The Way of a Siluan
Chapter 32: Echoes in the Force
14 BBY 0 Months 1 Day
There were some things, Vader decided, which he would not tell his master. One of those things was that he had seen her himself this time.
Not meaning Ry. He was trying not to think of her any more than he could help. The person he would not tell his master he had seen was his former padawan, Ahsoka Tano. Not that he had met her face to face, no, but he had seen her starship as it was pulling out of a self-serve refuelling station in a quiet part of the Galactic Mid-Rim. Through the forward viewport, as she bent over the control panel to calculate the leap to hyperspace, he had seen the outlines of a Togruta's twin montrals and what he was sure must be striped lekku draped over her shoulders. True, there were other female Togruta pilots out there, but after all the time they had spent together, he would have known Ahsoka's Force signature anywhere.
Once she made her leap to hyperspace there was no way to follow or even guess where she'd gone, so he just sat in his pilot's seat, pleased but stunned. He'd heard claims over the years that she was still alive: reports of a rebel rescuer on a distant moon called Raada, a sighting in a bar at the great space station known as The Wheel. He hadn't believed it; these leads always turned cold and could never quite contradict the grave he'd found on Denova, with her twin lightsabres marking the site. But now he had seen for himself and believed it was really her. There was no one he could trust to aid him directly in his search, but one day, he promised himself, one day he would hunt her down and persuade her to join him. Then together they would be strong enough to defeat the Emperor and repay him for everything he had taken.
The sooner he found Ahsoka, the sooner he could put his plan in motion. But before he could go hunting for Ahsoka, he had to find a way to keep his master off his back. That meant obeying his order to find Ry Kyver, or at least feign a convincing attempt at it. If only he could do that, if only he could get his master to focus elsewhere, Vader could disappear for a while and take time to do his own thing, looking for Ahsoka without the Emperor's notice.
As for what he would tell his master in order to make that happen, for once Vader didn't know what to think.
Things had seemed simple enough on Takodana: Ry Kyver had received the summons he sent in the Emperor's name and had refused to answer it. The message was there, marked as read, in the starship's computer. That had fitted perfectly with his original theory that fear, fear of failure or fear of already having failed to find and destroy the One prophesied by the Emperor, had driven Ry to flee from him and reestablish herself elsewhere. The fact that she had abandoned her starship on a random planet like Takodana and stashed her signature black denim jacket behind a toilet in the washroom in the cantina told Vader that she had heard of the bounty he'd offered for her capture and become even more desperate to get away. He liked that. She was playing perfectly into his plan to get rid of her.
He figured the bounty hunters and his darkside minions, the Inquisitors, could handle it well enough from here, but he knew his master would be asking for a report on what he personally had done to find her, so he checked her ship's log, to see where she had been before Takodana and since the last time he'd met her on Ukio. Perhaps that would yield some information to either guide the search or persuade his master to give it up.
The ship's log showed that the first place she had gone after he last spoke with her on Ukio was Hokto System Planetary Object 743. That surprised him. The Hokto system was a no-fly zone, and for good reason. The debris field surrounding the system was a playground for him and his TIE fighter but a death trap for anyone else. He was grudgingly impressed that Ry had made it through. He hadn't thought she had it in her. If only to prove his own superiority in this matter, he made a point to revel in the death-defying dives and twirls he made his TIE fighter take through the asteroid field as he journeyed to that obscure planet to see what she might have been up to there.
When he stepped out onto the planet's bleak and rocky surface he could see, or guess at least, why she would have made such a dangerous trip. The thin air of that lifeless planet crackled with the lingering energies of long-forgotten Sith, too lost in the Force to be known as individuals now, but their knowledge and their power were still there for one who wished to use them.
She came, he guessed, to seek their aid to find the Siluan whose death the Emperor prophesied would bring her the power the Emperor desired in her: the ability to alter cellular midichlorian levels, and so create the Force-enhanced bio-tissues for a cybernetic body in which the Emperor's consciousness could live forever in whatever form he chose. That was why Vader hated her. The Emperor had promised him that together they would find that secret. Together they would find the secret of eternal life. But no. No sooner had the Emperor ascended his throne than Vader learned that he had another apprentice besides him, some useless AgriCorp Jedi called Ry Kyver whom his ill-chosen master had already tasked with finding those secrets.
But perhaps, he thought, he could get back at her yet. Perhaps she had led him to a power that would allow him to find her and get this search over with. With all his strength, he bent the power of the Force to his will and strained to make those throbbing energies of the ancient Sith yield up one little bit of insight: where exactly was Ry Kyver now?
But as for that question, nothing in the bleak red-black sky nor anything in the bare red-grey ground would reveal anything whatsoever to him. Behind his mask, he clenched his teeth and narrowed his eyes at them. They had helped Ry, had they not? Why else would she have decided to set her course next for a useless little planet like Iwaki? He went back to his TIE fighter smouldering with anger.
