The Way of a Siluan, Chapter 23: In the Dark before Dawn
BBY 14, year five of Imperial rule, about ten hours after the end of chapter 22 and seven hours after the end of chapter 23
"The way of a Siluan is hard," Varda said flatly. "Are you able to do it?"
"I don't know," Eo said, "but I want to try..."
Outside Ava Kirrin's stone house on the rocky hillside above the forest, Eo stood in the garden, looking up into the purple night sky of the planet Iwaki. She searched the white stars, wondering which of them was Hokto and whether Varda was okay. More than anything, she wished she could see Varda again and tell her that she was right.
Eo wrapped her skinny arms around herself. The too-big grey hand-me-down pants and tunic she got from Devin's wife were thick enough for the fall evening, but she still felt cold and sick and hollow.
Behind her, in the little stone house on the rocky hillside overlooking the forest, the dinner things had been cleared away. Ava Kirrin and his wife were deep in conversation with Devin about the new order of the galaxy: Sith lords and stormtroopers, the end of the Jedi Order, and this Dark Jedi called Ry Kyver who had set out to destroy the Siluans. Eo had tried to sit and shut it all out while pretending to listen, but it was too much. As soon as she politely could, she excused herself to go use the outhouse.
Now, standing out there in the dark of the garden, all she wanted was to stretch out the minutes before courtesy demanded that she go back in to join her hosts. She hoped that by then the conversation would be over. Somehow, when she first heard all this back on Nechako, the shock of the news was so fresh, and the bustle of staying with a real biological family was so intriguing that she didn't have the space of mind to think or to feel her new reality. But on the long flight from Nechako to Iwaki, while the starship was on autopilot and Devin was zonked out asleep with a parent's perennial fatigue, then she had time to feel the weight of it settle over her.
The way of a Siluan is hard, Varda had told her so many times. It's one thing to like nonviolence from the quiet of your garden, and another thing to practice it when your enemy is staring you in the face. Eo meant it every time she said I want to try, but her words sounded so naive now, like something spoken by a child in a fairytale a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Behind her, Eo heard the door slide open and a long column of light was cast out into the dark beside her, throwing the leafy garden into jagged contrasts of light and shadow. She turned to look, and there was Ava Kirrin's big, burly form in the doorway. He stepped out and closed the door behind him, shutting the light in again, and called her name.
"Eo? Eo? Are you out here?"
As her eyes readjusted to the starlight, Eo could see him standing there, looking toward the outhouse on the other side of the garden. For split second, Eo considered crouching down behind a bush and pretending not to be there, but then she heard her own voice quaver, calling out, "I'm here!"
Ava Kirrin looked over and caught her eye, then walked over with his big lumbering gait to stand beside her. For a moment, they both just looked up at the stars.
"Conversation in there was a bit heavy?" Ava Kirrin said.
Eo shrugged, then nodded. There was no point pretending.
As his eyes adjusted to the starlight, Ava Kirrin studied Eo. With her straight black hair and dark eyes and skinny frame, she reminded him of someone he couldn't quite place. What was more important to him, though, was to get a feel for who she was in the Force. But at first, all he could read was that she was scared, scared and troubled, but it didn't take a Force-adept to see that. Even in the faint light, the way she hunched her shoulders and hugged her arms around herself told him as much.
"So you want to be a Siluan?" He'd already asked that over dinner, but with the kids and everyone else at the table, it was hard to take that conversation far.
Eo felt a wave of something almost like pain wash over her. What she wanted hadn't changed, but how could she say she was able to commit herself to such a path in the face of what it might cost her now? She looked down at her feet. "I want to try," she said uncertainly, "but..." She let her words trail off unfinished. Ava Kirrin seemed so big and sure and solid, she felt ashamed to be here asking for training yet feeling these kinds of doubts about herself.
Ava Kirrin sighed and nodded sadly. He couldn't read Eo's thoughts, but he was reading her feelings more and more clearly, and her thoughts he could guess. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and fingered the rough stone that hung on a short cord around his neck. It was years now since he took his vows and began to wear that stone that marked him as a Siluan, but he was painfully aware that the questions he sensed in Eo were also his own: if, when, this Dark Jedi found him, his very biology would demand that he defend himself. Love, no, plain old decency would demand that he defend others, and then how could he say that he would keep his vow of nonviolence? How could he hope to take the way of a Siluan and love even his enemy when instinct itself demanded fear and anger and hate?
But to be strong for Eo's sake, he decided to tell her what he kept telling himself. "The way of a Siluan is hard in its own way, but so is the path of anyone who chooses to seek the Light. Whether we take the way of a Siluan or not, we'll all have to answer whether we're really willing to accept the challenge of our calling." Ava Kirrin's voice sounded forced and overconfident in his own ears, and he only wished he knew how to change that.
