The memories were so immersive that the rain startled Ezra when he opened his eyes. It was like he'd been disconnected from it somehow, the feeling of water on his skin muted and strange.
And it wasn't just the rain. Suddenly, it was like there were no birds in the forest, no living tree beneath him, no insects scurrying over the bark. Ezra almost dropped his basket as he sat up, leaning as far out on the branch as he dared to look up the river stream.
Was Thrawn dead? It seemed stupid to even ask, but if he hadn't just been instantly killed somehow (Ezra's gut twisted at the thought), then why couldn't Ezra sense his mind? Why was their connection gone? Earlier he'd been able to see clearly to Thrawn's post on the river, but now the same area seemed distant and blurry, like the ground between them had stretched until Thrawn was too far away to make out.
Adrenaline spiking, Ezra grabbed hold of the branch beneath him and swung down, abandoning the basket as he ran. He landed harder than he was used to, the bark scraping his hands and the impact jarring his knees and ankles. He stumbled up, hitting his stride a moment later. The wet grass slipped beneath his feet, mud sucking at his boots, but he was running as fast as he could — and although he was funneling as much power as possible to his legs through the Force, it didn't seem like anything was getting through. His muscles felt peculiarly useless, like someone had filled them with water while he was sleeping.
Within a few seconds, he was close enough to the bank to make out Thrawn through the canopy of trees again, standing in the shallow end of the water and staring intently at something upstream.
A few meters closer and Ezra could tell Thrawn's left hand was closed around something on his chest — the oth'ola endzali, without a doubt. And his shoulders were tense, his knees bent, like a predator about to pounce. But what could he be staring at?
"Thrawn!" Ezra shouted, speeding up a little. He waved one hand above his head, but Thrawn didn't even glance his way. The wind aided Ezra, blowing northward and lengthening his stride, making up for the strange lack of energy in his legs. "Hey!" he yelled again, keeping his volume high even as he reached Thrawn's vicinity and started to slow down. Within touching distance, he slid to a stop, almost face-planting in the wet grass, and reached for Thrawn's shoulder. "Hey, Thrawn—"
It all happened too fast to follow after that.
His fingers brushed Thrawn's arm. Upstream, the water rushed around a fallen tree swept into the river by the buffeting wind. The trunk charged toward them, just ten meters or so out from where they stood on the bank — a potentially deadly force if either of them were actually in the water. But it was far enough away to miss them, to mean their current positions were safe — and Ezra's fingers were closing around Thrawn's sleeve, and Thrawn's eyes were on the fallen tree, tracking its vector as it came closer and closer.
And before Ezra could stop him, Thrawn broke away from Ezra's touch and sprinted toward the tree in a running leap.
He came down hard on it as it swept by, slipping halfway into the current, one arm wrapping around the trunk just tight enough to save him.
"Thrawn!" Ezra screamed. Already, the tree was past him, too far for him to make the jump by natural means. He reached out to the Force, but the channel between himself and all the life around him just wouldn't open up. No matter how hard he tried, he felt nothing. No rush of peace to calm his mind and keep the adrenaline at bay, no surge of power to his joints in preparation for a gigantic leap, nothing.
He had no other option. He took off running again, his chest and throat aching from effort as he chased the tree downriver. It outpaced him easily, carrying Thrawn away with it — but Thrawn wasn't passively allowing the river to decide his fate. He hauled himself out of the water, balancing in a crouch aboard the bobbing trunk. Running as fast as he could behind the tree, Ezra watched in disbelief as Thrawn laid his hands on the trunk and moved forward, carefully and slowly inching his way toward the branches ahead of him.
The water rocked him, but he kept steady even as he knelt on the trunk and lowered himself down until his stomach was pressed to the bark, reaching for something hidden in the branches below him. On the bank, Ezra could hardly make anything out — but in the next moment, Thrawn was straddling the trunk to brace himself and pulling back hard, snapping one of the branches off at the joint. He sat up, taking the branch with him, and glanced over his shoulder at the bank.