But when he got back in the pilot seat, there was indeed new insight waiting for him. The alert he made that Zabrak computer hacker captive of his set up for him, to show if Ry Kyver logged into her account in the Imperial computer network, that alert was beeping loud and clear. And his display console gave him a location: an IMAg animal processing facility on the planet Arum.
Vader swore a string of Huttese curses. It would take him the better part of a day to get to Arum. But there was a stormtrooper training facility nearby, and he opened a comm link to the commanding officer there.
"Lock down all exits from IMAg facility number KZ9183472," he said before the officer could finish stammering courtesies.
"My lord, it's only a slaughterhouse. The security system wasn't set up to..."
"Then get your men there immediately! I want all persons on site taken alive."
"We are in progress to address the situation, my lord. We were gratified to receive an earlier alert concerning the fugitive."
"Then I trust that you will have her for me when I arrive," Vader said sarcastically, then slammed the comm device down and lifted off from that dead rock of a planet in the Hokto system to weave and spin his way back through the debris field before he could make the leap to hyperspace.
On Arum, he made sure that a few heads rolled. It had taken the stormtroopers-in-training a full twenty minutes to get on-site and by that time, Ry was gone. In the meantime, she had used her keycard to deactivate the facility's security while an accomplice extracted a prisoner from the barracks that housed workers in the Imperial Remedial Labour Program. Then, according to what the computer in the facility control room told him, she had logged into her personal directory in the Imperial computer network, copied a large number of files to a disc, and then deleted them.
At least, she had deleted most of them. A folder of academic research articles was still there, articles with titles like Potential roles of Lactobacillus in mediating host midichlorian activity and Correlation of gut microflora profiles with host cellular midichlorian levels. Vader could hardly despise Ry Kyver more. How desperate had she become, investigating even gut germs for a connection to getting the Emperor the midichlorian-enhanced cell lines he wanted?
But the mention of the Emperor's prized midichlorian enhancement project made Vader realize something. He checked the network's deleted files cache to see what she had removed from her directory.
There was nothing. She had taken the trouble to delete the files permanently. That just made Vader feel angry, angry at all the useless time he was wasting just because his master wanted him personally to work on finding her. Nothing he was finding would help him find her, nothing would help him persuade his master to get off his back, to leave this search for Ry in the hands of the bounty hunters and Inquisitors and let him get on with other business, business of his own, like finding Ahsoka.
But as Vader spent the following days chasing down a lead on the starship Ry Kyver and her group had escaped in, he began to realize something: Ry had gone to no small trouble to get that data and then delete it. He even grudgingly admired her, thinking of diving to the bottom of the sea and swimming up a long waste discharge chute like that just to get what she wanted.
He started to wonder all the more: what did she have in there that she so badly wanted to hide? Surely not the work she had been doing for IMAg, but what about the midichlorian project? Could she have indeed destroyed the One of the Emperor's prophesy and so acquired the power to manipulate life, but then decided to hide her work from the Emperor? As much as it angered him to think that his master could have been right and he wrong about her, this would explain the lengths to which she had gone to break into the facility and delete the files she wanted to keep secret, but not only that. New power would also explain her boldness in aiding the rescue of an Imperial prisoner, one tied to an exiled Mandalorian family. Could it be, he wondered, that with her new Force-skills now in place she was seeking to realign herself with her own Mandalorian roots and so become a Power unto herself?
If that were the case, then he wished indeed to concern himself with seeking and destroying her. He wished no rival, only that he might himself become the lone master.
But the starship Ry had escaped in turned up torched on a lifeless moon near the Void space station and no further trace of either Ry or the Mandalorians she had consorted with could be found. Determined to know whether she really had become the threat he imagined, Vader decided to work on one missing piece of information in the story: what had happened when Ry went to Iwaki?
On Iwaki, the coordinates he had taken from the log on her starship brought his TIE fighter down in a swampy patch of grassland near the edge of a small shaggy forest.
As he stepped out of his TIE fighter onto the wet mucky ground, a light breeze stirred the feathery branches of the forest before him. He didn't like the way the trees whispered to each other, not just the sound of the wind in their branches but the ripples they made in the Force around them. They were too green, too alive, too well in themselves, and none of their power was of the sort that he could take and bend to his own use. He hated the noise they made in the Force, chattering to each other, confusing what he had come to find. But the longer he stood there, the more clearly he could discern it: over the whispers of the trees, he could gradually sense a lingering reverberation in the Force.
This place had seen an epic clash of Dark and Light. That, and the abrupt cutting off of a sentient life, echoed in the Force around him.
