Welcome to chapter 33! A quick content advisory: this chapter contains a brief reference to past self-harm.
The Way of a Siluan
Chapter 33: Breaking Point
14 BBY 0 Months 1 - 0 Days
It shouldn't be this difficult. Ry knew that much for certain. After all, she'd been doing telekinesis since before she could read. But when she stared at the roll of tan-coloured bandages on the table beside her hospital bed and willed it to move, it just sat there.
She scowled at it. Move! she willed it. Please, move, she coaxed it, but nothing. She passed her hand slowly over it, fingers gently undulating as if she were doing mind-control, not telekinesis, but still, nothing.
Feeling dizzy again, Ry screwed her eyes shut and lay back against the thin pillows of her hospital bed. She fought hard not to let her frustration turn into despair, but despair kept chewing at the edges of her sanity.
In all her whole life, she had never been without her Force skills. Her whole childhood in the Jedi Temple was one long and highly determined attempt to prove her mastery of the Force. And she was one of the best in her cohort. That was why being assigned to the AgriCorps was such an insult. But once she made her choice to let go of Jedi strictures and to use whatever energy she wished, whether Dark or Light, new forms of power opened up to her. She became able to manipulate living cells even at their most basic molecular genetic level. She could alter gene sequences just using the Force, bypassing time-consuming lab protocols. She could reach inside plants and even animals and flip their little biochemical switches on and off to make them produce more and do it faster. She hid the darkside element behind this, of course, and with those kinds of skills she quickly rose in the ranks of the AgriCorps and caught the attention of the Naboo senator who later became Galatic Emperor. Because of her Force-skills, he gave her a ladder she could climb as high as she liked in his new administration. His prophesy that her power would reach new heights with the death of that One she'd spent so long hunting down had driven her from one end of the galaxy to the other and driven her almost insane, all for that elusive power to manipulate not just molecules but the midi-chlorians themselves, but it was worth it, if only to wield that power.
The thought of it now made Ry feel sick. She didn't feel powerful at all any more, just hollow. She'd tried everything she could think of to get back what she lost when she killed that girl back on Iwaki. She had fasted and meditated for days in that darkside nexus on Takodana. She had tried every day since to take the slow and patient route of simply retraining herself, beginning again from the basics like a brain-injury patient re-learning how to walk. But nothing was working. That scared her. Having known what it was to wield the power of the Force, she wasn't sure that life without her Force skills was worth living.
Ry shook herself and forced herself to sit up again. She could not let herself sink into despair. She had to stay in control.
She craned her neck, trying to see beyond the open curtain of the cubicle into the hallway. Wasn't that Dr. Unayat supposed to come and bring her her stuff? On that disc she'd made back on Arum, just before Wakeh stunned her, was one last hope for something she could try to get her Force skills back and put her life together again.
In the many years that she had worked on the Emperor's project, attempting to create muscle tissue with enhanced midi-chlorian levels, she had also engaged in a side-project of her own. The standard methods for measuring midi-chlorian levels all relied on blood samples, but some organisms she wanted to study didn't have blood. Bacteria, plants, fungi...all could be made to alter the ways in which humans and other sentients interact with the Force. And so, with long years of trial and error, with long hours of scouring Jedi archives and Sith holocrons for scraps and hints of information, and with no small feat of meditating her way into high levels of Force perception, she had designed a laboratory protocol for measuring midi-chlorian levels based on DNA sequencing rather than on blood proteins.
That protocol was on the disc. If only the hubbub with the bounty hunters would die down and she could go out into the galaxy again, maybe she could find a way to get access to a lab. She had other work on that disc too, work she'd done for the Imperial Agriculture Program but hadn't shared with the rest of IMAg yet. The right buyer would pay good money for the chemical formulas she'd worked out for new agri-chemicals and the sequences of new genes she'd developed for improved crop varieties. If she could sell that information, then she'd have the money and the means to work on something she had long wanted to do: she could screen bacteria and other organisms that could live symbiotically within the human body and look for genetic variants that carried unusually high midi-chlorian levels and so could enhance their host's Force sensitivity. That could provide a way back into the Force abilities she'd lost. It would be a long shot, but it was better than no hope at all.