Then, not hesitating — not even taking a breath, so far as Ezra could tell — he slipped off the tree and disappeared beneath the water. The trunk charged on without him, bouncing off of boulders in the river before it disappeared around a sweeping bend.
Heart pounding, Ezra ran right up to the spot on the bank parallel to where Thrawn had sunk. His eyes darted over the surface as his chest heaved, struggling to get air, trying not to panic — and he was halfway into the shallows for a rescue attempt when Thrawn resurfaced, spitting out a mouthful of dirty water and shaking his head. He held the snapped branch up above the water as he swam in, arrowing through the current until he was close enough to shore to stand. He didn't bother to avoid the chunks of fiberplast and uprooted saplings that were bouncing around in the river. He let them bump into him as he forced his feet through the thick water in the shallows.
By the time he reached the bank, Ezra's heart had stopped pounding quite so hard, leaving him shivering from the cold. He stared at Thrawn openly, unable to pick out a single question from the millions spoiling around in his brain.
For a long moment, Thrawn only stared back, an expression of open anticipation on his face. Water dripped from his hair; the branch rested in his palms; and the oth'ola endzali's cord was tangled around his neck, the leather twisted into an uncomfortable-looking knot. He didn't bother to adjust it so that it lay right, and after a second, Ezra realized there was something else that seemed off about the pendant — it was like the oth'ola endzali had become a simple piece of tarnished metal and nothing more. It wasn't glowing with life energy like it had been since the first time Ezra saw it; it wasn't emitting any sort of sense through the Force, not of Thrass or anyone else.
It was like it was dead.
When he met Thrawn's eyes again, Thrawn hesitated only a second before holding out the severed branch to Ezra with one hand and parting the sodden leaves with the other. Attached to the wood, its claws sunk deep into the bark, was a tiny lizardine creature no bigger than the palm of Ezra's hand, covered in fur and scales. Its tongue darted out; its eyes swiveled to follow an insect buzzing through the air. When water dripped onto its snout from a nearby leaf, it blinked and shook its head.
Slowly, Ezra looked up and found Thrawn's eyes boring into his, his mouth set in a thin line.
"We have something to discuss," Thrawn said.
The strange, muted effect on his senses followed Ezra into Thrawn's shelter. It felt like having both his ears plugged or filled with water — a sense of partial deafness, a loss of balance that couldn't be overcome through willpower or acclimation alone. He sat on a closed box near Thrawn's woven mattress, feeling disoriented and slightly ill as Thrawn held the branch in one hand and searched for dry clothes with the other.
Ezra didn't even bother to look away as Thrawn dried off and changed; he was so dazed he didn't absorb anything going on around him anyway. He couldn't feel the Force at all; not outside him, not within him. It was nowhere to be found. Though he stretched out to it, he could feel nothing responding to his call, nothing reaching back to meet him.
He rubbed his eyes and simply sat there for a long moment, his hands covering his face. Gradually, his senses came alive again in an inconsequential way, feeding input to his brain the way they were supposed to — but he couldn't deny that there was still something extra missing, some additional sense he couldn't fathom, except he knew it was gone.
It was something he'd felt before, he realized, but only briefly. A loss of control so complete that it made him panic at the time, even before the tilting of the Chimaera threw him head-first into the bulkhead. Back then, the Force had only seemed to leave him for a minute or two, coming back in time for him to make that final, life-saving jump, gone and back again so fast that in the tumult of everything that happened after, he forgot it even happened.
But now…
Thrawn brought the branch with him to the other side of the shelter, folding himself cross-legged onto his woven mattress. He laid the branch across his knees, balancing it there as he looked up at Ezra. Moving his hands to scrub through his hair, Ezra stared back at the oblivious little lizard nestled between the leaves.