He very much wanted to spin this new evidence in his favour: to tell his master that Ry was dead and so they should give up the search. But that story didn't fit. The last revenge of a darksider was that in their death, the energies released by their death would warp the place where they died so that the Dark Side of the Force would long hold sway there. If Ry had been killed here and someone else had somehow taken her starship to Takodana and then used her password back on Arum, her last anger, her last resentment would have haunted this place.
But no, all he could sense was a lingering power of the Light. The more he sensed this, the more it unsettled him. What lingered in the Force here should not be: Light unbroken, Darkness shattered. Not dead, but shattered. That was what disturbed him. It made him feel uncomfortable, unsettled.
Vader quickly tried to pull together some way to explain what he was sensing, if only to push away that feeling. He grasped at the pieces he already knew, and began to put a story together: it would seem that Ry might have seen some sort of vision in the Hokto System, then had come to Iwaki and found that One she was supposed to destroy. Here now on Iwaki, that sense Vader was getting of a sentient life having been suddenly and violently cut off was too strong to ignore, but he was also sure that it was not a darksider who had died. So if Ry wasn't dead, then maybe that Siluan was killed here. But then Dark was shattered...this didn't fit with his theory that Ry had gained new power and sought to establish herself apart from the Emperor.
Perhaps, he thought, he was right in the beginning. Ry had no new strength. In fact, she was so weak that killing a simple-minded lightsider could shatter her, if not physically, then psychologically. He liked that idea. He could tell his master: Ry Kyver's spirit is broken. There is no further need to search for her, except as a common criminal who broke into an Imperial facility, and surely, the bounty hunters could deal with that.
But as much as he wanted to frame it that way, the idea wouldn't stick. As much as he hated and resented his master's interest in her, Vader knew, he shuddered, indeed he knew, the Emperor was far too powerful, far too knowing to take interest in Ry Kyver for nothing. No, however much he hated her, he knew she was too strong to be broken easily.
Yet the echoes in the Force said that Darkness, or some piece of it at least, had been broken. That left only one way to make sense of what he sensed here, but the idea was an abomination. It was unthinkable that a Light could rise strong enough to break a darksider like Ry that way. Even his old friend, his former Jedi master Obi-wan Kenobi couldn't do that. He'd left Vader maimed and crippled, yes, but that only made Vader's will to choose the Dark Side rage all the stronger, strong enough to keep him alive even as he lay smouldering beside a river of molten fire. No, there was always more power, more raw ready-now power in the Dark side than in the Light. That was why he had chosen it.
But the whispers of the shaggy green trees mocked him. They were alive, and by their very life they seemed to say: for all the power Vader had gained, the Dark Side could not fulfil the promise Palpatine had dangled before him. It could not create life. It could not keep Padme from dying. It could not bring her back.
The tree in front of Vader shivered and cracked, split down the length of its ten-metre-long truck as Vader twisted it in Force-grip. Then with a blast of anger in his outstretched hand, the tree went up in flame.
It was the dry season in that part of Iwaki and it was autumn. Quickly the fire spread through fallen leaves on the ground. Quickly it leapt up through the resinous branches of the trees. Soon the roar of the fire and the rush of the flames were too hot even for Vader's armour.
He got back in his TIE fighter, safe of the wetter ground of the swampy grassland, and gripped the steering console in his gloved hands. The TIE took off.
From his new vantage point up in the air, Vader saw a little hill on the far side of the burning forest, with a stone house standing at the very top. He was in no mood to ask questions. With one shot of the TIE's energy missiles, he made the house a burst of dark shattered rock and red blazing fire.
But for all the grim satisfaction that gave him, Vader was left with one problem: what exactly would he tell his master? He needed to figure that out soon. The display on his dashboard was flashing a message: the Emperor wanted his report, in person, immediately. Cursing, he set his course for Coruscant.
The hypnotic blue swirls of hyperspace put Vader back in a more analytic mood. He considered his limited options. What exactly could he tell his master to satisfy him for the time being? And how could he spin all of this to his best advantage? He knew the Emperor would not be pleased that Ry had been to Arum but that the stormtroopers had failed to capture her. Yet he couldn't hide this. The Imperial Security Bureau would tell the Emperor as much even if Vader refused to mention it. But what about the deleted files? He considered: would he mention those?
It didn't take Vader long to decide. No matter how confounding the echoes in the Force on Iwaki might be, one thing was clear: Ry had gone to great lengths to get those files for herself and then delete them from the Imperial network. Clearly she was hiding something, probably something about the midi-chlorian project, something that might be of some use to him yet, if only he could discover it.
He made a mental note to look further into this. Deleted files could be recovered. It would take time, but he hadn't terminated that Zabrak computer hacker yet. She could be made to help him extract whatever Ry had hidden. And that, Vader decided, was something he would not tell his master.
