Of the Forgotten
Chapter 2
35 ABY: Zonama Sekot
It had been more than five years after the conclusion of the Yuuzhan Vong War, and yet, still the decrees of the previous Yuuzhan Vong rule had dominated the minds of those Vong who were of the former elite castes. Many ex-warriors, subalterns, and the like had refused to live in mixed grashals and villages with former Shamed Ones, who were now formally titled the Extolled, yet they would steal from their villages, a la food and other such resources provided to the former invaders. In fact, Tahiri Veila was currently trying to resolve a dispute between Bava, a member of the Extolled, and Sal Ghator, a former subaltern who had allegedly tried to steal from Bava's grashal, later that day.
Other than that, Zonama Sekot had become a relatively comfortable world for both the Yuuzhan Vong and the Ferroans to live on, if you counted out those aforementioned Vong who still leaned to the traditions of their previous society. And for Jacen and Danni Quee Solo, who had married about a year after Jorielle was born, it was a quiet and peaceful life as they raised their child, now half a decade old.
Jacen and Jorielle were out in the back of their grashal, where the former was training the latter in using the Force, specifically by having her use her telekinetic ability to lift up rocks nearby. She was lifting up several about a few meters into the air each. Jacen was proud of his daughter. Already five years old, and she could easily master the art of telekinesis. Danni was right; she is a strong Force-user, and she would make a great Jedi.
"Very good, Jorielle," Jacen said, controlling the amount of pride he had in his voice. "Now to try to maintain your hold on those rocks in the air for the next thirty seconds. Understood?"
"Yes, Daddy," she said as she did what she was told and held those rocks in the air at the limited altitude she raised them up to.
Fifteen seconds later, the voice came to Jacen's head again. It was a call coming from within the Unknown Regions–far from Zonama Sekot, but close to Chiss space. He, Tahiri, and Tekli had been hearing this call from the Force for several weeks now, though neither Danni nor Jorielle heard this call.
The voice disappeared as quickly as it had appeared in Jacen's head, and he saw Jorielle standing before him, her face curious. "It was that voice again, wasn't it, Daddy?" she asked.
"Yes, it was, Jorielle," Jacen replied. "I need to see your mother... and Tekli and Tahiri. Get back in the grashal. The training session is over. Goodbye."
With that, Jacen turned and left, but he was still able to see over his shoulder Jorielle returning back into the grashal using the backdoor.
A few minutes later, Jacen, wandering the local tampasi, found Danni and Tekli, who were approaching him. The two of them were studying more of Zonama's ecosystem and biology, as they've done for the past half decade following the Yuuzhan Vong War.
"Jacen, what's going on?" Danni asked as she and Tekli joined him.
"It's the voice again," he answered. "Where's Tahiri?"
"Right here," the Yuuzhan Vong-scarred Jedi Knight said as she appeared from behind a nearby boras tree. "Sorry I'm late. The dispute between Bava and Sal Ghator kinda got me a little tied up. So are we all going then?"
"Going?" Danni asked. "Going where?"
"To the source of the call," Tekli answered. "But since you haven't been hearing it, Danni, I think it's a better idea for you to stay behind, at least for Jorielle."
Danni looked from the diminutive Chadra-Fan to her husband. "Has Zonama Sekot agreed to this?" she asked Jacen.
"I do," the voice of Jabitha Hal said off to the side. All of the Jedi turned to her, and they all knew that they were talking to Sekot, who joined their group. "It needs to be answered. And I sense no hostile intent from the voice that Jacen, Tahiri, and Tekli have been hearing, Danni. In order for this call in the Force to stop, you three–" Jabitha-Sekot pointed at Jacen, Tahiri, and Tekli "–must heed it. You have my blessing to leave my surface for the time being."
"Thank you," Jacen nodded at Jabitha-Sekot. He turned back to his wife. "Take care of Jorielle for the both of us, my love."
"I will," she said with a nod before kissing him.
