~6~
Beneath the Stellar Path
Just when Luke had assumed that he might finally be able to pass a night in peaceful slumber, the universe had thrown him another curve ball. What was it Tara had so prophetically pointed out? That calamity haunted the very name of Lilandra Ilkhaine. How true it was, too. She had even lived up to her infamous timing this time around.
Luke lay in bed, his eyes as round as soup tureens, reflecting the golden moonlight filtering in through a gap in the blue curtains. It had been quite the day, from his midnight stroll in the jungle with Lilandra, to the strange Force flickers, and the map, and all the pieces falling so quickly into place …
Here he was again, barely twenty-four hours later, in the same situation, operating on little more than three hours' dreamless sleep, but with one exception: Mara was also still awake.
She lay on her side, her back to him, so as to trick him into thinking that she was asleep, but Luke could tell by her shallow breathing and restless mind that she was in a state between sleep and wakefulness – thinking hard and feeling much.
Luke wanted to talk to her, but he wasn't sure of what he should say. He knew she was upset by something, and he was sure that this time it had nothing to do with either he or Lilandra. But that was the thing – he couldn't guess this time, and he knew almost certainly that she wouldn't tell him of her own volition.
Of course, Mara Jade had always had a way of surprising even the most confident of opponents, particularly her own husband, and she did so on this occasion when, out of nowhere, she said, quite clearly:
"Terapinn."
At first, Luke thought he'd imagined it, but no – Mara kept talking.
"I knew it had something to do with tortoises, only spelled differently …"
"Excuse me?" Luke murmured.
"That penal colony," Mara sighed. She sounded relieved that she'd gotten his attention. "It was called Terapinn."
"Palpatine named it?" Luke asked incredulously. He should've guessed the one thing that could make Mara slip into a stupor this deep: mention or thought of the many years she had been known not as Mara Jade Skywalker, but as Mara Jade, the Emperor's Hand.
"It meant something, in another language. It was that important to the Emperor," Mara replied softly, and Luke thought he heard her voice waver for a moment.
"What was so great about it? He'd imprisoned thousands before," Luke said bitterly.
"I don't know," Mara whispered, and reached her hand behind her to take her husband's. She wouldn't look at him, lest he notice that she had tears in her eyes.
Luke squeezed her fingers, and rubbed her shoulder sympathetically with his free hand before laying a kiss on the top of her head, turning over, and closing his eyes, cutting off the steady flow of thoughts through his head and slipping away into welcoming darkness.
***
Outside in the silent hallway, a shadow was moving, creeping stealthily over the stone tiles. At the end of the corridor, a window cast moonlight onto the cold floor, and in the rectangle of pale, washed-out light, the shadow materialized into the shape of Lilandra Ilkhaine. She held in her hands her own printout of the map.
She paused before rounding the corner, and motioned for someone lingering in the shadows to follow her. Tara appeared seconds later, shivering in the deep chill of the jungle night, although both she and Lilandra were dressed in long, white thermal sweaters and stiff black flight pants, zipped down over flat-soled boots.
It appeared to a grudging Tara that Lilandra had decided to not sleep at all during her time at the academy, and rather spend her nights wandering the temple, looking for someone to bother with her questions and ideas and random, idealistic thoughts.
She needs a sex life, Tara thought miserably, and shoved her hands into the pockets of her pants. Aloud, she asked, "Why are we doing this, Lil?"
Lilandra raised a finger to her lips to silence her, and replied softly, "Because I want to see if I can make it happen again."
"Make what happen?" Tara asked, and promptly yawned.
"The Force flicker. There are too many variables right now to come to any concrete conclusions about how the map reached us. Maybe it only works with Luke and I. Maybe it sends a physical map bearing the coordinates of every planet you touch in the lake, not just the penal colony. Maybe that was just a freaky coincidence."
Tara appeared unimpressed, flopping herself down upon the windowsill.