"Yes," Eo said, without looking up. Ava Kirrin knew that yes. It was the yes of someone who had learned compliance, not the yes of someone who spoke from their own conviction.
"It's OK to be afraid," Ava Kirrin said, trying again to connect with her. "But that's why we say Yet shall the Light be unbroken, so that we can find the strength to face these things."
"Yes," Eo said again, and Ava Kirrin sighed, wondering whether she might rather just be left alone. But he didn't sense a go away in her. The longer he paid attention to what he was sensing in her through the Force, the more he felt that the fear in her was just mashed on top of what she really wanted, that beneath it she was rooted and grounded, unshakable in a way that few people were. Maybe she just needs to know her own mind, he thought.
"If you're not sure this is right for you, you don't have to do it," Ava Kirrin said, trying against his natural bent to keep his words gentle. "The way of a Siluan isn't normative for everyone; there are other ways to seek the Light, other ways to live a good life if you want. We'll be happy for you to stay, but if you'd rather you can go back with Devin in the morning. Or even if you want to stay and learn from us for a while, you still have time to change your mind. You're what, eighteen now?"
"Seventeen," Eo said.
"You can't take your vows until you're at least twenty-one anyways, so you have four years or more to change your mind."
In the dark under the stars, Eo tilted her head to one side, weighing this. When Ava Kirrin put it that way, she felt with crystal clarity that her basic desire hadn't changed. She was still drawn to this simple yet demanding way of life; she felt most wholly well and truly herself in it. To hang back from the calling she felt would itself be a kind of death. Better to live with fear than with regret, she felt.
"No, I want to try," Eo said, more firmly this time. "It's just that I can't say I won't fail."
Ava Kirrin shrugged. "Neither can I," he said, looking down at her standing there beside him.
Hearing the catch in his voice, Eo stopped staring at the ground and looked up. She was surprised to see the lines of his face show that he questioned himself just as much as she did.
"Do you remember from the sayings of Ava Yelena, Though I may die, yet shall the Light be unbroken?" Ava Kirrin said.
Eo nodded. The words sent a shiver up her spine.
"Perhaps what we need now is to say, Though I may fail, yet shall the Light be unbroken. More than nonviolence or any of that, this is what it means to be a Siluan: to trust that whether we live or die, whether we succeed or fail, yet shall the Light be unbroken." As he said this, Ava Kirrin was painfully aware that the young man he once was, even a part of the man he was now, would argue back that nothing in reality evidenced any final triumph of the Light, and that if one held any such belief, then why was there any need to make any effort to see Light prevail over Darkness at all?
But beside him, Eo let her breath out slowly and closed her eyes. She nodded. Ava Kirrin could see the tension melt out of her shoulders, and sense the fear wash out of her. "Thank you," she said quietly.
Ava Kirrin smiled down at Eo, the way a master may smile at a novice. She will do well, he thought, but then caught his breath at a brief and sudden vision in the Force: he saw not a young woman of seventeen, but an old woman nearly seventy, bent and wrinkled but her eyes were bright. She wore the stone amulet of the Siluans around her neck and bore in her hand the staff of an abbess. She will do well indeed! he told himself.
"Tomorrow we will begin your training in earnest, then," Ava Kirrin said. "But for now, you've had a long day. Please get some sleep."
With one last look at the stars, Eo followed him back inside. But Ava Kirrin decided not spoil his new apprentice by saying anything about the vision to her. Anger was the great enemy of the Jedi, but pride was the undoing of a Siluan.
# # #
Eo opened her eyes and found herself wide awake, but unsure where she was. She lay still for a while on a soft and unfamiliar bed, looking around in the dim glimmer of starlight that came through the window above her, listening to the small night-sounds and sensing the air, and then remembered: she was in Ava Kirrin's house, on Iwaki. She and Devin had arrived there the evening before, and after her talk with Ava Kirrin, they were each given a cot to spend the night.
Sleep did not seem likely to return, so Eo got up. She quietly felt her way up out of the house and went out into the garden.
A crescent moon hung over her now, and in its light, she could see that Ava Kirrin's garden wasn't like the tangle that she and Varda kept on Hokto. It was laid out in strict blocks, mostly of some massive vegetable with a ring of huge round leaves around a massive bulbous head, but there was also a grass-like plant with big globular seed heads and a squat, bushy plant hilled up in tidy rows.