With that, Jacen, Tahiri, and Tekli parted ways from Danni and Jabitha-Sekot, where they headed in the direction of the closest of Zonama's airship ports, about a few klicks away, which would take them to one of the living world's spaceports.
"Danni," Jabitha said behind her as the two women watched the Jedi leave. Danni turned to the other female and knew that Sekot had left her form, leaving Jabitha as her own individual–for now. "I must speak with you."
"What is it, Magister Hal?" Danni asked.
"As you know, I am quite old, despite my relatively youthful appearance," Jabitha said. "I have lived long enough to see even Jacen's grandfather, Anakin Skywalker, when he was but a mere boy, and I a mere child myself. And for all this time that you have spent living on Zonama, since you have first arrived, I had sensed your particular interest in it due to its... unique circumstances. And your presence in the Force is strong. I know you have doubted yourself as a Jedi, and I know as well as you that it is not your fate. Your fate is with Zonama Sekot... as its new Magister."
Danni's eyes widened in surprise. "Me? As the new Magister? I-I don't think I can, Magister Hal."
"Oh, but you will," Jabitha said. "Not now, of course. I still have a few years left in me. But when I die, Sekot will select you as the next Magister."
"But I don't think I can handle the responsibility of governing a whole planet like you can, Jabitha," Danni said. "I mean, it's not in me. I'm a scientist, not a Magister."
"You are a scientist, there is no denying that," Jabitha nodded. "But you only think you don't want this. Sekot wouldn't select you as its next Magister if it didn't sense that deep down within you, you wanted this. And if for nothing else, you would take my position after I have passed into the Force so that you can fully comprehend all that is of Zonama, as was your goal here, was it not."
Danni took a moment before she nodded with, "Yes, it is. But what about the others? Like Jacen, Tahiri, or Tekli?"
"Sekot has foreseen that their destiny is not with Zonama like yours is," Jabitha said. "The coming conflict that will ensue will decide for them that the responsibility is to the rest of this galaxy."
"What coming conflict?" Danni asked.
"The conflict that is brewing nearby Chiss space," Jabitha answered, "where the source of the call is."
"Sekot set Jacen, Tahiri, and Tekli into danger?" Danni said with shock. "But why?"
"They are Jedi," Jabitha answered. "It is their duty to confront danger."
"But what about Jacen?" Danni asked. "Jorielle still needs a father! And someone to teach her how to be a Jedi! I can't do that, especially not when I'm raising her alone."
"You are a strong woman, Danni, in spite of what you think of yourself, and in spite of what the Yuuzhan Vong did to you when they finally entered this galaxy," Jabitha said. "You can raise her. Jacen has done all he can. And Jorielle's is of a different path from that of the Jedi Order."
"What, you mean that Jorielle's going to be the next Magister after I 'pass into the Force?'" Danni retorted. "Why is Sekot suddenly deciding the destinies of me and my family?"
"Because it is ultimately your path, Danni," Jabitha said. Her voice took on a more cerebral tone, and she knew it was Sekot who said that, not Jabitha. "You may not see it at first, but you know that your destiny is with me."
~o~
The source of the call in the Force lured Jacen, Tahiri, and Tekli all the way from Zonama Sekot to an unknown world that, after they landed on this planet's surface, they learned was called Yoggoy. Its population was of various species, but the primary populace of Yoggoy was of a particular insectoid species that neither of the Jedi had ever seen before.
Upon their disembarking from the Sekotan freighter they took to leave the living planet, the three Jedi had met an escort of several insectoids, who waved them along so that the Jedi could follow them. Jacen, Tahiri, and Tekli did as they wished, and followed them on foot through the bizarre-appearing city of Yoggoy for a few klicks before they were led inside one of these buildings.
Inside, the insectoids took Jacen, Tahiri, and Tekli up their version of a turbolift to the building's highest floor. On that floor, the Jedi were led down a long hallway and guided into a nondescript room. Everyone inside that room turned to the three Jedi's entrance.