"You had those in your office," he said dully, recognizing the creature at last. "Big ones. Two of them, right above your desk."
"I had statues of them, yes," Thrawn said. He was watching Ezra cautiously, like he was worried the Jedi might somehow break. Or maybe like he could tell there was something off, something wrong with the Force. With Ezra.
Ezra snorted out a humorless laugh.
"They are called ysalimiri," Thrawn said. He pushed the wet leaves away with one hand, brushed one finger down the ysalimir's back. "This one is still an infant."
Sighing, Ezra moved his hands down to the back of his neck, hanging his head between his knees. "That's … neat, Thrawn," he said, voice strained. "Why'd you jump in the river after it? You just like lizards that much, or…?"
There was no response to that. Ezra kept rubbing his neck, waiting for Thrawn to answer, but when the silence dragged on without either of them speaking, he finally glanced up. Thrawn's head was cocked, his eyes on the ysalimir but an open look of curiosity on his face that was probably directed at Ezra.
"What?" Ezra asked.
"You are not feeling well," Thrawn observed.
Ezra sat up with a sigh that came out sounding like, "Eupgh." He gave the ysalimir another dead-eyed glance. "Something's really weird right now," he said. "I know you can't feel it, but … the Force is … it's like I've lost all connection to it entirely. Like it's not even there for me to connect to. I keep waiting for it to come back, but…"
Thrawn's curiosity faded away, replaced with a knowledgeable, almost bored expression.
"I'd have thought you'd recognize the source of that," he said, lifting the branch a little. "You've encountered them twice now, after all."
It took a long moment for Ezra to realize what Thrawn meant. At first he looked at the branch, thinking for a moment that it might be some sort of Force-sensitive tree. Then he sat up a little straighter, the last of the haze in his mind fading away fast as he looked at the ysalimir with fresh eyes. He could feel his eyebrows contracting and his jaw dropping in horror.
"The lizard?" he said.
"It's an ysalimir," Thrawn helpfully reminded him.
"I know what it's — what do you mean, the lizard's the source?" Ezra jumped to his feet, then immediately slowed down, approaching the tiny lizard with all the caution due to a mighty predator. He held his hand out carefully, stopping several centimeters away, and let the lizard sniff him. It didn't seem interested in making Ezra's acquaintance, so he drew back again, his eyes darting warily between the lizard and Thrawn, who had helpfully moved the branch closer to Ezra.
"You're telling me this thing is — what, blocking my relationship to the Force?" asked Ezra, mystified. "Or disrupting it somehow, or … I mean, what exactly is it doing?"
Thrawn lowered the branch gently, adjusting the various offshoots so that it rested on his knees without disturbing the ysalimir. "I cannot be certain," he said, "having no better source of information on the Force than yourself. But I believe they are Force-resistant — they push the Force away from them in bubbles, and large numbers of these creatures create correspondingly large bubbles, capable of affecting a wider circumference than any individual ysalimir on its own."
This was it. This was Ezra's time to shine. He straightened up, took a deep breath, and gave Thrawn his very best Are you stupid? look. He could only hope it was one-tenth as scathing as Thrawn's.
"You disagree?" said Thrawn, unfazed.
"Uh, hell yeah, I disagree!" said Ezra. "It can't be Force-resistant, dude. Literally no one is Force-resistant! The Force is the life energy of everything around us, like — if it's alive, it's got to have the Force. You can't just neutralize that; it doesn't happen."
Thrawn looked down at the tiny ysalimir, his nose wrinkled. "I was under the impression the Force also moves through inanimate objects and emanates from life as well as death."
Ezra blinked, bending forward to present his index finger to the ysalimir again. This time, it craned its neck to sniff at him, a reptilian tongue flicking in and out of its mouth but not touching Ezra's skin. He moved away again, reluctantly this time, and gazed anxiously out at the rain.
