Chapter Six
Luke found himself in a very large underground tunnel after about ten minutes of painfully slow limping. The tunnel he was in had sloped downward from the start, making walking even more precarious for him. It was pitch dark now in the chamber, all light from the outside that had bounced off of the rocks to illuminate the tunnel and chamber gone.
The kyyrat dragon would be stirring soon.
Unfortunately, he had to turn on his lightsaber for illumination so he would find a place to hide from the dragon until morning when it slept. He stretched out with his senses and felt the kyyrat dragon. It was always harder to feel exact distances with alien minds, and doubly so for alien animals. When he had lived here as a boy and young man, he had had no Force training at all in order to sense the animals—though not even his boyish recklessness had ever prompted him to seek out a kyyrat dragon's lair.
"Reckless is he…" Yoda's raspy voice echoed in his ears, and he smiled grimly as he unhooked his lightsaber. His recklessness had mostly evaporated as he got older, but even he had to acknowledge that igniting a lightsaber in a very dark chamber was an extremely risky thing to do.
Sighing, he lit the glowing green blade.
One very large gold eye stared directly at him, bare centimeters from where he stood. The eye itself was as tall as he was.
Yoda would not be pleased.
Even as he thought it, he was rolling away from the awakened kyyrat dragon, leaving the lightsaber on to aide him in his escape, even while knowing that it made him extremely easy to locate. Behind him, the kyyrat let out a loud roar that shook the chamber and the dirt earth floor that Luke ran on, limping, pain shooting through his ankle. He had just spotted a recess in the chamber wall that looked just big enough for him to squeeze into. If he could reach it, then he could stay there until the kyyrat lost interest in him to find easier prey.
He almost succeeded. As he neared the crevasse, his aching ankle suddenly refused to hold any more of his weight.
Definitely broke it, he thought as he found himself slamming into the ground.
He immediately brought his lightsaber up above his head to guard himself from the kyyrat who had turned its long, slender body around to follow his movements. It saw its prey fall and had swooped its long neck down to snap at it, but the glowing presence of his lightsaber brought a pain-filled howl from it.
Luke panted, knowing he was stuck where he was for the moment. The kyyrat wasn't going to let him move another inch, and he wasn't going to be able to walk or run the short distance he needed. Determination filled him. He had faced odds worse than this before. Legs encased in ice with a hungry wampa stalking him, not even very trained in the usage of the Force, and he had survived—though barely. Han Solo had been there to save him, and now Han and Leia were on Coruscant with their children.
So what was an injured Jedi to do?
Luke wasn't given an opportunity to think about it. The kyyrat dragon suddenly swooped down, faster than Luke would have thought possible for a creature of its size and bulk. The Jedi was barely able to twist his body around, swinging his legs around, to avoid the kyyrat's bite. The only thing the kyyrat managed to do was knock his lightsaber out of his hand with its large whisker-like fur on the side of its face, causing the lightsaber to roll toward the wall. Luke thankfully had had the foresight to lock it on so that even when away from his hand it would not turn off, providing light for him to see by.
The kyyrat saw that its prey was now unarmed and struck again. One huge tooth caught his shoulder, digging into the flesh.
Luke cried out in pain, barely noticing that the kyyrat was picking his body off the ground as it drew its head back, its tooth lodged deep in Luke's shoulder to protrude out the other side. Desperately, Luke used his palms to try to gain some kind of leverage on the slippery tooth to pull himself off but he couldn't get a good hold.
He was near the ceiling when the kyyrat shook its head vigorously and Luke was slung, hard, into the wall. His head bounced off the stone, an arm snapped from the impact, and he felt himself falling. He was too rattled to concentrate on the Force to slow his descent.
The ground rushed up to meet him, and his only regret was that Mara was still trapped by Callista and wouldn't know what had happened to him.
Mara raced into a large chamber, guided by the weak green light of a lightsaber. All she could sense from Luke was great pain and a flurry of activity. She hoped she had not waited too long to make her decision.
She skidded to a halt when she took in the long, serpant-like body of the kyyrat dragon filling the chamber. It shook its head, as if irritated by something, and Luke's body went flying through the air to smack into the stone near the top of the chamber. His Force sense went quieter, indicating a dimming of his awareness. For him to lose consciousness now would not be a good thing.
Luke started falling toward the floor.
Mara gasped, then mentally cursed even as she flung out her hand to catch her husband in a Force-grip. She was not nearly as good with the direct manipulation of the Force like this like Luke was, but he needed her now or he would slam into the floor and break his neck. She slit her eyes in concentration and her hand shook with the effort of trying to keep her husband from becoming one with the Force.