"Jacen!" Jaina, one of the people inside, called as she rushed up to him and hugged him. As Jacen returned that hug to his sister, he took note that everyone else in the room were his Jedi friends from the tragic but successful mission to Myrkr about eight years before during the Yuuzhan Vong War. Tahiri and Tekli were exchanging greetings and salutations to their friends. The only one he noted was absent was Tenel Ka Djo, who was the Queen Mother of the Hapes Consortium.
After exchanges all around the Jedi were conversed, with Jacen being the only one among them who noticed that the door that he, Tahiri, and Tekli entered through had closed, and that their insectoid guides were gone, a deep, guttural voice sounded through the room with, "Good. Nearly everyone is here."
The source of that voice stepped in from an open side door that all of the Jedi Knights had just noticed. The individual who stepped into the room wore brightly colored and contrasting trousers, tunic, and cloak, but that wasn't his noticeable feature. His noticeable feature was his horribly burned face that appeared to have smoothed out into albino white. The man's eyes looked oddly familiar to Jacen as the horribly burned figure walked up to the podium centered in the front of the room, so that he could tower above the Jedi as he spoke to them.
"For some reason, Tenel Ka refuses our call," the guttural man said. "And we are sorry to find out that Anakin and Ganner are both dead."
The mention of Anakin and Ganner brought sadness to all of the Knights in the room. Anakin, Jaina and Jacen's youngest brother, had died during the mission to Myrkr, being the last casualty before they succeeded in their mission in destroying the voxyn cloning lab and the Jedi hunters' queen. Ganner later died saving Jacen from the Yuuzhan Vong back on Vongformed-Coruscant, two years before the Galactic Alliance would retake it for itself.
Jacen was the first to snap out of the opened-up grief among his fellow Knights to ask the man, "We? Who are you? And how do you know us?"
The burned man titled his head and seemed to smile, despite the fact that he couldn't really do such a thing due to the texture of his skin. "Jacen," he said. "You, Jaina, and the others among you would remember us as Raynar Thul, but we are now UnuThul."
Everyone's brows widened when they realized that this man was Raynar, one of the Jedi lost during the mission to Myrkr. He wasn't one of them to die, obviously, but he had been kidnapped by the Dark Jedi Lomi Plo and Welk aboard the Tachyon Flier. The Flier was a ship that Anakin, before he died, planned to have the team escape on in order to leave the the Baanu Raas, the Yuuzhan Vong worldship where the mission to destroy the voxyn took place aboard. However, that plan was foiled when Plo and Welk took the Flier with Raynar, and Lowbacca's M-TD translator droid, aboard, and the team was forced to hijack a Vong frigate that Jaina would later use in the Yuuzhan Vong War as psychological warfare against the invaders, making it appear as if she were their Trickster goddess, Yun-Harla.
"Raynar!" Jaina exclaimed in shock as she looked upon her fellow Jedi Academy attendee. "What in all nine Corellian hells happened to you?"
"Raynar Thul is gone, Jaina," Raynar's guttural voice said. "There is only UnuThul in this vessel."
UnuThul explained what had happened, though he seemed to have left out the part about Lomi Plo and Welk kidnapping him. He told the story of when the Tachyon Flier crashed onto the surface of Yoggoy years earlier, while the Yuuzhan Vong War still raged, and the colony of insectoids, who collectively named themselves Yoggoy as part of the hive mind they shared, had found Raynar Thul as a badly burned survivor of the Crash. The Yoggoy took Raynar in, healed him to the best of their abilities, and then absorbed him into their hive mind as one of them; that was what happened to outsiders when they spent a long enough time with the Yoggoy, and they were aptly named Joiners as a result.