As he brooded further on how to handle the Emperor, Vader decided that even if it made his master angry that so little progress had been made, he had better tell as much of the truth as possible to draw attention away from the things he would rather hide. Though experience had taught him that he certainly could lie to Palpatine and get away with it, he was never sure just what the limits were to the old Sith Lord's ability to read thoughts. He didn't want to give his master a reason to try the full extent of his abilities on him.
So he decided he would lay out the basic facts, plain and simple: that it seemed Ry had sought out the spirits of the ancient Sith in the Hokto System, clashed with a lightsider on Iwaki with questionable results, and then gone to Takodana, from whence she fled only to reappear on the planet Arum. After that, he didn't know.
It occurred to Vader that there was a missing link in there that he had not yet considered: why had Ry gone to Takodana and not some other outpost? Takodana was certainly along one of many potential hyperspace routes from Iwaki to Marfa, where she seemed to have been headed, but it was not the most efficient path she could have taken. Was she meeting with someone specific there, he wondered, perhaps the Mandalorian who was involved in her escape from Imperial troops on Arum? Or was it someone of a more Force-related connection? He decided to send a couple of Inquisitors and a few non-Force-adept under-cover agents to prowl Takodana again for potential leads on this.
Having dispatched this message, he sat back in his seat for the long trip to Coruscant, bracing himself to face his master's displeasure.
From the depths of dark dreams, Ry Kyver surfaced into waking, if waking it could be called. Her first awareness was of light, as if of a bright sky seen from underwater. She vaguely sensed dim figures moving around her and speaking over her, but fevered heat filled her senses. Her lips and her limbs felt too heavy to move.
Then, for what felt like a very long time, she passed in and out of restless sleep. That sleep, too, brought dreams, vivid dreams. In those dreams Ry tried, again and again, to stalk that Siluan girl and take the power that should have been hers, but even though she tried with every bit of her being to force a different outcome, it always brought her back to the same place: here, her heavy body hot with fever. Then sleep would come again but instead Vader would be the one stalking her. She would flee from him back into half-waking, but that sound of his inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale always followed her even to that place with the bright light and a dim figure moving quietly around her.
How long the cycles of dream-waking went out on, Ry didn't know, but a time came when she woke to that brightness and blinked and as she blinked, the brightness became a skylight set in a dun ceiling. Sounds came into focus: a slow and steady mechanical beeping, the soft hum of electric machines, the sound of footsteps, and again, that steady breathing. She turned her head towards the breathing and saw not Vader but a Yemerian lizard-child lying on a hospital bed with a mechanical ventilator tube connected to a hole in its throat. The child's back was propped up with pillows; its spine was too abnormally curved inward to allow it to lie flat, and its tail was kinked at a right angle near the end. Ry quickly looked away.
She tried to sit up, but nausea came over her when she tried to move. She could see, though, that she was in hospital bed as well, covered with a green hospital blanket and dressed in a green hospital gown. Her forearms were wrapped in bandages and an IV tube poked its way into her left arm. A number of other medical-looking machines stood behind her, but they all looked hopelessly angular and antiquated. She and the Yemerian child shared a cubicle sectioned off by green curtains, the same dull green as the hospital blanket and hospital gowns. From beyond the curtain to her right, she could hear a man's baritone voice: "Yes, if your condition remains stable, we will operate in the morning."
Ry shifted uncomfortably in her hospital bed. How did she get here? She fought hard to bring the past into waking memory. There was her hasty escape from Takodana to Yemer and the meeting with Ava Gerges and the deal she made with Wakeh. Then they went to the IMAg facility on Arum. The last thing Ry could remember was Wakeh Gunma in full Mandalorian armour lunging at her with a blaster when she was in the control room trying to finish making a disc and deleting her files for the midichlorian project from the Imperial computer network.
The disc! And her kyber crystal. If she didn't have those, then she had nothing to rebuild her life with. Ry looked frantically around her. The bedside table held a box of medical examination gloves and a fresh roll of bandages but no sign of her disc or her kyber crystal or anything else she had so carefully stowed in her wetsuit pockets.
"Where's my stuff?" she demanded loudly.
Beyond the curtain, a few more words were exchanged between the man whom Ry presumed was a nurse or doctor and another person with a high squeaky voice who seemed to be the patient, then she heard what sounded like a man's footsteps and the curtain of her cubicle was whisked aside.
"I see, you're awake," he said. He was a tall man and solidly built, wearing green medical scrubs and a stethoscope around his neck. Ry almost did a double-take when she saw him: despite his sparse beard and masculine figure, their faces were so much alike that Ry thought for a minute she was looking at Wakeh. Not only that blue-black complexion but the lines of his face and the shape of his eyes were much the same, though he had a more gentle look. But even so, the thought of Wakeh, whom Ry last remembered putting a blaster to her head, did not improve Ry's mood.
