Eyes open, seeing nothing.
Ears listening, hearing the pitter-patter of rain.
Skin feeling the cold drops of water... solid ground beneath her body...
She stands. On what, she does not know.
She is so alone. She opens her mouth to speak, but the sounds will not leave her throat. They are afraid.
So, she turns. She turns around to see an endless wall of windows, stretching farther than her eyes can see from left to right and ground to sky. Lights shining through the windows, inviting her inside.
She hears something. There are voices beside her - the shadow children have found her, even here. They hold her hands in theirs, speaking words of comfort and assurance, offering her hope.
The windows beckon them all.
So, they walk.
They walk for years, the shadow children growing into a shadow man and a shadow woman, while she remains a teenage girl. When they finally reach the edge of the windows, they look in.
Suddenly, a corridor, never-ending, eternal. Each door looks the same, except for one. No door has a handle, except for one. The same door. She needs to open it.
Where are the shadow children?
She is in front of the door, her hand resting on the doorknob. Her hand, black and wispy as shadow. She turns the doorknob and opens the door. The Faceless Man is there, beckoning to her. His companion, calling her name…
"Mimi!"
Ami jolted awake, heart racing, lungs gasping for air. She flung her arms out, groping for something - anything - to grab hold of, something to ground her in reality. Sitting up, she began to realize where she was: the grass beneath her and the blue leaves above told her she was still in the Dorulian sacred forest, Yvwatzë, which means "Tears of God" when translated into Basic.
"Why are we still here?" she croaked, pulling herself to a standing position with the aid of a young tree.
"Well, we've only been here a few minutes," a small, sassy voice pouted behind her, "And you decided to drop into one of your trances, as usual."
Ami turned to look at her young companion. Five years later, Ilyaa was still not much bigger than she had been when they first met. Her dark purple lekku hung down her back, carefully bound together with treated strips of nerf-hide; if they kept growing, they would soon be longer than she was tall.
"Why do you tie your lekku together every time we come here?" Ami asked, mildly amused.
"Because," Ilyaa replied, stepping closer, "They're Force-sensitive, and tying them together helps me feel safer. Sometimes I feel like you're going to rip them off my head, especially when you do that thing with the fainting and eye-rolling."
Ami chuckled. She had never seen Ilyaa's lekku so much as twitch independently, and was convinced that they had been damaged in the wreck of the transport ship on Ithor - but what did she know about Twi'lek anatomy? They were definitely growing, it was just that the color had slowly changed over the years: while the rest of her body remained a light lavender color, her lekku had darkened to a blotchy, almost black shade of purple. But, they caused her no trouble or pain, so they had both chalked it up to a strange amalgamation of genetics.
Ami scanned the surrounding trees for any flashes of gold and red which would signal the approach of Adherents; seeing none, she motioned Ilyaa further into the woods and followed stealthily. No one knew exactly what happened when you were caught in Yvwatzë, but if the way the Adherents treated the local fauna was any indication, you definitely weren't going to get a simple slap on the wrist.
"Be on the lookout for stones," Ami called to Ilyaa, who had run up ahead to chase a rodent, "We're going to practice splintering them today."
The patter of their feet followed them ever deeper into the forest, sounds muffled by the moss growing underfoot and the dense leaves on the trees. About a mile in, Ami finally caught the sound of the faint babbling of a stream, which told her they were only a few yards away from the entrance to their destination. Jogging forward a few more steps, both girls stopped abruptly at the edge of a drop-off bordering a narrow crack in the landscape that spanned about a mile from east to west. Ami gently dropped the ten feet onto its grassy bottom, then turned to catch Ilyaa. The floor of the crack, created aeons ago by primitive strip miners, sloped gently downward into the earth, the walls of dirt rising slowly above their heads until only a narrow strip of sky was visible; still they walked on, a small brook bubbling alongside them, winding its way toward the bottom of the ravine where it was supposed that a large underground lake awaited.
Nearly a mile down the gully, the walls abruptly separated into a crater. The blue forest could be seen bordering the top, growing so close to the edge that the white roots of the trees protruded from the dirt walls. The brook that had accompanied them widened into a river and continued wending its way through the crater, disappearing somewhere along the opposite wall.
The girls halted their journey at a small scarecrow that looked as if it had seen brighter days. There was no garden nearby for it to protect, and thousands of tiny cuts could be seen all over its body where small, sharp projectiles had been flung into it during their daily practice sessions. Both Ami and Ilyaa reached into sacks at their sides and pulled out the roughly two dozen stones they'd collected on their way, stacked them into a pile at the foot of the scarecrow, and retreated about five yards back.
"Now," Ami began, summoning a stone so quickly it reddened her palm, "Go ahead. Get yourself a stone."
Ilyaa squared her shoulders. She lifted one bracelet-bedecked arm and held it out, palm up, toward the pile of stones.
"Remember the breathing, and remember how to feel for the stones." Ami reminded her.
"I know how to summon a stone, okay?" Ilyaa impudently responded. Ami knew that her constant reminders, mantras, and life lessons were getting to her young companion, but that didn't stop her from expressing them.
"Keep giving me lip and I'll start reciting my Inspiration Book." Ami quipped. "'Success will always, through necessity, be precluded by failure.' 'There is no Dark Side, there is no Light Side; there is only the Force and the intentions of the heart.' 'Believe that y-'"
"Okay, I get it!" Ilyaa interrupted.