But Raynar Thul didn't become just any Joiner. He became the leader of the Yoggoy; as the Yoggoy absorbed Raynar's mind into the hive, they also absorbed his caring personality regarding even a single individual in the Yoggoy rather than just the nest as a whole. Eventually, as time went on, the Yoggoy gathered up other nests into their hive mind, such as that of the Taat, the Saras, the Wuluw, the Unu, and many others. The Unu was the prime nest, the nest that led all the other nests in what would become the Colony.
The Colony would expand itself through its space in the years that passed. But lately, they have had a border conflict with the Chiss Ascendancy in the Qoribu system, which is just on their frontier. UnuThul had called all of them out here, on Yoggoy, so that he could ask them for their help.
When UnuThul was done explaining his story, Jacen asked, "What happened to Lomi Plo and Welk?"
"Who?" UnuThul asked.
"The Dark Jedi who kidnapped Raynar Thul," Jacen clarified, curious as to why UnuThul wouldn't remember them. "What happened to them?"
"We don't recall any Lomi Plo or Welk," UnuThul said.
At that, the Knights looked at each other in bewilderment, wondering why UnuThul, if not Raynar himself, if his mind was still in that burned body, had forgotten about the two people that had caused him all this.
"Does this mean that none of you will help us?" UnuThul asked.
The Knights were silent for a moment before Jaina spoke up with, "We will help you."
At that, they all agreed.
~o~
As time went by, the Jedi Knights' involvement in battling Chiss scout forces at Qoribu eventually caused the Skywalkers–including their son, Ben–Han and Leia Organa Solo, and Saba Sebatyne to come all the way from their respective locations in the galaxy where they were doing their part to repair what had been destroyed by the Yuuzhan Vong War.
Following a battle against Chiss scouts, in which Lowbacca went M.I.A., the elder adults confronted all of the young Knights about what they were doing on Qoribu's moon of Jwlio, questioning their actions and ethics in who and what they were fighting for, especially in light of the fact that on two occasions already, the Skywalkers, Solos, and Saba had all been attacked by members of the Colony. This surprised the Knights and their fellow Colony members, and befuddled them when they were told that those that outright attacked them had blue-black chitin. No one in the Colony they knew, not even the Colony members themselves, knew anything about Colony members with blue-black chitin.
They all agreed to a compromise in light of the situation. Jaina, Zekk, and Alema Rar would stay behind to at least find and save Lowbacca out in space–for they knew he was still alive from the battle–while the rest would go with the Skywalkers back to Ossus to test for the Joining connections that they've made with the Killiks–the name of the race of the Colony, as the elder adults discerned.
On Ossus, Jacen and the others had undergone various brain activity tests in order to gauge the connection between them made possible by their time with the Killiks. But it was much later after Han and Leia returned from Qoribu with a severely wounded Saba Sebatyne and a captured Alema Rar. The Solos explained that Alema was a traitor to the Jedi Order who tried to kill them all aboard the Millennium Falcon. Not long after that, a blue-black Killik had been fought and captured in the Ossus Academy by Mara after she discovered that it was hiding thanks to Ben.
Of all the tests, the connection between Alema and the Gorog–the name of the nest that the blue-black Killik was–proved to be the strongest. Master Cilghal discerned that this may be so because the Gorog were of the unconscious part of the Killik mind, manipulating events behind the scenes to their will; hence, the Killiks were purposely being led into a war against the Chiss thanks to Welk and Lomi Plo; that information came courtesy of Saba when she was healed of her injuries and explained that she was wounded because she fought Welk–there was no direct evidence that Lomi Plo was still alive though.
Taking all of that into account, Jacen decided that if the Killiks were being led into such a war, they needed some more outside help. While the elder adults secretly allowed Alema and her Gorog companion to leave so that the bugged ship they took would lead the Jedi back to the Dark Nest (the nickname given for the Gorog), Jacen, by the permission of his Uncle Luke, took one of the Jedi Order's latest StealthX ships to Hapes. There, he would convince his old friend, Tenel Ka, to lend the Killiks a little help at Qoribu in the way of a fleet.