Wondering how long it was going to take before she could get off this planet and work out her plan, Ry stared up at the skylight in the dun ceiling, now showing a few orange-tinted stars in a reddish-pink evening sky. Beside her, though she turned her head away and tried to ignore it, was the wheeze and hiss of the mechanical ventilator for the patient in the next bed. From somewhere outside, she could hear the rise and fall of voices chanting. One of the voices, a woman's, was tolerable and another male-sounding baritone voice was actually quite good but a third voice had a high, thin, whistling quality to it that Ry found quite grating. She wished they would stop.
Ry shifted restlessly under the hospital blanket and noticed that something on her right thigh really hurt. When she touched the place, the pressure of her touch made it hurt even more. She sat up and pulled the blanket aside, then hitched up the hospital gown so she could see.
Along the outer side of her right thigh was a twenty-centimetre gash all sewed up with little black stitches. Around it, her grey skin was blotched with ugly red and purple bruises. She quickly covered it up again.
Dr. Gunma had said something about her getting hit by shrapnel. Was that the place? Gingerly, she touched the spot through the hospital blanket again. Feeling the pain somehow made everything that she didn't remember happening seem more real, more within her control.
But as she touched the place, the motion niggled something in her mind: she could remember standing there in the control room at the IMAg facility on Arum, the computer spitting out that slim grey disc. She remembered putting it in her pocket... Her muscle memory told her it was the right-hand side pocket on the outer thigh of the wetsuit but no, she told herself wasn't it the breast pocket she'd put it in?
If the disc was in that pocket when she got hit... Ry felt her heart start beating wildly. No, she told herself. Flesh was weak, flesh might bruise but that didn't mean that the disc would break. Even if it was in that pocket, not in the breast pocket where she wanted to tell herself she'd put it.
Ry looked around to see if there was a buzzer or something she could use to call the doctor. There was a red button on the machine behind her with a label that said Intercom but when she pressed it nothing happened.
As evening fell and the light from the skylight dimmed, light fixtures in the walls flickered on with the cheap blueish white glow of low-cost fluorescent lighting tubes. They made her eyes hurt. She screwed her eyes shut and tried to block out the other senses around her: the sound of the chanting and the mechanical breath, the smell of alcohol-based disinfectant. The feverish and woozy feeling in her mind and body took over, and soon she dozed off into troubled dreams of trying to remember which pocket she had used when she put away that all-important disc.
When, somewhat groggy, she opened her eyes and sat up again, a woman was there checking something on her IV drip machine. She was a Twilek, on the older side judging by the wrinkles in her light purple skin, with her head-tails tied back in a plain beige headscarf, wearing shapeless medical scrubs the same ugly green as the cubicle curtains.
When she noticed that Ry was awake, the Twilek woman looked her over in a dispassionate and technical sort of way. "Good to see you awake. How are you feeling?" she asked in a thick Twilek accent.
"Where's Dr. Unayat? She was supposed to bring me my stuff," Ry said.
"I am Dr. Unayat," the woman replied calmly. She looked intently into Ry's face as if looking for some indicator of her patient's condition.
Ry quickly looked away. "Where's my stuff?"
"As soon as we are finished your checkup, I will get you your things," the doctor said. "Now stick out your tongue."
A little cross-eyed, Ry obliged.
The doctor scowled slightly and made a note in her datapad. "We will have to give you more B vitamins," she said, and adjusted a dial on the medical monitor. "Now look at this," she said, and moved the stylus for her datapad around in the air. Ry followed the point with her eyes while the doctor watched carefully. The doctor made another note, then clipped the stylus to her datapad and set it down on the table beside the bed. "The last thing we need to do now is to change your dressings," she said and picking up Ry's right arm, proceeded to unwind the cloth bandage wrapped around her forearm.
Ry stiffened. She didn't want anyone else seeing what she had done to herself on that nightmare night back in her lab after Vader's last visit. She didn't even want to think about it. Angrily, she turned her head away and found herself looking at that Yemerian kid in the next bed with its curved-in spine and mechanical breathing tube attached to its trachea.
Bandage off now, the doctor was rubbing something cool and soothing into her forearm. "This will help to heal your scars," she was saying. "The cuts got infected because you went in dirty water before they were all finished healing. Did you do this to yourself, or did someone do this to you?" She asked this in a gentle, professional voice, scanning Ry's face for her reaction.
"It's none of your business!" Ry spat, turning her head back to face the doctor in time to see her wrapping a new bandage over the ugly blue welts on her grey forearm.