Finally, Luke's body slowed and settled gently to the floor. Quickly, as the kyyrat swung around to the other thing behind it, she called Luke's lightsaber to her hand. The cool metal cylinder was heavy and awkward to her smaller hand, but for this battle finesse was not needed.
Even as the dragon was snapping at her, she was no longer there. She twisted and somersaulted through the air to land midway up the body of the long dragon's body. She wasted no time for the kyyrat to figure out where she went and ran up its body toward its head. Its scales were slippery and footing was treacherous, but she grimly kept herself balanced, knowing that now with her gone it would focus on the prey that no longer moved.
Right as the kyyrat dragon nudged Luke's unmoving form with its snout to make sure that this prey was not going to bite back again, she reached the top of its head.
"Mess with my husband…" she muttered, then plunged Luke's lightsaber deep into the kyyrat dragon's head.
The kyyrat screamed, the sound echoing back and forth in the chamber, rumbling the walls. Rocks from the ceiling began to fall, but those for the moment were not her primary concern. She suddenly found herself on a buckling kyyrat dragon. She lost her footing and fell backwards off of the head to tumble toward the ground in an eerie parody of Luke's fall.
Suddenly, she stopped her plunge and was lowered gently to the ground. She gathered her feet underneath her and raced over to where Luke was laying, sweat covering his forehead from his effort to save her while injured. On her way to her husband, she had to duck the lashing tail of the dragon in its death throes.
"Luke!" She dropped down to her knees beside him, pressing his lightsaber that she had somehow managed to keep a hold of during her fall to his hand. His fingers were puffy and turning a bluish color, indicating a severe break. She instead hooked it to his belt. "Can you stand?" She tried to ignore the sounds of the still dying kyyrat and the rocks falling down around them.
Luke gave a shaky laugh. "Whether or not I…can, it seems…as if I have…to," he gasped out. "Help me up?"
Mara smiled at him and shook her head. "Farmboys…always getting into some sort of trouble on their own." She helped him as he got his feet underneath him, and took most of his weight as his left ankle threatened to collapse again. She frowned. "Is that the same leg you injured on the Eye of the Palpatine?"
Luke cut her a look and she laughed. "Oh, the irony," she remarked, then left the subject alone.
She and Luke gazed at the dying kyyrat dragon, now settling to the ground in its final resting pose.
Luke frowned. "Pity…" He gasped out as she started helping him back out of the tunnel toward the hole they had both used to get to the dragon.
She glanced at him. Trust him to feel sorry for something that had tried to eat him for dinner. On closer inspection, she saw that he looked very pale and he shook uncontrollably. She feverantly hoped that his little contact with the stone wall hadn't damaged anything internally.
One ice-blue eye caught her green one. Quietly, he said to her thought, "I'm…not sure…have to go into…healing trance to see." He glanced to where he could now see the gaping hole and stars of planets. "Have to…get out of here…first. Join me?"
Immediately, she knew what he wanted to do and nodded. She positioned them directly in the middle of the hole, then closed her eyes. Swiftly, the two Jedi joined their powers, themselves, together as if in battle. The greater power tingled Mara's skin and she directed it to help her and Luke leap out of the hole.
Then she was shooting out of the hole, Luke by her side, and she had to open her eyes again to see where to land safely in the night of the desert. She took the brunt of the impact and rolled slightly so that Luke would not further injure himself with a harsh landing.
Luke lay, gasping and coughing, on the sand. A cool breeze blew his sandy-brown hair from his forehead, and for the first time Mara felt afraid.
"Let me ease you into a healing trance…" Mara offered, a small smile that was mostly bravery on her lips.
Luke nodded and smiled at her. "Set…up…code…" he forced out.
Mara nodded once. They had a running code phrase whenever the other needed a healing trance for any reason. It had started when he had thought she would be killed and came after her, dropping all his other Jedi duties for her—one person. In order to both survive, he had sunk her into a healing trance that she had set up a phrase to snap her out of it shortly after he proposed. What a proposal that was—neither had known if they would survive from that situation…and here they were with another bleak situation.
"Sleep well, farmboy," she whispered as he sank into the healing rest of Jedi hibernation.
Then she unhooked his lightsaber from his belt.
"I have unfinished business to attend to." She narrowed her eyes and stood. Callista's tent was only a few meters away.
She cleared her mind of anger and hate, and began to walk toward the tent.