"I mean, I guess technically that's right," he said. "But I don't know … I thought when people died, their life energy just pooled back into the universe, like —" His eyes darted to the necklace tangled around Thrawn's neck, where a small portion of his brother's life energy was permanently trapped, and changed his mind mid-sentence. "I've never exactly connected with something that was dead. It's all just a theory to me."
Gravely, Thrawn arranged the leaves to cover the ysalimir again. "It can be done," he said. "It isn't much different from connecting to an inanimate object; you've done that before."
"It is different," Ezra insisted, his mouth dry.
"Only because it's difficult to make the muscles of a corpse move in a realistic way," Thrawn said. Ezra's head whipped around to stare at him, but Thrawn's gaze was far away, like he didn't realize how unsettling his words were. It made Ezra's skin crawl. "You don't have to worry about muscles when moving an inanimate object."
Was it Thrawn's older brother who'd moved a corpse with the Force? Or was it someone else — one of the Jedi Thrawn had mentioned days before, maybe, or one of the Sith Lords? The Emperor or Darth Vader seemed the most likely choices, but it wasn't a subject Ezra wanted to dwell on. He stared at the mass of leaves obscuring the ysalimir from view, a frown wrinkling his brow.
"So these things are native to this planet?" he asked, keeping his voice even and casual.
Not even and casual enough, apparently. Thrawn's eyes darted up to examine Ezra's face.
"Not necessarily," he said, his own voice suddenly guarded. "Certainly, they have been found on at least one other planet, though they are now almost extinct. It is possible they were imported here long ago."
"One other planet?" Ezra repeated.
Thrawn gazed at him for a long moment, his face impossible to read — just as Ezra hoped his was. "Myrkr," Thrawn said eventually, giving up the name of the planet like it was a peace offering. "A primitive planet in the Unknown Regions."
"So not far from here?" Ezra asked, crossing his arms. Thrawn neither agreed with nor refuted this, simply staring implacably at Ezra. "How do you know about it?" Ezra asked.
"The Imperial Navy is not fond of non-humans," Thrawn said without a trace of animosity. "Once I attained my rank, I was sent to the Unknown Regions to map the area — a mission which took me far away from the eyes of the Core Worlds. I discovered many planets such as Myrkr and Koja which were not on Imperial maps."
"Awfully lucky, isn't it?" said Ezra.
Thrawn didn't respond, looking almost bored.
"That we happened to crash on the only other planet in the entire galaxy with lizards that can apparently block the Force?" Ezra said. It was difficult to keep his temper in check, but he managed — his fingers were clenched tight on his sleeves, his shoulders tense and his voice tight, but he wasn't shouting. Not yet. He glared down at the hidden ysalimir, feeling all too keenly how it blocked him.
Who would win if he and Thrawn were in a fight, no Force involved? Ezra wanted to believe it would be him — desperately wanted to believe it — but he'd seen Thrawn fight the assassin droids without a weapon, without armor, without the use of the Force. He stared at the flat, deadened oth'ola endazli, wondering how much it aided Thrawn in hand-to-hand combat, if at all. So far as Ezra could tell, it was nothing more than a relic, imbued with the Force but unable to help in any tangible way.
And in any case, it wasn't imbued with anything right now, so it didn't matter. Calmly, Thrawn endured Ezra's narrow-eyed stare, his own posture relaxed and at ease.
"I did not engineer this crash," he said, his icy voice at odds with his demeanor. "Nor do I believe we are within my scope of the Unknown Regions. Your purrgils took us far from the sectors charted and mapped by the ISD Chimaera and other ships of the Seventh Fleet; I was no more aware of this planet's inhabitants when we crashed than you were."
"Well, you sure got to know them fast enough," Ezra snapped. He could hear the waspishness in his voice and couldn't even bring himself to dislike it. He paced away from Thrawn, arms crossed tightly over his chest, glowering around at the tiny shelter. "How'd you even know there was an ysalimir on that tree? That thing is tiny and you jumped in to get it as soon as the tree came into view. If I couldn't see it, I have a hard time believing you could."