Eo felt calm now, and resolute. A cool wind brushed her cheek, and she looked up to see the white fluff of some sort of thistle-seeds catch the bluish moonlight as the breeze bore then away over the forest to the east. Eo felt a strange desire to follow them but didn't. What she wanted most was to sit and feel the feel of this place. Iwaki could never be what Hokto was to her, nor could it be what she'd hoped the monastery on Yemer would be, but after her talk with Ava Kirrin, she felt she could put down roots here. It would be hard, she knew, to learn to live at peace with the fear of this Dark Jedi always hanging over her, but as Varda would have said, This is your training. Eo smiled sadly as the image of the old hermit came to mind. But perhaps Varda would be glad that she was here. Back on Hokto, Eo thought, she was still a child; here, she would grow up and learn to face the harsh realities of the galaxy.
Eo wandered down along the path between the blocks of vegetables, looking for a good place to sit, but just then she heard a swoosh of wings. She took a step back, startled: a big night-bird, nearly knee-high, landed on the ground in front of her. With a rustle of feathers, it folded its dark wings and turned its flat white face toward her. Its hooked beak gleamed in the moonlight. Eo stood perfectly still, and the bird looked her in the eye with something very much like intelligence. Come, it seemed to say in one low hoot. Eo watched it fly off to perch on top of the outhouse and look back at her. Come, it seemed to say, now!
Eo looked back at the stone house. Every window was dark, everyone was asleep. She didn't suppose anyone would notice if she stayed out for a while. Back on Hokto, she used to do this if she couldn't sleep. She would follow the voice of the tree-frogs out into the forest and sit by the lake and watch fish jump in the moonlight. She learned many things that way, watching and listening to the voices of the night creatures. Perhaps this bird, too, had something to teach her about Iwaki.
Eo followed the bird through the garden and down the hill to edge of the forest below, where a little path dipped down a steep bank and then wound its way under the feathery branches of resinous trees and through a thick undergrowth of some kind of leatherleaf.
She had taken this path with Devin earlier when he landed the starship in the flat field beyond the forest. She couldn't see the path in the dark under the trees, but five years on Hokto had taught her what she never learned in the Jedi Temple: how to sense the life of the trees and plants around her and so find the way through them. And she knew her woodcraft. She struck her hands together to ward off predators, the way Varda had taught her to do on Hokto, and stepped into the dark of the forest.
By Force-feel and careful attention to the way the moonlight reflected off the shiny leaves of the undergrowth, Eo made her way to the far side of the forest, where she could just see the moonlight shining on the open field beyond the trees. Ahead of her, the bird called out to her again in a series of low notes as it stopped on a log in a little clearing. Standing quietly all around was a host of mushrooms, which gave off a vivid green bioluminescence. The bird hooted at Eo again.
"Is this why you brought me here?" she asked, but with a swoosh of wings, the bird flew away.
The bird didn't seem to mean for her to follow, so Eo knelt on the damp ground to look at the strange fungi, and noticed a trail of insects, ant-like, walking in orderly lines to and from the mushrooms, diligently scraping something sticky from the underside of the mushroom cap before joining the returning march. Eo remembered Varda telling her about something like this, about insects that cultivate fungi the way so-called sentient species cultivate other crops. She dug her fingers into the crumbly leaf-mould, wondering whether this species, like the mushrooms on Hokto, knew how to join to the roots of the trees and bind the forest together.
With her fingers in the cool damp of the ground, Eo could focus and begin to feel something of the life of the fungi stretching out under the leaf litter. She could even sense the mushrooms' connection to the life of the trees around her, and she felt a surge of awe and gladness for it. But as she knelt there, looking, feeling, listening, another sense came to her through the fungi. It reminded her of something else Varda had told her: that plants, in their own way, sense danger, and send out signals to warn each other.
Eo quickly stood up, feeling uneasy. She held her breath and listened, but she heard only the rhythmic chirping of some host of insects in the field beyond the forest. She clapped her hands together again, then waited, but heard nothing. The stillness did not comfort her.
She turned to go back up the path, but then came up against a dense patch of leatherleaf. Her heart started pounding as the realization came over her: in her uneasy state of mind, she couldn't use the Force to feel her way through the trees. She forced herself to breathe, to calm down. She turned back and headed again for another gap that looked like it might be the path.
Wild things, she knew, would avoid her if they knew she was there. She clapped her hands together sharply again, and listened.
A twig snapped, and a woman's voice laughed softly. Eo froze. Fear crept up her spine with cold fingers.
"Let there be Light!" a woman's voice said sarcastically, and with a sharp click, the harsh light of an electric lantern seared Eo's eyes. She held up her hand and squinted through her fingers, too stunned to run, trapped in the unexpected brightness.
"So you're that One? You? You're a little twig!" The woman cracked her knuckles, but to Eo, it sounded like more twigs snapping.
What One? Eo was baffled.
"Anyways, I found you," the woman said, with a note of triumph.
"Who are you?" Eo asked, but saw only the too-bright lantern held up to her face.