"Where's my stuff?" Ry demanded again.
"Your stuff?" He seemed surprised or maybe confused.
"My stuff, the stuff that was in my pockets, in my wetsuit."
"Dr. Unayat handled your things, but she's with another patient now," he said calmly as he walked up to Ry's bedside. "I can ask her later. But how are you feeling?"
"Fine!" Ry said sarcastically, feeling woozy. "And who are you?"
His face twitched, her rudeness not lost on him, but his voice remained steady. "I am Ane Gabran," he said, "but you can call me Dr. Gunma if you prefer."
Ry bristled. Not only was he, in fact, a Gunma, but 'Ane' was a Siluan word for someone who had devoted themselves to monastic life but hadn't attained the rank of Ava, of Elder. She noted that as well as the stethoscope he also wore a plain grey stone on a rough cord around his neck, another Siluan thing. She scowled at him. "Where is this?" she said.
"We're on Yemer, at the Paloma Monastery Medical Clinic."
"There is no monastery." She knew. She was there. She gave the order to destroy it.
"A few of us are trying to change that." He sounded pleased as he said that.
Ry bristled. He made it sound so easy to undo what she had done. "Well, I don't want to be here!" she said and glared at him. She tried to get up but again that feeling of weakness and nausea overcame her.
Dr. Gunma sighed. With an obvious effort at patience, he said, "Unfortunately, you will need to remain with us for quite some time. You have a serious blood infection that you contracted from the slime on the wetsuit you were wearing when you were injured, and you're also still recovering from a few broken ribs."
Ry scowled. She didn't remember any of that happening.
"I was given to understand that Wakeh stunned you when you were on Arum," the doctor explained. "While you were stunned, she was taking you back to her starship but Imperial troops attacked. The blast shield warded off their shots but you were hit by shrapnel and injured while you were still unconscious."
Ry blinked, trying to integrate this information into her complete non-memory of the situation. Then she realized something. "But if I was injured then I should be in a bacta tank," she said and glared at him, daring him to contradict her.
A muscle in the doctor's jaw twitched. "Bacta is an Imperial monopoly now," he said quietly. "We haven't been able to get enough to make a bacta tank."
Ry was livid. She could remember being at the Imperial cabinet meeting at which they discussed this monopoly and decided to require identification for the purchase of this essential medical substance. It was like he was trying to blame her for her problem, she thought. "You call yourself a hospital and you don't even have a bacta tank?" she spat.
Dr. Gunma narrowed his eyes and said nothing. He quickly turned away and busied himself checking her IV drip bag and heart monitor. In her mouth Ry ran her tongue over one of her canine teeth, savouring the knowledge that she had made him well and truly angry.
At length, and with some restraint, the doctor spoke. "If you would rather be treated in another facility," he said, "we can call a medical transport to take you to the government hospital in the capital. As you can imagine, a not-for-profit clinic like this doesn't have the funds for that, so you will need to provide five thousand credits or so for the medical transport, and at least another fifty thousand or so for treatment at the hospital, unless you can provide proof of identity and show that you qualify for the Imperial Health Program."
For a moment Ry was tongue-tied. She didn't even have five credits, let alone fifty-five thousand. As Minister of Agriculture, she certainly did qualify for the Imperial Health Program, but given the search that was on for her, she wasn't about to alert an Imperial hospital to her presence by presenting her ID card. That's when she realized it: her ID card. They would have found it in the pocket of her wet-suit. They knew who she was.
"Go away! I don't want to talk to you!" her angry words burst out, and she hated herself for it; in her own ears, she sounded just like a volatile teenager.
The Siluan doctor sighed and said nothing. In silence, he adjusted a few settings on her medical monitor, then turned to the patient in the next bed. As he went to close the curtain that had been open between the two hospital beds, he turned to Ry and gave her a pointed look. "I think you are very fortunate to be at this clinic," he said, and then swished the curtain shut.
Ry glared at the gently swinging curtain with an intensity that would once have shredded it, but her power was gone now. She looked around the dull green cubicle in disgust. She was stuck here. It deeply offended her sense of pride to be in a place like this and not be able to just get up and leave.
Ry folded her bandaged arms across her chest, gingerly avoiding touching the place where the IV drip tube entered her veins. She had no idea how in the galaxy she was going to do it, but all the same, she promised herself that she would regain her power and that she would rebuild her life. She willed it with an intensity that made her aching, fevered muscles hurt all the more. She resolved to stay awake until Dr. Gunma sent the other doctor to bring her disc and her other stuff, but with the heaviness of her eyes and the soft wheeze and hiss of the child's mechanical breath behind the curtain, she soon fell back into a restless sleep.