In response, Thrawn reached up silently and adjusted the oth'ola endzali around his neck, untangling the cord with deft fingers. "This wayfinder normally emits a temperature slightly above or below my own. When the ysalimir floated toward us on the river, this pendant stopped emitting anything at all; similarly, the sense of calm it emanates abruptly ended. I have noticed the same effect before; when I first investigated the forest north of the Chimaera's crash site, the wayfinder stopped working in the same way shortly before I discovered ysalimiri in the nearby trees."
Across the shelter, Ezra leaned against the rough wooden wall and glowered down at the ysalimir, his face pinched as he did the math. "So you've known about them for, what, fifty-six days now? Fifty-seven?"
There was a slight pause before Thrawn inclined his head. "The woods are filled with them," he said, reaching through the leaves to stroke the patch of fur on the ysalimir's back. "Particularly to the north. The purrgils — I assume they are Force-sensitive to some degree — lost control of the Chimaera while passing over a stretch of woods where the ysalimiri are especially thick, congregated around the ruins. I was able to test their radius with my wayfinder, but I was unsure of their effect on true Force abilities until I tested you in person, both through our mental link and with the mole, which you could not sense underground due to the ysalimiri in the tree above you."
Ezra shook his head. For a long moment, he was unable to form words. This was worse than the reveal that the planet hadn't always been deserted, worse than Thrawn's revelation about the Grysks. This was something that affected him directly, a weapon that could be used against him — that already had.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Ezra asked.
Slowly, Thrawn met his eyes. The shrug he gave was little more than a twitch of the shoulders. "You know now."
It was impossible to read him, pointless to even try to glean anything from his expressionless face. Ezra watched him a moment longer, and then suddenly his legs were moving, a decision made up in his mind without his conscious supervision. He took the branch from Thrawn, encountering only a little resistance before Thrawn suddenly relaxed his hands and let Ezra snatch the branch away. Crossing to the window, Ezra untied the covering and pushed it open, leaning outside.
"That won't work," said Thrawn. "The radius is at least ten—"
With an angry huff, Ezra pushed away from the window and stormed past Thrawn again, this time kicking open the door. He walked far away from their camp, shaking rain out of his eyes. When he'd reached the forest surrounding the clearing — twenty meters away from their shelters, at least — he sat the branch down underneath a bush, protecting the ysalimir at least somewhat from the rain.
Lightning cracked overhead as he approached the shelter. Halfway there, he felt his senses come alive again, his connection to the Force flooding back so strongly as he crossed the threshold that it nearly brought him to his knees.
"Why didn't you tell me?" Ezra ground out again, slamming the door shut behind him. He kept his eyes on Thrawn as he fastened the interior barricade, refusing to look away for even a moment. Thrawn had moved in the short time Ezra was gone, and now he lay back on the mattress, turning something over in his hands as he watched Ezra's face.
The oth'ola endzali, Ezra realized. It was glowing again; he could just make out the silver-blue shine between Thrawn's fingers. He finished fastening the barricade blindly and let his hands drop, coming forward to loom over Thrawn, who only glanced up at him with a placid expression on his face.
Using the Force — and maybe this was petty of him, but he didn't care — Ezra floated the oth'ola endzali right out of Thrawn's hands. He moved it across the room, setting it down in the box of scrap electronics rather than touch it himself. Slowly, Thrawn sat up, leaning his back against the wall and staring at Ezra — finally — with some of the seriousness he deserved.
"Explain yourself," Ezra said. "Because from where I'm standing, it looks an awful lot like you meant to use those lizards as a weapon. Against me."
There was a tense beat of silence before Thrawn answered.