They met in one of the palace gardens, where Tenel Ka was sitting on a bench, meditating. Her back was to Jacen as he hid in the shadows provided by the overhead shade of the trees, and he stared down at her as if he was a predator.
"Hello, Jacen," she said, snapping out of her meditation and folding her legs back into a standard sitting position.
At that, Jacen dropped from his hiding spot and joined Tenel Ka in sitting down next to the bench. "Hello, Tenel Ka," he said. "It's good to see you again."
"I feel the same about you," she acknowledged, her tone clipped as usual. They embraced in a friendly hug before they pulled back. "So, I suppose this is not a mere social visit, now is it?"
"It isn't. Tenel Ka, have you heard some kind of call in the Force coming all the way from the Unknown Regions?" Jacen asked.
"Yes. I had locked myself in my bedroom and waited until the call passed. I could not leave my duties as Hapan Queen Mother. I assume that you had heeded this call?"
Jacen nodded. "Along with all the other Knights from the Mission to Myrkr."
"Myrkr? What did it have to do with Myrkr?"
"Do you remember Raynar Thul?"
"Of course I do," Tenel Ka replied. "What about him?"
"Well, he was the source of the call," Jacen answered.
"Really? He's alive?"
"Yes, and to make a long story short, he's leading a civilization of sentient bugs against the Chiss Ascendancy, and we need your help."
"Why is Raynar going up against the Chiss?" Tenel Ka asked.
"Because Lomi Plo and Welk–the Dark Jedi who kidnapped him before Anakin died–are leading him into it for their plans of galactic domination," Jacen said. "It's not for certain though, but that's the best guess the Jedi Order has. Will you help us?"
"I already told you, Jacen, I cannot abandon my post as Queen Mother," she insisted.
"I'm not asking you to, Tenel Ka," Jacen said. "All we need is a small fleet. Can you give us that?"
"Why should I put the Hapes Consortium in conflict with the Chiss Ascendency?" Tenel Ka asked back.
"Because if you don't, you're going to allow an entire civilization be destroyed by the Chiss," Jacen said. "We saved the Yuuzhan Vong from being exterminated by Alpha Red, the Bothans, and everyone else who wants to see them extinct, even with all that cost us. Please, Tenel Ka, as a Jedi, you have to do this."
Tenel Ka looked directly in his eyes. "Very well, Jacen," she said. "I will give Raynar a portion of the Hapan fleet to combat the Chiss. But you will have to do something for me in return."
"And what is that?"
A few seconds of staring at him later, Tenel Ka leaned in and kissed Jacen. Jacen, in turn, quickly broke off that kiss, abruptly stood up from the bench, and quickly walked back several paces away from Tenel Ka.
"You want me to sleep with you, Tenel Ka?" Jacen asked in shock.
Tenel Ka, a look of curiosity drawn on her face, stood up and approached Jacen. "Of course," she said simply. "Why, are you married?" She asked the question in retort. A look of disappointment was drawn on her face when, a moment later, he told her that he was indeed married and even had a five year-old daughter. "Oh. So that was what you did with your time on Zonama Sekot."
"Listen, Tenel Ka, I'm sorry, but this can't happen between us," Jacen said. "I'm faithful to my wife, Danni, and our daughter, Jorielle. I can't betray them like this."
Tenel Ka abruptly turned away as tears began welling in her eyes. She began pacing away and said, without looking over her shoulder, with a relatively calm voice, "Then you can say goodbye to whatever hope the Killiks have in gaining help from the Consortium, Jacen." Tenel Ka walked away slowly, allowing Jacen ample time to reconsider his decision.
After several seconds, during which Jacen knew what Tenel Ka was doing, he conceded with, "Wait." Tenel Ka turned back around and reapproached Jacen as he sighed in defeat and said, "All right, you win, Tenel Ka."
"Indeed, I have," she said as she locked lips with Jacen.
And this time, he couldn't pull away from her.
Even if he wanted to.