The doctor kept her face down and said nothing. The silence was filled with the wheeze and hiss of the child's breathing in the next bed. "What's wrong with him?" Ry demanded, pointing with her free hand.
The doctor pressed her lips together and scowled. "Dr. Gunma didn't tell you why we have the clinic here?" she said but didn't wait for an answer. "When you get better and go outside, you will see. There is a big dead zone where the monastery used to be. Someone sprayed chemicals there to kill everything. Whatever those chemicals are, they don't go away. The Yemerians who live around here are all poisoned now. The chemicals, they get into the eggs the mothers lay and then the children hatch out damaged, like that one you see here. All of the patients here, except for you, they are kids like that. Or some older ones too. The older ones have problems too, from the poisoning."
Ry screwed her eyes shut and pretended not to hear. Guilt had never been a problem back in the days of her success, but now it threatened to join despair for a chance to eat away at the fraying edges of her mind. She refused to let it get to her.
Meanwhile, the doctor moved around to the other side of her bed and finished doing the bandage on her other arm.
"Your things are here," she said when she was finished.
Ry opened her eyes. The doctor was putting a green drawstring bag down on Ry's lap. It was the same ugly green as the cubicle curtains and bulging with stuff.
Ry yanked the drawstring open. The doctor moved on to the Yemerian kid in the next bed.
From the bag, Ry pulled out a red shirt and black jeans, then a black sports bra and black thong underwear, the ones, she realized, she had been wearing before she changed into her wetsuit. She let them sprawl on her lap on top of the hospital blanket. Next thing her hand found in the bag was a flat rectangle. She wrapped her fingers tight around it, triumphant, but it turned out not to be her disc, just her ID card. She threw that down with her clothes too, and with it, the two key cards that she fished out next.
Reaching into the bag again she felt something like a small rock, nearly cylindrical but with lengthwise ridges and bluntly pointed ends. That turned out to be her kyber crystal, red and gleaming. Not much use to her unless she could get her Force skills back, but valuable nonetheless. She put it carefully in the breast pocket of her green hospital gown, then scowled. Where was her disc?
One last time she reached into the bag and felt a little packet. It crinkled when she grabbed it. She pulled it out and looked at it: a red elastic band tied around a piece of clear flimsiplast, folded many times over around some stiff grey thing, or maybe several stiff grey things inside.
Ry quickly unwrapped the little package, pulling off the elastic band and tearing the flimsiplast loose. Inside were three grey shards, hard temperaplast cracked to reveal a thin bluish-silver metal plate inside, also cracked. Ry stared at the fragments in disbelief.
Her disc was broken.
~ at the Imperial Palace on Coruscant ~
It was not without reason that the Emperor rarely entrusted any task solely to Darth Vader.
This was not out of any desire for teamwork or the benefit of diverse perspectives. No, the Emperor was a Sith Lord and knew well that in the ways of the Sith, love and loyalty counted for little. He knew that if it suited Vader's interests to lie, to manipulate or to betray, he would do so without remorse.
He did not intend for his apprentice to get the better of him, especially knowing as he did that Vader did not share his desire to bring Ry Kyver back in any state that would be useful to him. And so he had asked the head of the Imperial Security Bureau to report directly to him, and not only to Vader, regarding any information that might surface as to where Ry Kyver was and what she was doing.
That is why, when Vader came at last and bowed before his master in the great throne room of the Imperial Palace on Coruscant, the Emperor was listening carefully to see how well Vader's account did or did not match what he had already heard.
As Vader rose, the Emperor looked him up and down. His apprentice stood, feet shoulder-width apart, shoulders squared, almost as if bracing himself for something he did not wish to face. Though his head was slightly bowed in the appropriate reverence, the Emperor read in him a deep frustration held in check by the hope of getting this over with quickly. Something he couldn't put his finger on gave him the sense that Vader had some secret he thought he could keep from him. There was something that gave him hope, the sort of hope that inspires rebellion, however small.
"I take it, Vader, that you have yet to find Ms. Kyver," he said dryly.
The Emperor sensed Vader bristle but then quickly brush the feeling off. "My lord, I regret that she remains at large, but I have gathered information which may be of some use to us," he said, matter-of-fact.
"Oh, do tell, Vader," the Emperor said with a wave of his pale and bony hand.
"Her starship was found abandoned on Takodana, but she later appeared on Arum, where she and a Mandalorian female extracted a prisoner from an Imperial work camp. It may be that she is seeking to claim her Mandalorian heritage and become a power there."