"Perhaps I did," he said evenly, tilting his head. It was like he didn't recognize the danger in Ezra's tone — or like he did recognize it, but simply didn't care. "Were we not enemies when we crashed? You were unconscious; it was impossible to predict how you might react once you awoke. It would be wise, then, for me to seek out and secure a weapon." His eyes swept away from Ezra, moving sightlessly over the carefully organized array of boxes and shelves. "At least, initially," he added.
"And after I woke up?" Ezra challenged. "When I didn't attack you?"
Thrawn lifted one shoulder and let it fall in a careless shrug, his gaze drifting across the room. He was working hard to seem unaffected, Ezra could tell — acting like the confrontation didn't bother him, like Ezra's stance above him wasn't triggering his adrenaline, when Ezra could sense the tension wavering between their link. If he made a single aggressive move, he knew Thrawn was ready to dodge or counter it, no matter how relaxed he may seem.
"You wanna give me an answer?" Ezra asked. "Or are you just gonna sit there and let me draw my own conclusions? Cuz I can guarantee you, they're aren't gonna be good."
Thrawn raised his eyes to meet Ezra's gaze. "We were enemies," he said, "and then we were allies, but our alliance was still shaky. Consider your first response to the ysalimir: you recognized the statuaries from my office and concluded I must have somehow engineered the crash to my benefit, evidently to obtain live ysalimiri as a weapon to use against you."
"Or it could have been an accident," Ezra interjected. Thrawn's mouth closed with a delicate but audible click of his teeth, the noise of it giving away his irritation while his face remained calm; he motioned for Ezra to go on. "You could have known about this planet in advance," Ezra said, "and maybe you even had it lined up in your navcomputer. When the purrgils took control — I don't know, I don't really know how they work — they could have somehow been influenced by the vector you already had programmed. Maybe you didn't mean for the Chimaera to crash, maybe you didn't mean to take me here with you, but you definitely meant to come here."
Thrawn waited to speak for a moment, making sure Ezra had finished. "If I intended to use ysalimiri against you in the battle for Lothal," he said, "I had plenty of access to them on Myrkr. You are correct in that I did intend to use them; you are incorrect in your assessment of my target."
"Meaning what?" said Ezra.
"Meaning that I could not visit Myrkr without attracting the attention of Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine," said Thrawn, his voice strained. "Both of whom were — and possibly still are — far more dangerous to me than you."
Ezra scowled, unsure what to say. Thrawn, of course, took advantage of his silence.
"You see?" he said, gesturing to Ezra. "Even now, you don't trust my intentions. Think how much worse it would have been thirty, forty days ago, before we began your training. You could have killed me outright."
Ezra opened his mouth, ready to hotly deny this accusation. But he really had meant to kill Thrawn, hadn't he, when he let the purrgils take the ship? Things had changed, yes, when he woke several days later to find Thrawn had tended to his wounds and built a shelter while Ezra was unconscious — but even then, their alliance had been shaky, as Thrawn said. Full of tension, each of them waiting to see if the other would attack.
He glowered at Thrawn, considering his options. "There's an easy way to solve this, you know," he said.
Thrawn waved his hand dismissively, breaking eye contact. "Theoretically easy," he said, his tone uncharacteristically disparaging. "For someone who can properly read minds. Not for a novice who barely bothers to put in the work."
The insult set Ezra's temper off again, but he controlled himself, refusing to respond to the bait. The key to keeping calm was that now, after so many days alone with nobody to talk to but Thrawn, he knew him well enough to recognize that Thrawn didn't disparage people — not even Ezra. For all their fights over the past few months, Thrawn had never talked down to Ezra or insulted him; he kept his voice calm even in the middle of the most fiery arguments, and he only ever showed the slightest hints of annoyance or strain. If he was insulting Ezra now, then he was doing so to stoke Ezra's temper deliberately — and why would he do that?
To distract him, maybe. To force his attention away from something Thrawn didn't want to be revealed.