"You tell me," the woman said.
The lantern dimmed slightly and was lowered. Eo blinked to adjust her eyes, and saw a woman in a black denim jacket and dark jeans, with dark hair pulled back from her face. She haggard beyond her age, unhumanly grey. Her yellow eyes gleamed in the lantern-light.
Eo's mouth went dry. She wasn't good at reading people through the Force, but this person was practically broadcasting herself. "You're Ry Kyver," Eo said quietly.
"And you are that One."
Eo shook her head, still confused, but gathered herself. "You were a Jedi once," she said, more boldly now, too boldly perhaps. "We need you to come back, while you can."
Ry didn't answer, but snickered softly. Eo caught the gleam in the Dark Jedi's eye and realized all at once that she needed to run. She took a step back and then sprang away from the lantern's harsh circle of light.
But Ry was expecting this. She reached out her free hand in the air and with grasping fingers jerked Eo back, yet without touching her.
"Let me go!" Eo yelled, and clawed against Ry's Force-grip.
Ry grinned and held the lantern up a little higher. "Scream, little One!" she said. "Yell while you can! No one will come." She liked this part. She liked to taunt these people who thought they could hold on to the Light. Fear is the path to the dark side. So Yoda had taught her back when she was a Jedi youngling in the Temple. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. So Eo's reaction was a step in the right direction.
Kicking and screaming, with her heart pounding against her chest and blood throbbing in her ears, Eo did feel a storm of fear and anger and hate rise up and gather strength within her. And that storm was itself strength, it was power, power to wield the Force, to play Dark against Dark and so have some hope of escape.
But not every tree bent by the wind breaks, and the roots Eo had put down in the Temple and in the garden were not shaken. Out of that unbroken place within her, Eo stopped her thrashing and took a deep breath. With a single exhale, she blew the storm away.
She was still now, standing there in Ry's unyielding Force-grip. In that moment of stillness, before Ry could react, Eo knew as clearly as she had known as a child in the Temple: I want to have the Light within me. I want it more than anything. But now, even with this Dark Jedi glaring at her, she knew that the only Light she would find for herself was the Light she was willing to share with Ry Kyver.
Ry saw Eo's face soften, and it angered her. She tightened her Force-grip so hard that Eo cried out.
But now Eo could separate the will to live from the will to hate. With one last burst of energy, she pushed back against Ry's hold on her. Very deliberately, she let out one last piercing scream, one last call for help.
For months to come, Ava Kirrin would wake up in a cold sweat, thinking that he heard Eo cry out, but the truth was that he never heard it. No one did. The forest muffled her voice, and back at the house, heavy sleep and stone walls blocked out what was left to be heard.
Ry laughed as Eo struggled to get away. She let the lantern in her left hand hang at her side, but kept the right stretched out to hold Eo in place. "You can't run, and you can't hide," she said. "No one is coming for you, so your life is mine to take." She set the lantern down on the ground.
Hanging limp in Ry's Force-grip, with her breath and strength spent, Eo looked at Ry, and looked at the tall trees standing silent and unmoved around them, and understood the situation. Though I may die...the words crystallized in her mind. "Yet shall the Light be unbroken," she finished quietly. But she saw Ry reach for something in her belt. She wondered for the first time what it was like to be run through by a light-sabre, and her fear came flooding back. She screwed her eyes shut.
Ry Kyver wondered afterwards whether things would have been different if she hadn't let Eo know she was there in the first place, if she had just drawn her blaster and dropped Eo where she stood before the girl even knew what was happening. Then again, she wondered later what would have happened instead if she'd played Eo out longer and made sure that her will toward the Light was truly broken first. But without the benefit of hindsight, Ry felt that she'd had a little fun, and she had other things to do. So when she heard Eo's words and saw her brace herself, she decided it was time to make her point.
"That's so not going to work for you," Ry said, and twisted her clenched hands in the air.
Under Eo's cry of pain was the dull crunch of bone and cartilage. When Ry opened her fingers, Eo fell to the ground. Her body twitched a few times and then didn't move again.
Ry smiled and wiped her hands on the sides of her black denim jacket. Mission accomplished, she thought, and poked Eo's twisted form with the toe of her boot.
Yet even as she did so, the lantern she'd set on the ground shattered and went out, but all around her, the forest beheld a flash of light. Ry instinctively raised her arm to shield her eyes, but a blinding white pain seared her mind. A wave of nausea washed over her, and her knees gave way. She found herself lying on the ground, clutching at the pain in her side and gasping for breath. Her mind reeled in agony.
She lay there until night passed and dawn's red light bled through the trees. Then suddenly there was a sharp thwack in the distance. Thwack! The sound rang out again. Hearing it, Ry leapt up and fled into the forest like a wild thing.