"Come on, Tara," Lilandra pleaded. "You're the scientist! I thought you'd be interested in this kind of stuff!"
"Not in the middle of the night," Tara whined, gazing plaintively in the direction of her apartment. "You've got the worst timing in the galaxy," she added sulkily.
"Blame it on jet lag, okay?" Lilandra pleaded, grabbing the younger girl's hand and pulling her off the sill.
But Tara was unyielding, planting her feet firmly on the floor.
"Hey," Lilandra frowned. "What's the matter, Jaksbin?"
"I'm tired," she groaned, still staring down the corridor in the direction they had come.
Lilandra giggled suddenly. "The hell … I'll bet Anakin's spending the night at your place, that's what."
Tara gave her a strange look, while Lilandra glared back, sucking her cheeks into a perfect likeness of a fish.
This time, it was Tara's turn to giggle, leaning back on the window. "We're living together now, Lil. Sharing Ani's apartment."
"You're kidding!" Lilandra gasped, a whispered shriek. "For how long now?"
"Three months," replied Tara bashfully, lowering her eyes.
"Oh, that's fantastic!" Lilandra breathed. "Why didn't you tell me, Jaksie? That's brilliant news!"
Tara waved the superlative reaction away with a flip of her wrist. "Oh, Lil – "
She stopped, stifling another embarrassed laugh, looking at a point somewhere above Lilandra's head.
Lilandra squinted confusion as the blond smirked, nodding at the wall …
Until someone gave her braid a rough yank, making her squeal aloud this time and stagger backwards into none other than Anakin Solo, clad in boxer shorts and an unbuttoned sweater.
"Shhhh!" Anakin hissed, doubling over with silent laughter. "By the stars, Lil – "
"Ani," Lilandra spat, whirling to face him with one hand clutching her left shoulder. She exhaled, indulging him with a cynical laugh.
"Pretty weird place for you two you have a girly chat," Anakin commented, bending over and digging his fingers into his girlfriend's waist while Tara bit her lip to keep from crying out.
"She wanted to go swimming again," Tara accused, pointing at Lilandra as she leaned into Anakin's arms.
"Hey, you aren't completely blameless, blondie," Lilandra smirked.
"Fair enough," Tara shrugged, smiling.
"What do you say, Anakin? Care to take part in my little experiment?" Lilandra urged the teenager.
"Mm, it's a tempting offer, but I'm more inclined to say 'no', Lil, considering I have to be awake again in three hours."
"Well, suit yourself, spoilsports," Lilandra grumbled good-naturedly, giving up on Tara altogether. Poking her tongue out at the young couple, she heaved open the window and climbed out into the sweet-scented, cool jungle night.
"Lil, you're nuts," Tara hissed as Lilandra pulled off her shoes and arranged them in a T-shape below the sill, a charm to deter evil spirits from entering the Academy.
"No, I'm adventurous," Lilandra retorted, grinning. "Why don't you two lovebirds go back to your nest, then, if you're so tired?"
Tara and Anakin exchanged a weary glance, like two parents trying to understand an insolent child.
"Come on," Tara said, shaking her head, and tugged Anakin's sleeve in the direction of their apartment. He followed quite willingly.
Outside, Lilandra skipped easily across the landing pad and passed beneath the solid darkness of the canopy. Blind to the trees at either side of her, leaning in close with curiosity, she watched for the path, which glowed faintly white in the filtered moonshine and wound away like a silken ribbon through the trees.
As she wandered, her feet seemed to guide her of their own accord. She felt shivery, slightly nervous, distinctly aware of a presence there with her, of something she couldn't name but that felt like a memory. Her long-legged shadow crept and rippled away ahead of her, and at her sides, things flickered and darted between the trees, appearing so briefly in her periphery vision that she could not distinguish their form. She appreciated their presence all the same.