Varda spent the eight-hour journey from Nechako to Iwaki in bitter fantasizing: if only she hadn't made Eo leave Hokto, if only she hadn't let the past keep her from going with her, if only Devin hadn't taken her to Ava Kirrin, if only Ava Kirrin had kept a better eye on her...
Whatever resentment she felt on that last point quickly faded as Varda brought her starship down at the landing coordinates beside what should have been Ava Kirrin's stone house.
There in the last rays of the evening sun, the stone house was a heap of rubble. Freshly cracked rock showed sharp blue-grey against the weathered grey-brown of the older surfaces. Everything around the house was in ruin also. Thin columns of smoke were still rising from blacked logs and charred tree-trunks in the lowland where a forest had once surrounded the little hill on which the house stood.
Feeling numb, Varda parked the starship and walked out into a cool autumn breeze. Even amidst the reek of smoke, the wind carried the scent of fall leaves and resinous evergreens from the moist, unburnt places nearby, yet Varda still found it hard to breathe. No wind could blow away the heavy, oppressive feeling that tightened itself around her head and chest and twisted her stomach into a knot as she stepped out of the starship.
For all her thoughts of blaming Ava Kirrin, Varda had very much hoped to meet him. She wanted to ask him about his encounter with Eo. She hoped he would take her to see Eo's grave. She was under no illusion that visiting there would end the incessant stream of if only I hadn't, if only he had that still rushed through her mind, but perhaps going to the place where Eo lay might end that maddening feeling that it wasn't really real, that Eo was still out there somewhere. Perhaps she could have some sense of closure and feel close to Eo again, if only for a little while. But now there was no Ava Kirrin to show the way.
Yet whether he lay dead beneath the rubble of his house or whether he had succeeded to flee far away, the dark throb of destruction and the echoing anguish of so many creatures that had perished in the fire all around her made it difficult to read what had happened, much less to find him. She walked with her stump-step gait over the charred ground and went and touched the broken stones of his house, hoping they would have something to tell her, but they echoed only the same hot anger that reverberated in the air around her. It made her whole body feel heavy and tired, small and afraid. She looked down the hill at the charred stumps poking up from the blackened, hummocky ground of what had been the lowland forest where Devin said Eo was buried. The grave could be anywhere in that mess and her bad hip, haunting her with a dull ache, was in no shape for walking up and down on rough ground if she didn't know where she was going. Varda kicked herself for not having asked Devin anything more specific; she had assumed that Ava Kirrin would be there to show her.
Was it Ry Kyver who had destroyed the house and burned the forest? From what Devin had said, Varda wouldn't put it past her, yet the feel in the Force around her was not a feminine energy, but one at once masculine and mechanical. It made her skin crawl. Was this the work of the Sith lords Devin had spoken of? She shifted her weight uneasily, reluctant to stay yet reluctant to leave without finding the place where Eo lay.
One last time, Varda reached out into the Force. Once again, she found nothing to guide her. Her heart ached as she looked out over the charred forest and the living grassland beyond it. She turned back to her starship.
That was when, behind her, Varda heard the swoosh of wings and felt something brush against her cheek.
On the ground in front of her landed a dark bird nearly as tall as her knee. Its round flat white face and hooked yellow beak suggested something of owl kind. It folded its wings with a rustle of feathers and looked up at her with big round yellow eyes that seemed to say Come.
Varda reached out her hand, trying to Force-connect with the bird but it crouched down and lifted its wings, then flew off back the way it came. Varda turned and saw that it had landed on top of the stone rubble. It looked straight at her. Come. Varda felt the message more in her bones than in her ears. She reached out to the bird again but again it flew away, landing beyond the house in the ashen remains of what Varda guessed had been Ava Kirrin's garden.
"Who are you?" she asked the owl, but it flew away and perched on a rock beyond the garden, then turned its round head back to look at her. Come, the owl's eyes seemed to say, come and see.
A feeling of anticipation quickened inside Varda. As fast as her bad hip would let her, she stump-stepped after the owl, along the little path through the garden and then along what she could just barely discern to be a path down the hill and down into a lower place where the remains of the forest still gave off wisps of smoke. Whenever she got close to the owl it would fly off another ten metres or so, more or less in the same direction each time, and then wait for Varda to catch up, or almost catch up, before flying off again.
Varda was huffing and puffing, hot despite the cool autumn breeze and gritting her teeth against the pain in her hip when at last the owl didn't fly off when she got close. It stood, perched on a pile of smooth fire-blackened stones and watched Varda carefully.
A pile of stones. Varda ran her eyes over them as she stood catching her breath. The stones were smooth and oval, river-rocks, not something out of the forest. The pile was not tall, two or three layers deep, but it was a meter wide and at least a meter and a half long. Could it be...?
Varda glanced over at the owl, but it shifted its folded wings and looked away from her.