The Emperor pressed his lips together. This interpretation of the events had certainly occurred to him, and he resented Vader mentioning it because it was no small worry. But there was an important detail Vader had not yet provided in connection with Ry's visit to Arum, and so when Vader paused, watching his master's reaction, the Emperor simply let the silence last just long enough to become uncomfortable, and then said, "Go on."
"Based on her starship's log, I also retraced her steps," Vader said and then paused. "Perhaps you will see for yourself."
The Emperor could not always read all of a person's thoughts, but when Vader consciously, deliberately opened his mind to him, the Emperor could see the memory as if he himself were there: the dry air and bleak rock of the dead planet Yalith, its thin air crackling with the energies of the ancient Sith. This pleased the Emperor. He knew Ry had it in her to attempt such a thing in order to gain the power she was seeking on his behalf. But then Vader turned his mind to memories of another world: the planet Iwaki, where tall feathery trees swayed and whispered furtively to each other in the soft wind. The whole feel of that place was very much alive, too alive for the Emperor's liking, and what was worse, the Force spoke of something that was not allowed to be: Dark shattered, Light unbroken. The place had seen death, but the death was not of Ry. And yet: Dark shattered, Light unbroken.
The Emperor felt a wave of deep anger rise up within him. He was not accustomed to being made to feel shaken. This was something he would not permit Vader to see.
"Is that all?" he said sarcastically.
Vader kept his cool. "Yes, it is," he said.
The Emperor narrowed his eyes at Vader, standing there unshaken in the even rhythm of his breath. "Vader, you deceive yourself and your vision lies to you," he said, "but you cannot lie to me. You have yet to mention the data that was stolen from the Imperial network."
Vader immediately stiffened, his mind closed to his master now. Yet the Emperor sensed a quick flare of anger and frustration in him. Anger, frustration, but no embarrassment. No, Vader had nothing to be embarrassed about. He did not fail to notice the stolen data back on Arum. He knew full well about the data Ry took. That, his master concluded, was what he had been hiding.
"You will bring me the stolen data, all of it, down to the last bit."
The Emperor could almost see Vader narrow his eyes behind his mask, calculating whether he still had a chance to withhold this from his master. "I regret that she deleted the data from the system permanently," he said, and then waited.
The Emperor needed a moment to chew on this information before he could make his comeback. "There is no such thing as permanently. Unless the databank computer itself was destroyed, the information can still be recovered by one who has the skill."
Vader's hand clenched at his side. He was angry, his master could tell. It pleased the Emperor to have gotten the better of him and he gave his thin lips a twisted smile. "You have a computer hacker, don't you?" he said. "The one you found in her starship on Takodana...surely you realize you could make use of her?" And then he laughed, a high and evil little laugh that made him cough but still he laughed some more. When Vader had opened his mind, he had shown more than he intended.
"You will have the data. Consider it done," Vader said. He bowed deeply, then turned on his booted heel and stalked out, his flowing cloak as dark as the thick cloud of resentful energy around him.
The Emperor laughed to himself again. He liked reminding his apprentice that there was no outwitting his master.
But with Vader gone, the Emperor was left to his own thoughts. He sat hunched over, clenching and unclenching his bony fingers on the armrest of his great throne. What did it mean, what Vader had seen on Iwaki? He tried again to reach out into the Force to find Ry yet again, and yet again he could not. As his mind scanned the galaxy, he could see others: Vader cursing him as he got back into his TIE fighter and flew off to do his master's bidding; his many minions, the Inquisitors...he could not say precisely where they all were but he was aware of each of them as a distinct presence within the Force. He could even sense, somewhere, he knew not where, Vader's former master, Obi-wan Kenobi, and other unknown Jedi also, alive for now, alive until Vader or the Inquisitors finally found them. But Ry he could not find. It was as if she had escaped into another dimension.
Seeing his own hands resting on the arms of his throne, glowing sickly pale and bony in the half-light around him, the Emperor slumped back and drew his hands into the wide sleeves of his dark robe so that he wouldn't have to look at them. He needed so badly to attain some way to keep on channelling all that great power of the Dark Side without burning his body out completely. He knew she was the one to do it; she had the beginnings of that gift already, the power over life. All she needed was to absorb the energies of that One among the Siluans and make her gift complete. He had foreseen it, even as he had foreseen that Anakin would become Vader.
