Fractures. Cracks. Streams. Currents. Eddies. Whirlpools. Forests. Oceans. Deserts. Strings. Ropes. Chains. Shackles. Tapestries. Plans. Chaos.
Time was Time.
Similes and allegories simply had no hope whatsoever of ever expressing, truly and fully expressing, the body of the conceptual force of Time.
Not even the Force could be used as an eyepiece to study Time, as one was as mysterious as the other, and hardly seemed linked yet could never be conceived separately. Many a great mind had and yet would attempt to rationalize the relation, but those were but words to describe something beyond thought.
Such flowery words, for nothing.
The Force, as it was, as it could possibly be or wasn't at all, had existed from the past to the future concurrently, never linearly or even the same way twice. The beginning was the end, and the final moment was the start.
And that was the problem.
Darkness, as the living beings perceived it, was a tide to either fight against, succumb to, or plot to master and control. They had eyes only for what they could see, what they could affirm. Darkness was in what was unsaid, the abstract, the overview.
Life and Time had gone through their courses again and again, that the Force had been witness to billions upon billions of endings that varied minutely or drastically. It was a beautiful performance, much like the dance of birds or the music of cultures, influenced one way or the other by pain or by love. Not random, but not organized. There had been happiness, there had been desolation.
But a change was occurring. The beginnings were normally the same, few weren't, and they progressed along much the same path, but there was increasingly a point where everything skewed, subtly but critically, and a destiny of a Universe invariably drifted to one of misery, confusion, hopelessness. Again, and again, the frequency growing to such a point that it could no longer be called mere fate or chance. It didn't have the feel of being unnatural, but neither did it feel like these timelines belonged.
The Force was not a being, nor a consciousness, yet it had a will, and the will of the uncountable that had rejoined with it over innumerable lifetimes of the stars, so it looked. From impossible angles of creation and oblivion, it sought to discover the origin-point of the growing divergence, where the "cracks" began.
It found many. Hundreds. Thousands. Less. More. Like so much, they were ever changing, flitting into and out of existence capriciously, as though by the will of a child. Centered around the same span, a period of several thousand 'years', though there were no exacts.
Events were rewritten. Swathes of history were expunged. Key points were drawn back, with no surrounding structure to give them purpose. The very meaning of words and ideas were changed beyond any point of recognition. Important figures became mockeries of themselves. The Force was harnessed in purposes strange and ugly.
All of these anomalies, and the end result was almost certain ruination. So much sooner than should ever be, these timelines came to abrupt endings, as though discarded like used up toys. It was one tragedy after another. If there was a source, it was not for the Force to discover, or possibly even comprehend; completely different spheres of existence, never touching directly, but linked all the same.
There was to be no clarity for having found this ongoing travesty, no closure. The Force was a balance, often teetering to extremes but never forever nor so overwhelmingly that the course of destiny was stuck in one direction alone. If nothing was to offset these doomed timelines from within themselves, then it would have to come from without.
There had to be a counter. A change to combat the change. Canceling one another out, if all went perfectly.
The major obstacle being that while the Force existed at all points of Time, it could no more influence Time's passage than Time could shape the Force. There couldn't be a message sent, a prophetic vision of the madness to come, or, laughably, an entire being plucked from one time and deposited in another like they were a parcel for delivery and then be trusted to guide events back to where a natural conclusion could be reached.
...trust...
The will of the Force was an influence, not a statement, but a powerful one. It had influenced lives with but a glancing touch, or given enough of an impression to inspire a revelation. There were many avenues to follow for fate to be achieved, but...trust was not inherently one of them. Why should it be? Why would the Force need to "trust" when it can simply be?
The answer to such a rhetorical inquiry was the same as to why there were anomalies running amok: the Force didn't have the answer. Something – that was all it could be surmised as. Something was happening to history and the future, and it was beyond the Force alone to influence events back on track.
Then, just maybe and beyond all possibility, the solution was not in control but the relinquishing of it. To trust.
It was a monumental choice, the like of which had shaped reality before, and one that would not go without consequences. This was undoubtedly dangerous, tampering where the Force was never meant to intrude, but it was the measured dose of chaos that might be required. Its target was unaware, wonderfully oblivious, barely a footnote in (some) history and yet a pivotal piece, much like so many before and after. There was no reason for choosing them, nor any reason against. Only a trust.
The Force gathered. From across the vastness of space and the great enigma of time, it concentrated a pinprick of intent, an unheard of amount of power that could, if only but directed, snuff out entire solar systems, extinguishing countless lives and shaping the galaxy as a whole in an instant. No group or even entire order of Force users had ever even dreamed of such a magnitude of power, nor dared to consider what could be done with it.
Now, the Force used this power to push, warping Time around itself, to reach through ages and realities and possibilities. Bending all to create a new focal point for destiny to balance around and determine so much more than could ever be expressed.
With all of that power, now strained to breaking and threatening to implode on itself, the Force made one final effort, against Time, the anomalies and itself...
...and lightly flicked the back of a young girl's ear.