All around her stood what was left of the forest: the blackened skeletons of trees stark against the blue evening sky. But beyond that was a grassland, unburned. Devin had said that they buried Eo near the edge of the forest. Could this be the place?
With the death of so many living things echoing in the ash and charcoal all around her, it was hard to get any feel in the Force of whether this was indeed the place where Eo lay. But as Varda stood quietly there, under the turbulence in the Force that echoed the destruction all around her, she began to feel, not Eo's presence, but something that reminded her pointedly of Eo, as if this place still quietly spoke the memory it had of her.
There was no one to watch. Varda let a tear slip down her cheek and reached down to gently touch the stones on the grave. "I'm sorry," she said quietly. She could sense no answer, but she called up the image of Eo as she had last seen her: the skinny teenager in a weathered set of pants and tunic, with her jet black hair pulled back from her suntanned face, and that beige cloth bag of hers slung over one shoulder. I love you, Varda, she remembered her saying. Varda hugged that feeling to herself and stood there by Eo's grave for a long time.
When the sun dipped behind the low hills on the horizon and dusk darkened around her, Varda turned to go. But then there was a swoosh of wings and the owl landed on the ground in front of her, barring her way.
Varda almost jumped; she hadn't even realized that the owl was still there. But here it was, shifting its weight on its feathered feet and looking at her intently. She reached out her hand to it again, inviting it to Force-connect.
She was puzzled when the owl didn't let her into its mind, but hopped up onto her arm, flapping its dark wings until it got its balance. Then it sat there with its yellow talons gripping the sleeve of her grey quilted jacket, lighter than it looked but still pressing down on her arm with no small weight. Again it looked into her eyes, closer now. At first, Varda wanted to look away, knowing that a direct gaze might be seen as a challenge. But she could feel the owl willing her to look, and so she did.
In the deepening dusk, the owl's yellow eyes had dilated, no longer the flat discs they were before but now two slim rings of yellow around bottomless wells of black. As she looked into those depths, Varda found herself drawn into that blackness. Her heart pounded hard and fast.
She found herself standing in a dark void, but soon the dark gave way. A purple night sky full of white stars appeared and a pale blue moon painted itself over her. As her eyes adjusted to the owl's night-vision, she felt herself flying towards the hill, where the stone house still stood intact. The door slid open, and there was Eo.
In the moonlight, Eo looked up into the sky. Her face was calm, resolute. Varda couldn't help but think that she looked older, not that her body had changed, but the lines of her face said that she had seen much. Varda realized then that Eo, like her, had no idea until she left Hokto that the Jedi had been destroyed and the Sith now ruled the galaxy. No wonder Eo looked older with the weight of that knowledge on her.
Varda watched as Eo saw something and walked down the hill after it. She saw this not as a continuous video but as a disjointed stream of images: Eo walking down under the eaves of the trees and into the still-living forest, at peace with the night but clapping her hands together to ward off predators; Eo bending down to look at some phosphorescent fungi growing on the forest floor; Eo hearing a noise, sensing something unfriendly nearby, her eyes showing her fear.
Varda saw her then, lighting her accursed lamp: Ry Kyver, with her mane of dark wavy hair and her pale grey face and a glint in her yellow eyes. She heard her laugh as she caught Eo in her Force-grip and held her there. An iron hand clenched Varda's heart when she heard Eo scream, watched her struggle, saw her face turn from fear to anger to hate.
But she was amazed to see that Eo mastered herself, and though she heard Ry laugh and taunt her, she saw that the peace Eo had chosen was unbroken by it. She heard Eo cry out for help one last time, saw her face Ry Kyver and heard her say, "Yet shall the Light be unbroken."
And then Varda closed her eyes. She knew what was coming. But she still heard Eo scream as her bones cracked and her cartilage snapped. The pain jolted through Varda's nerves and echoed in her bones. When Ry laughed again softly, triumphantly, Varda seethed with indignation. She steeled herself as she opened her eyes to the scene.
Eo lay crumpled and twisted on the forest floor, her eyes screwed shut and her face marked with pain. Ry, all clad in her black denim, took a few steps over and prodded Eo with her boot.
Varda felt sick. If this were in real-time, if she didn't know this was a vision, her lightsabre would have been in her hands, ready for swift vengeance. That sentiment did not prepare her for what came next.
She saw the forest filled with a brief and sudden glow of light. She heard Ry's lamp shatter, saw it go out. And she heard another scream, from Ry this time, a cry as if something had been bodily ripped from her. She fell to the ground as if something had struck her down. But for Varda, the effect was quite different.
The peace that washed through her mind and body was past understanding. It was quietness and it was strength; it was rootedness and it was courage; it was being made wholly well and becoming most truly alive. It is often like that with the death of a Siluan, she remembered telling Eo years ago on that day they buried Ava Yen back when Eo first came to Hokto. But she hadn't imagined that skinny little Eo had it in her to die with that kind of peace in the face of that kind of evil.