But what did it mean, what Vader had seen on Iwaki? It was normal for energy transfers to involve some turbulence in the Force, but why that sense of Darkness shattered? He could not allow such a thing to be.
Yet as much as he was troubled, the Emperor hardened his will. Somehow, somehow, he would find her. Somehow he would make sure she did what he needed her to do. He did not become a Sith Lord for nothing. For one who truly commanded the Force, there were loopholes in the flow of space and time, back doors into alternate realities that might be made part of this reality.
There was a place he had heard of where one might enact these alternate possibilities if one knew the way. With a motion of his hand, he summoned one of his Red Guards.
"Bring me holocron ninety-three," he said, "the one that lists the old sacred sites."
The Red Guard simply bowed and went to do his master's bidding.
~ on Takodana ~
After all those years as a hermit, the crowded cantina was a frontal assault on Varda's senses. As soon as she opened the door, a barrage of sights, sounds and smells hit her in the face. There were at least fifty people of various ages and species crammed into the tables and benches that filled the old castle's bottom floor. Twenty different conversations and several baristas calling out orders competed with a three-piece jazz band, while the smell of strong beer and grilled meat mingled with the scents of assorted people's sweat and perfume.
Gritting her teeth, Varda let the door close behind her, walked down the steps and joined the crowd on the castle floor. She was here to get what she wanted and then get out. The owner of Takodana's famed, if small, cantina was a diminutive person known as Maz Kanata. Maz was not quite a friend, but Varda knew and trusted her from previous missions to Takodana back in the days of the Jedi Order. Maz herself was no Jedi, but she knew the Force and was a shrewd reader of people. And people were her business. Thousands of them, mostly travellers stopping in for a meal and a good night's rest, passed through her cantina every year and her ears were always pricked to their stories and gossip whether they meant for her to listen or not. If anyone could give her news of Jedi survivors, Varda figured it would be Maz.
But even after she'd elbowed her way around the cantina twice, Varda still had no sight of the wrinkled proprietor. She found this odd. Though Maz was small, she shouldn't have been easy to miss. She was always there, working as a barista even though she was the owner, shouting out greetings to people she knew and peering intently through her thick round goggles at those she didn't. But no Maz was to be seen.
"Where might I find the owner?" Varda asked a skinny Twilek boy who was mopping the stone floor just outside the restroom.
He paused and wiped his nose on his sleeve. "She's out," he said. "Errands."
"Errands?" Varda raised an eyebrow. Takodana didn't have places to go running errands to. Supplies were usually delivered. She knew that.
"Yeah," he said, but his eyes flicked over to the door of the cantina.
Varda followed his gaze. A man in a leather pilot's jacket stood there. He was tall and muscular, pale blue Pantoran or a Pantoran mix maybe. He seemed to be just leaning against the wall, nursing a drink, but something in his posture, something in his vibe told Varda that he was listening intently, looking closely at each person he saw, not just seeing them but sifting them, probing them.
Inwardly, Varda stiffened. Devin had pleaded with her to be careful, and now she was reminded why. She doubted that this man was the same sort of being as the darksider who had visited Nechako, but there were others like Maz out there: aware of the Force, shrewd readers of people, yet unlike Maz, not to be trusted.
Varda turned to the boy, who had gone back to his mopping. "When might she be back?" she asked. She didn't want to take the risk of using mind-control on him to extract a true answer but she did her best to put out the vibe that she could be trusted.
The boy looked at her quizzically. "Try her tomorrow morning," he said, then turned to his work with a focus that let Varda know the conversation was over.
Varda sighed. She craved the chance to spend as much time as possible on Yemer and regroup at the monastery there before she had to get the starship back to Devin and Shie, but if she left Takodana now she wasn't sure if or when she'd have the chance to make the ten-hour journey back. It seemed a waste of precious time to come all this way and not get to talk to Maz. Varda decided that she would have to spend the night.
Varda was not above bartering her services as a dishwasher in return for a bed in one of the rooms upstairs, but that man by the door and his searching gaze were making her increasingly uncomfortable. Having lived so long on Hokto, she was used to roughing it and the forest outside was beckoning. She went back out, carefully ignoring the man as she passed by, then got back in her starship.
