his eyes and sighed. "I've never heard of or seen anything like that before, but it sound right. How else would it be able to attack ones so close to the light side so viciously?"
* * * * *
Qui Gon could feel the student's misery before he even stepped into her room. It was as if her mind kept up a muttered chant of despair through the Force no matter what direction her thoughts went in. It almost swept Qui Gon along with it, it went so deep. He felt a blackness start to seep into him. Exorcizing the vergence would not make her pain any better, the damage had been done. He would have to remember that. But he did not hesitate as he keyed the door (not hanging curtain of cloth like most of the other rooms in the temple, a thick, sliding sheet of metal) or steel himself against the empathetic pain. This was one of the hardest and most vital things a Jedi needed to learn, to face suffering with an open heart.
The room was almost completely bare of personal possessions, even by Jedi standards, and yet looked cluttered, the objects in apathetic disorder. As Qui Gon looked over the room he began to understand why it was so empty, the knowledge simply entering his consciousness as it so often did. She had next to nothing because she had given away or destroyed everything she had had when she lived with Kray.
The student, who's name the Temple Master would not say, because to the Ferrio using someone's name was a source of dominating power, was of a species Qui Gon had never met before, humanoid from the waist up and serpentine from the waist down. She sat by the window, resting back on the coiled loops of her lower body and tail, shoulders back, head unflinchingly up. Her coal colored hair was sheared in a Padawan's short prickly crest, but the cord of her braid had been cut.
"Mang." Qui Gon whispered softly from the doorway.
"Temple Master told me about you, Master Jinn." She kept looking out into the open air of the canyons, but Qui Gon felt Force senses wrapping around him and scrutinizing him like a million eyes and feelers. "Enter."
He took slow steps into the middle of the room and stopped in the middle of it. He could feel she was not afraid, not of him, but to go any closer would have been cruel and disrespectful.
"Do you know what happened to me in the cave?"
"The demon attacked you and your Master. That's all I know."
She looked at him silent and hard. Her eyes were dark bronze, slit pupilled and eerily wide. "I went down into the cave, Master Jinn. Only the mouth is narrow, just below, it opens out. A shaft of light comes down from the entrance. I heard something moving in the dark corners, but I couldn't sense it or see its heat. I tried to track it, but the sounds kept jumping across the cave, always far away from where I was. Then Kray grabbed me from behind. Kray attacked me, he dug his claws into me. Kray was going to kill me and leave me down there with the dark side. I couldn't escape so I wrapped myself around Kray and squeezed. He didn't stop until he stopped breathing. That is what I remember, Master Jinn."
Qui Gon frowned, feeling guilty. Mang had obviously adopted the Ferrio way of using names, and was subtly punishing him for speaking hers. And desperately trying to control the memory of her dead Master.
"You know that's not what happened."
Mang nodded. "Temple Master has told me that again and again. She has protected me. She says the demon got inside Kray and killed him. It got inside both of us, but Kray helped save me. She showed me her memories of Kray bringing me home. But what I remember hasn't changed."
She unfolded her arms and braced her hands on the windowsill. Qui Gon saw a bracelet around her right wrist, almost hidden by the sleeve of her baggy tunic. A leather thong, dark against her pale skin wound around her wrist several times and threaded through a rough, dark green crystal. Qui Gon saw an invisible globe of energy around it as it caused a delicate but profound shift in the pattern of the Force. A chiasamus stone.
"She takes care of you. Did she give you this?" He held his hand out towards the crystal, frowning slightly. Was Mang in that much danger?
"I asked her for it. I will never be sure what happened in the cave. At least with this I can know the dark side doesn't still have me."
Qui Gon was impressed by the Temple Master's devotion to her foster Apprentice. Chiasamus stones were among the rarest minerals in the galaxy, she must have worked long and hard convincing the temple to give her a crystal for Mang. The were treasured, not for their appearance, similar medium hard, translucent green crystals could be found in abundance all across the galaxy, but chiasmus was as rare as rain storms on Tattooine. It was their microscopic structure that made them priceless, that created a resonance in the Force that was extremely painful to Force sensitive. Some crystals affected the light side, others the dark side. A darksider could not stand to be in the same room with the crystal Mang was wearing.
Her taught posture and hard hollow look didn't change but Qui Gon felt less of her pain and grief. Not necessarily because she felt better, but because he was causing less of it and she felt faintly less hostile. He sensed she accepted his presence and moved quietly to stand by her side in front of the window."
"Hasn't the Force been able to show you what is true and what is not?" He asked.
"No," She said, looking down the canyon to where the cave was. "The Force can't do everything." There was no bitterness in her voice, but there was a matter-of-fact emptiness that hurt Qui Gon's heart.
"Then why do you continue your training?"
"I don't know." A pause. "But I will." She said with raw determination.
He relaxed a little in a moment of relief. She had great strength. The nature of her strength reminded him so much of himself, so many times lost, hurt, and blind, not knowing if anything could save him, but finding something that might save him and struggling along with it as best he could.
"Some day you might be able to see the truth, like learning to spar blindfolded. I've seen and felt things that no one should, but little by little, you can grow back. You really can." She hissed far back in her throat. "Not always. Sometimes something inside someone breaks and never gets better. Once Master and I were searching for the killer of a young woman. The second I met her father the Force told me he would never stop grieving."
"You may be right, but I feel that you will."
She turned and looked at him. "The Temple Master told me about you. Your foreseeing isn't worth water on Mon Calamaria."
"Your right, but I still feel it. And I know that whatever happens you will be a Jedi." That meant many things, and it didn't necessarily mean she would heal, but it was a life and better than despair and nothingness.