At the foot of the scarecrow, Ami could see one of the stones starting to wiggle and rise cautiously into the air, as if it was afraid of falling back down to the earth again. Slowly, ever so slowly, the stone traveled closer until it finally came to rest on Ilyaa's outstretched palm.
"All right!" Ami praised, playfully punching Ilyaa in the arm, "Good job with your aim. Next time, though, I want to see it happen faster."
Ami sat cross-legged on the ground and motioned Ilyaa to the same position. They faced each other, knees touching, and cupped the stones in their hands. "We are one with the Force," they chanted, "We are all people. We are the sky, we are the seas. We are the earth, we are the trees. We keep the peace, yet stand to fight. We love the day, embrace the night. We are all people. We are one with the Force."
Eyes closed, Ami hovered her stone in the air above her head, willing it to crack and splinter, watching the molecules separate in her mind until there was no longer a stone, just thin, deadly shards that were sharper than knives. Ami stood, stone shards moving from over her head to the palm of her hand, and flicked her fingers in the direction of the scarecrow. The rock pieces seemed invisible as they flew infinitely fast from her palm into the scarecrow's flannel face. A death-dealing blow if ever there was one.
Hearing Ilyaa quietly grunting below her, Ami crouched back down to eye-level; her young friend had managed to crack a very small stone just last week, but hadn't yet been able to fully splinter one.
Ami gazed at the tiny, purple fingers as they trembled and twitched, trying desperately to coerce the stone into doing their master's bidding. Ilyaa's nails were painted with a heat-sensitive solution that changed color based on her body temperature - called Liquemo - and they were currently a vibrant fuchsia, meaning she was nearing rage-level frustration. Often they turned black when she slept, indicating fear and anxiety. Ami didn't blame her, as she also had torturous nightmares that had become more centered around the raze of Ithor as the years had passed.
After their timely rescue, Luke Skywalker had taken the two survivors to temporarily live with an old friend on an Outer Rim planet called Dorullë. Tazer, whom Luke had known as a young boy on Tatooine, owned and operated a high-class cantina in a wealthy sector of Labellë, Dorullë's capital city. Still in shock and only semi-conscious, mere hours after the attack on Ithor, Ilyaa and Ami found themselves in the care of a complete stranger. Tazer treated them kindly, fed and clothed them, and protected them from the world outside his cantina, but the elderly Toydarian was no replacement for the families they'd lost.
As the months went on, Ilyaa began losing the ability to recall the names and faces of the people in her family, which prompted Tazer to try and find some way - mental exercise, meditation, memory-boosting drugs - for her to keep what little she had left of her loved ones. They began meditating every morning, all three of them together, and as soon as Ilyaa could write she began journaling every memory she still had, along with a list of names and dates of people and events she could still remember. The unfortunate side-effect of constantly trying to enhance her memory was that it came back to haunt her when she slept. Was it really worth it?
"WHY!"
Ilyaa's cry of frustration jolted Ami back to reality. The stone Ilyaa had been trying to fracture went flying through the air, still in one piece, and smacked the scarecrow square in the chest. Ami watched it tumbled to the ground and come to a stand-still next to a small, golden wildflower.
"Why what?" Ami asked, standing.
"Why does this have to be so HARD!" Ilyaa yelled, slamming a fist into the ground.
"Well," Ami began, "How old are you?"
No answer.
"You're nine, that's how old you are. When I was your age, not even in my wildest dreams could I take something so solid and permanent as a rock and break it into thousands of tiny pieces. I couldn't even summon a rock." Ami paused, jogging over to pluck the wildflower. Its stem had several small, sharp thorns that bit into her fingers as she attempted to pull it from the ground, so she left it.
"You know," she continued, waving Ilyaa over, "I was kinda like this flower right here. When I saw the flower from where we were sitting, it looked so pretty, like a nice, soft flower whose only life wish would be to sit in a glass on my night table. But once I grabbed hold of it and tried to pull it out of the ground, I noticed all these thorns that were poking into my skin, and the flower suddenly had a different purpose and personality than I'd originally credited it with."
Ami paused again, watching as Ilyaa bent down to inspect the flower.
"I don't get it." Ilyaa finally said after several seconds of silent thought.
Ami shrugged. "I'm not the best at making metaphors or teaching children, so that makes sense. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that I used to be just a pretty little thing that followed in the wake of my parents' reputation. I was satisfied to just sit back and live my life comfortably, be some kind of career politician or heiress, and not worry about using the Force too much - after all, we already had two Jedi in the family, and I wasn't one to do risky things. So nobody, not even myself, noticed that I had thorns. And then came Ithor, and suddenly someone was pulling me up by the roots. So I used my thorns. And you're the same way, girlie. Get it now?"
Ilyaa, still looking slightly perplexed, nodded. "I guess, maybe. The Force is my thorns and I have to sharpen them?"
Ami sighed. That wasn't what she'd meant at all, but it wasn't worth explaining any more. She wasn't a damn teacher. "Yeah, sure. You have to sharpen your skills. So go get another stone."
"You mean I can just grab one?"
"You know what I mean, Little Miss Mouth."