The climate of that part of Takodana was mild but much of the ground was hard and rocky, so the trees were nowhere near as tall as the ones she had known on Hokto, but the leafy canopy of the forest was still a cool and welcoming green beneath her as she flew the starship a hundred kilometres or so away to a place she knew in the forest. There was a flat spot in the midst of a tumbled rocky outcropping just barely big enough to angle the little starship in for a landing. She liked that the rocky terrain made her starship inconspicuous, and there was a snug place to stay nearby: a little cave in a forested ravine with a flowing stream where the water was good to drink.
The place was, truth be told, not far from a local nexus in the Force, a place where Darkside energies pooled in a strange and eerie part of a larger forest-swamp. But she had stayed in the in the area before and found that mere proximity to the place held no danger for anyone who did not bring trouble with them.
Having parked the starship in its hidden place, Varda followed a little path, an animal track really, down between the rocks and then through a more wholesome bit of swamp to the end of the ravine, where the clattering creek of the ravine slowed and melted into the still waters of the swamp.
Picking a path through the swamp and then making her way over the rocky floor of the ravine was no easy work. Her bad hip still hurt, but she was in no hurry. Stopping to rest every so often, she reached a spot about halfway along the ravine and found the little cave just as she had remembered it, not really a cave but a sheltered place where a long-ago glacier had left a rock slab leaning against the side of the ravine. She brushed a few spider-webs aside and spread out her bedroll.
Without bothering to take off her clothes, Varda got between the blankets and lay down. The night was warm, and it was a comfort to smell moss and fern and even to feel the solid rock beneath her. Despite the unsettling presence of that man by the door back in the crowded cantina, the pervading sense of peace Varda had found on Iwaki still wrapped itself like a shield around her. How or where Eo had found the strength to share that kind of peace in her death, Varda did not know, but she was grateful to share in it all the same. With it, she had regained her footing, no longer sinking in bottomless loss and regret.
As Varda waited for sleep to come, she wondered what was to become of her promise. Standing under the night sky on Hokto, alone after she had sent Eo away, she had promised herself, promised the cosmos even, that if she was given a way to leave Hokto, she would fulfil her duty to serve as a Jedi again. What that would look like now that she was one of so very very few, Varda almost didn't want to think. Perhaps if she could find Maz at the cantina in the morning, Maz might at least point Varda in the direction of some other survivors, and from there some direction might emerge.
But if Maz were not there...that boy with the mop seemed to be hiding something, and there was that man watching by the door, so perhaps Maz too was laying low now? Whatever the case might be, Varda made up her mind that with or without seeing Maz, she would leave for Yemer the next day. The Siluan Elders too might have something to say that would shape the path ahead, and being due back in Nechako in only a few days there was little time left for the visit she hoped to make there.
From inside the little cave, Varda felt the shifting breeze brush across her cheek and listened to the sound of the night wind in the branches of the low trees outside. The plant life here was completely different here, yet being in a wooded place like this at night reminded her of Hokto. Lying there by herself in the dark, Varda bit her lip. To be in a place of trees like this made her think of Eo. Whatever strength she may have found, Varda still wished she hadn't sent Eo away alone. She should have gone with her. Or she should have let her stay behind.
In the dark, there was no one to see. Varda let the tears come.
~ on Yemer ~
When Ry Kyver discovered that her disc was broken, she sat for a long time looking at the broken pieces. Then she realized she had a choice between two kinds of nothing.
Even if somehow, someday she could get off this planet, without her Force skills she would be nothing. Or, if she died, she would also be nothing, her essence lost within the energies of the Force. The difference was that if she lived, she would have to live knowing that she was nothing.
Whichever one it was going to be, she didn't want to just sit here in this stupid little hospital with pitying people watching her go through it. And so she steeled herself and pulled out the IV drip tube and tried to quietly walk out.
But in the state she was in, it wasn't as easy as she thought to get her legs to carry her where she wanted to go. When doctors found her halfway down the hall, they made her go back to bed and gave her a sedative. Her last bitter thought as the chemical took hold of her was: I am still in control, I can still live or die as I choose.
With thoughts like that foremost in her mind, she would have expected any dreams she had to be haunted by them, or by some attempt to change what had been, to not lose what had been lost to her when the shrapnel hit her and broke that disc.