There was a stillness to the forest that night, an uncharacteristic, hypnotic silence, and as Lilandra listened into the blackness, she soon forgot the path, the white ribbon unfolding before her, and walked as though in a dream, her motions automatic, effortlessly controlled.
She slipped easily from the cloak of night into the brilliant star-filled clearing where the Te'am Galatsia sat bathed in moonlight, and, mesmerized, sat in the dirt beneath the jeweled sky and turned her face to it, feeling that the stars were close enough for their light to brush against her skin.
There seemed to be more stars visible that night than ever before, so many that they had begun to blend and blur, casting a dense milky glow across the sky. Lilandra had tried to count them once, when she was seven or eight. Then, she had never been on a space vessel, never seen how far the stars really were, how angry they seemed up close. Counting them, she collected them, claimed possession of them, picked them from the sky one by one, feeling peace filling her to her center.
She also once believed that if you laid still enough, you would be able to feel the planet moving, would be able to perceive a passage beneath the sky, or feel the vibration of the effort of moving so much mass through so little matter. But gravity was as subtle and elusive as the force that had held her beneath the waters of the lake the night before, completely unknowable, untouchable, and all at once, Lilandra felt cut free, floating suspended in a black lake of stars, as common to the fires that burned above her as the water she breathed.
Smiling dreamily, she reached her hand towards the sky. In silhouette, her fingers seemed tiny, but infinitely powerful, and without knowing why – acting, perhaps, on behalf of the magic presence that had begun to overtake her the moment she stepped into the jungle soil – she thought again of the rogue planet in the lake, a star that needed counting, needed ownership.
She saw Luke, curling his fingers so tenderly around that tiny glowing form, promising something that neither of them understood – wait – and claiming it thus as his own.
I can do that, Lilandra thought sleepily, still feeling somehow the rocking of the ocean in which she lay drowning in light, her hand in the sky like a signal.
Intently, her eyes sought the little planet, mapping the galaxy in lines across her vision, stepping from star to star to try and place it in the heavens.
But there were so many, so many to choose from, and she quickly became lost in the glow, lost among the bonfires of the universe, and she snapped back down to reality with a wistful sadness.
She was lying on her side in the mud with her arms wrapped around herself and her knees drawn up to her chest, and she realized she'd been dozing, lost in the world of dreams that were not quite dreams but visions, reflections from the other side of reality.
She rolled onto her back again, feeling unwelcomingly human. She had thought she was in the lake. Above her, the stars were cold and distant, but still unusually bright …
Lilandra sat up quickly, scrubbing her eyes, wondering if she'd just imagined that star directly above her flashing out like a lantern in the darkness. It had brightened, only for a second, and then it was gone …
Again, though, the star flashed, a lighthouse beam across the night that darkened the stars clustered around it until it shone alone in blackness and Lilandra watched with eyes wide. Further on above it, another star flashed with the other, and soon Lilandra was seeing many stars, suddenly and inexplicably brighter than the others, spread in a perfectly straight line across the sky, all the way to the visible horizon.
Lilandra let her eyes wander the stellar path above her, a bizarre constellation that seemed to point to some inevitable end: a very, very dim star just above the trees, encircled protectively by countless others.
A smile flickered across Lilandra's lips.
She was looking at the colony.
She knew, by the behavior of the stars. The rogue planet, Palpatine's penal colony, they were one and the same, and most definitely real.
"Now I have you," she whispered, and, stretching out her hand to the horizon, she began to laugh, disbelievingly, out of unspeakable gratitude as the stellar path proudly shone on guard above her. "Incredible."
She stared in wonder at the physical impression of the colony, its light already twenty years old at least, and at the chain of stars that had led her to view it.
"You want us to go to you, don't you," she murmured, framing the star with her fingers and smiling.
There was no response, of course, only the stars, keeping their silent and empowering watch over the universe.
***
It was Luke who found Lilandra early the next morning, on a tip from Tara and Anakin.