Ezra took a deep breath, letting his anger out in a sigh. He stepped back, no longer looming over Thrawn — and as soon as he took a seat, he felt something change in the air between them. Something in the channel between their minds — a flicker of emotion too subtle for him to catch.
Eyeing Thrawn, taking in his posture and the set of his jaw, Ezra realized what it was: when he'd sat down, when he'd stopped looming over the other man, Thrawn had relaxed. It was only a minuscule amount, not noticeable to the naked eye, but the surge of adrenaline from earlier had faded away.
A memory sparked inside him — the day he'd infiltrated Thrawn's mind after that unknowing encounter with the ysalimiri, the day Ezra had failed to locate a mole burrowing underground. They'd talked about the Light Side and the Dark Side then, discussed why the Emperor caused pain when he searched through Thrawn's mind but Ezra — for the most part — did not.
And then Thrawn had said something Ezra hadn't given a single moment of thought since. The memory of it had been buried completely under the discoveries he'd made minutes later — the existence of the Grysks, the true nature of the oth'ola endzali. All of that had left Ezra muddled and confused, making him forget what might have been the most important revelation of the night.
Think of something you enjoy, something which makes you feel content, Thrawn had said. Until that day, Ezra had never sensed a single emotion from Thrawn; but after relaxing, after remembering the first time he ever went flying in an open-air speeder with his dad, suddenly Ezra had been able to see it all.
Why focus on a happy memory? Why had Thrawn specifically directed him to do that? It wasn't something Ezra had given much thought to before, but now the answer came to him, swimming gradually through a thick fog in his brain: because as overwhelming as his negative emotions were sometimes, they weren't something Ezra could share. Not with Thrawn. Not with anybody — not Sabine if she were here, not Kanan if he were alive, not even Maul, who at least stood a chance of understanding.
Because for a Jedi there was no emotion. Only peace.
Ezra let out a slow breath, scrubbing at the side of his face. It was bad enough that he had all the emotions a Jedi wasn't supposed to feel roiling around inside him — anger, grief, guilt and loneliness and sorrow — but it was somehow worse to admit that he felt any of them at all, to admit that even on a purely emotional level, he'd failed.
He'd sacrificed everything he had to take down Thrawn, and he'd failed at that. Worse, he'd killed everyone aboard the Chimaera in the process — not intentionally, as an act of war, but out of his own incompetence and panic. Then, to find out that Thrawn wasn't his true enemy in the first place — to find out about the Grysks, about the Death Star, about Thrawn's efforts in the Unknown Regions saving backwoods planets from a spot on the Empire's map — lost Ezra what little justification he had for the Chimaera's crash. Now, instead of sacrificing 50,000 enemy soldiers to take down a formidable enemy, he understood that he'd taken out 50,000 potential allies only to strand a military genius who was bent on fighting an alien horde more dangerous than even the Empire.
Ezra could follow each of his actions down a straight line to the worst possible fate. In a sense, it was possible that he'd doomed the entire galaxy to invasion by the Grysks, all in a failed attempt to be a hero. And if he were a real Jedi, he would stomach it all — absorb the negative emotions — push through them, be better.
But he couldn't even do that. He couldn't even acknowledge that those emotions existed.
That was why Thrawn insisted on a happy memory — it was the only type of emotion Ezra could willingly share, the only emotion he felt safe revealing, the only avenue for an open two-way channel between their minds, the only way he could access Thrawn's emotional state without causing pain.
But he couldn't possibly summon up a happy memory now. Not with so much anger boiling beneath the surface, threatening to come out. He stared at Thrawn, his hands clenched on his knees, and knew without even trying that it would be useless. So what were his options? What could he possibly do?
In his head, distant and faint, he heard his own voice: There is no passion, there is serenity.
And then, stronger, louder, Thrawn's voice:
Passion, yet serenity. Emotion, yet peace.
So, with no other options left open to him, Ezra closed his eyes, took a deep breath—
And let the hate flow through him.