But her first awareness in her dreams was the sound of water and the feel of her arms straining to pull against something. Her hands each held something cylindrical and solid, with neither the cold feel of metal nor the artificial smooth of plastic. She felt her lungs breathe deep, drinking in air more refreshing than water. She saw bright light all around her and the bright light gradually clarified into sharp images of a blue lake glistening all around her under a blue sky. Around the shores was no sign of sentient habitation, only the dark green of conifers and the paler green of broadleaf trees all sighing in the slight breeze. Her hands, human-coloured and not that Sith grey, gripped wooden oars and she was rowing a little boat towards the shore, her back to the warm sun.
When she reached the shore she felt the boat bump into the sand of a shallow beach, felt her bare feet splash in cool water as she got out of the boat and pulled it up onto higher ground. It felt good to exert herself, good to use her body. She felt joy swell up in her as she watched iridescent red and green and blue dragonflies hover over the water near the shore, then, hearing a splash, she turned and saw an eagle rise up from the lake with a glistening fish in its talons. She watched it fly away, the sight of the fish making her stomach feel suddenly hungry.
She climbed up a narrow path through the cool green forest, feeling young again, with nothing to accomplish and nothing to prove, only the warmth of the sun to soak into her bones and the fresh air to drink into her lungs.
When the path came out at a level, open place, she saw a tangled garden and a little hut made of bent branches. She brushed her way through the garden, the aroma of herbs following her. An older woman in a green sari came to the door, scolding her for being late. In waking circumstances, Ry would have found this unacceptable, but in the dream, she felt no need to be bothered by it. This woman was dear to her, so let her scold.
She went inside the little hut and took off her sunhat and threw down the beige cloth bag she carried over her shoulder, then sat down at a low table. The woman handed her a bowl of something hot and steaming. The first bite was pure bliss. It was nothing fancy, just steamed tubers of some kind, but they tasted fresh and pure like nothing she could ever remember eating. She finished it down to the last bite, wholly satisfied, feeling truly well for the first time in...how long had it been?
The feeling of the dream was so powerful that when she woke up, she wasn't thinking about the choice between two kinds of nothing anymore. She was only thinking about going back to sleep so that she could forget her problems and get back into that dream.
~ On Takodana ~
The cave was snug and dry, yet Varda woke feeling cold and clammy just as the grey light of dawn was creeping into the forest. There was a prickling along the back of her neck and she felt deeply uneasy. She reached out a hand and touched the rock face beside her. It was cool to the touch, but not cold enough to give her that sick feeling she was having.
She lay perfectly still and listened. Not far away, she heard a starship land, not over beyond the swamp where hers was but up on the bluff above the ravine. Yet that sound did not seem to her to be the source of her unease. If anything, her wariness relaxed, if only slightly, with its coming. But as she listened and let the little movements of the air speak to her, she knew there was another presence nearby, no, more than one, and with that, her mind was fully awake and all her senses on alert.
It occurred to her to make herself small, to mask her presence in the Force, and to stay there in the cave and hide. But as she examined the matrix of possibilities that was evolving in the piece of space-time around her, she felt quite strongly that there was no small probability that she might be cornered, trapped if she stayed in the cave. Apart from whoever had landed that starship, the other presences she felt seemed to be hunting something. The crawling feeling along her skin told her that they were looking for her. That, and her Force-sense.
Her rational mind agreed: hiding would only work if those malevolent presences were not the sort of species whose sense of smell or infra-red vision could find what a human could not, and only if they were not carrying electronic devices to sense organic beings for them. That, and if they were weak enough in the Force for her Force-masking to fool them. She didn't want to count on all of those ifs working in her favour.
Glad she had slept in her clothes, Varda pushed her blankets aside and grabbed her lightsabre, then listened carefully again. There was only the clattering of the creek. She took it as a bad omen that the birds and insects were silent.
The cave was too small to stand up in, and so Varda pushed herself forward with her hands and came out feet first, then quickly stood up, grounding herself against the rocks beneath her feet, drawing strength from all the living green around her, poised for action and alert.
A sharp hiss greeted her. She looked up. In the half-light of dawn, partway up the steep rocky slope, climbing down the side of the ravine, was a slim young Twilek. It took Varda a moment to realize that this was not the boy whom she had spoken with in the cantina. The figure had a woman's curves around the chest and hips, and instead of the boy's grey smock and pinky-tan face this one was dressed in body-hugging black and her skin was a deathly blue-grey. Her eyes flashed sharp yellow as she showed Varda her teeth and then leapt down, igniting her red double-blade.