She was, sure enough, curled up on her side beneath a spreading tree beside the Temple of the Galaxy. Her feet were bare and pressed together for warmth, and her sweater was smeared with mud, but her face was flushed with a sleepy joy, her mouth stretched into a smile.
"Lil," Luke grinned, kneeling beside her and shaking her gently. "Hey, come on, up and at 'em, starshine."
The mention of the word 'starshine' seemed to trigger something, and Lilandra's eyes snapped open, wild with excitement. She was sitting in an instant, a flood of incomprehensible words pouring from her mouth.
"Luke!" she shouted, grabbing his collar. "Luke, I saw it! The stars showed me – it really exists, it exists, that colony, it's over there!"
She pointed one trembling finger to the horizon beyond the temple, where the trees were shadowed beneath the pink and yellow bower of sunrise. There were no stars visible in the pastel sky.
"What are you saying? Are you ill, child?" Luke chided her, pulling her to her feet, which tangled beneath her.
"No! I was stargazing, and I … I saw things. The stars, there were seven of them. They got brighter, and they formed a line across the sky and I followed it over there, and I knew, I knew in my heart it was the colony. Luke, we have to go! The stars want us to go!"
Lilandra stopped, her face falling when the anticipated comprehension did not register with her teacher.
"You have to take me seriously. I saw it happen."
Luke frowned. "Are you sure it wasn't a dream?"
"Even if it was, it was so vivid. The other stars all seemed to dim, and the brightest seven formed a path, straight to this dim little star way on the horizon … oh, Luke, what else could it mean? We have to go. There's something there for us, we have to."
Terapinn. It was called Terapinn.
Te'am Galatsia.
"This is all too bizarre for words, Lil," Luke mumbled, rubbing his forehead. "Mara knows the colony exists. Last night, she said it had a name that meant something in a different language. Terapinn."
"What language?" Lilandra asked.
"I don't know. I've never encountered it before. It occurred to me that I don't know what language te'am galatsia comes from either. Only that the words mean 'temple' and 'galaxy'."
Lilandra stared pointedly at him. "They're connected somehow, Luke. It's all connected somehow. The lake, the temple, the map, the colony. Somehow."
"And now you're having nutty dreams about star charts," Luke sighed.
Lilandra felt a flash of annoyance. "Why are you resisting, Luke?" she demanded. "I thought you were 'craving change'. Well, here it is, written in stone," she added, gesturing impatiently at the temple.
Luke narrowed his eyes.
"I'll take the lesser of two evils in this case, Lilandra. I don't need any more complication in my life. I've about reached my limit already, and the last thing I need is to go off on some wild chase because you think I should."
Lilandra stepped back a bit, opening her mouth to most likely hurl a retaliatory insult at him but thinking better of it. Instead, she clamped her lips shut and glared at him, and Luke knew that he'd hurt her with that comment, though he hadn't intended to. Truthfully, the last thing he needed was Lilandra giving him the cold shoulder as well.
She seemed to understand that, and forced herself to calm down, but not, by any stretch of the imagination, back down.
"Maybe what you need is to forget about yourself for once," was the reply she eventually decided on.
Then, that said, she turned on her heel and marched back onto the path, hugging her arms around herself for warmth, leaving Luke staring wonderingly after her.
He sighed again once her hard footsteps had retreated into silence, and leaned on the tree she had slept beneath. Still, even when he closed his eyes, tiny stars of exhaustion winked behind his eyelids, and he had to open them again.
You can't stall forever, Skywalker, Lilandra taunted him mentally from somewhere in the jungle. Your word settles the issue.
Get lost, Ilkhaine, he retorted, scuffing his boot in the smooth dirt.
He stood there for a moment longer, watching the sun finally heave itself over the canopy, the last of the stars succumbing to the dawn. Then, he launched himself off of the tree trunk, and ran until he caught up with Lilandra, halfway to the Academy already.