Varda looked at Eo again and saw that the pain in her face was a clean pain, marked neither by anger nor by hate. She felt a deep humility come over her. All those times she had taught Eo, Eo was listening, and not only that but was taking to heart what Varda herself had not entirely believed.
It made Varda ache all the more for her young friend. All the past few days spent in bitterness and regret seemed hollow now next to the reality of how blessed she had been to know Eo. It didn't change the fact that she had been wrong, completely wrong to kill those two clones, wrong to hide what she had done, wrong to run away from her life as a Jedi, but in a way that she could not yet put into words, Varda felt that being part of Eo's life redeemed the time that she had spent hiding on Hokto. Now she could see not how much she had lost, but how much she had been given.
Varda reached down to brush Eo's tussled hair out her still face, but even as she touched her, the vision faded and again she found herself in a black void. The void took shape and then Varda was back, standing among the skeletons of charred trees, looking into the wide yellow eyes of an owl perched on her arm under a darkening sky.
The owl quickly looked away. It crouched and then pushed off from Varda's arm, brushing her face with its wing feathers as it flew off into the dusk.
"Thank you," Varda called out softly after it. A low hoot answered in the distance, and somehow she didn't think it was just the owl echolocating. She felt a deep respect and gratitude well up in her. Surely this follower of the ways of the Force had lost much in the fire but still answered the call to show her what it knew.
Alone now beside a cold stone grave in a forest of fire-blackened tree stumps, the ache of loss bit again, hard and quick, but Varda chose not to lose sight of what she had seen in the vision. She gently touched the stones on Eo's grave one last time, and then turned to go. As she walked slowly back up the hill, stopping to rest every so often, she felt very small yet she felt free and she felt well in a way that she hadn't felt for many years.
When she reached her starship, the starship Eo had repaired, the starship in which Varda had escaped when she fled from having to face the Jedi Council, she stopped to catch her breath. As she stood rubbing her sore hip, she looked up into the night sky, the purple expanse ablaze now with a million shining stars. All the constellations were different from Hokto, but seeing the stars shine clear and bright white or red, orange or blue above her reminded Varda that she had made a promise.
When Varda was alone on Hokto in the days after she sent Eo off, she found herself haunted by a sense that she should not have made Eo go alone, and she saw with painful clarity that her only real reason for staying behind was selfishness, selfishness and long resentment against the Jedi Council that made her unwilling to face up to what she had done during the War. Unable to sleep, she had wandered outside and looked up into the night sky. Seeing the stars shining out there beyond her, she had promised herself, promised the cosmos even, that if by some miracle she could find a way to leave Hokto, she would do what she needed to do to fully take up her calling as a Jedi again.
At the time, she thought that would mean first facing the Jedi Council, admitting what she had done and explaining her long absence. But now she knew that the stars above were ruled by the Sith and there was no Jedi Council, indeed no Jedi Order at all. Half of her was almost glad that she wouldn't have to face the Council now, but even that thought made her feel small and shrivelled. If she couldn't even get rid of that old bitterness, how would she ever live as a Jedi under the menace of the Sith?
The cool night wind brushed Varda's face, mingling the scent of fire-scorched earth around her with the fragrant resin of evergreens in the living forest further away. She looked back down the hill at the spot in the charred forest where Eo's grave lay now shrouded in night. Her sadness for Eo was still a deep aching gaping empty space within her, but in the face of that sadness the peace Eo shared with her through the owl's vision lingered with her. She felt her long bitterness against the Jedi Order soften and a new sense of courage and purpose welled up within her. Even in the face of great evil, Light was yet unbroken. Eo had found her way to say yes to the way of a Siluan. Varda's exact path forward remained unclear to her, but she felt that she too could still say yes to the way of the Jedi.
Varda bowed one last time to her friend's grave, then turned and got into her starship. She sat down in the pilot's seat, one hand on the keypad of the navicomputer, about to select her next destination.
She still very much wanted, no, needed to go to Yemer. The burden she carried was lighter now but she still longed to speak to an Elder who might offer her some guidance for how to best rise up from the depth of her fall.
But the space routes from Iwaki presented easy options that Yemer and Nechako did not, and Varda realized there was one thing she could do now to at least begin to keep her promise. It was improbable, she thought, that she and Devin were the only survivors. She could at least try to find out who else among the Jedi was left alive in case they could be of some help to each other.
Varda checked the starship's chronometer. She still had four days before she was due back on Nechako, enough that she could still go to Yemer after making one other trip. If anything was to be known about other Jedi, she knew one person who would be safe to ask, and she knew where to find them.
Varda set her course for the old cantina on Takodana.