Jacobus by WebRuss
Chapter 2 - A Little History Lesson
At the sound of that name the whole group sat upright as though they were suddenly electrocuted by sand eels. They all looked at each other sharing looks of shock and surprise. There were gasps and lots of whispered exchanges between the group as they talked quickly with each other.
Suddenly Rider who sat to Rustafa's left called the group back to silence. She was Rustafa's current padawan in her fourth or fifth year of training. "Be quiet now" she called. "If you don't listen how will you learn the truth?" Her lips were pressed together tightly and her face showed annoyance at the constant interruptions.
As the talking died away Rustafa continued in a soft voice.
"Jacobus was one of my first students." he said in a matter of fact tone. "He and I were on a mission to retrieve a Jedi known as Coloss from his base deep in the dessert of this planet. The only way to find him was to follow a dry river bed that ran for hundreds of miles along the canyons." He broke off at that statement but never looked up from the flames. His eyes however now glistened as though some sad memory had brought tears.
The night sky was starting to turn black as ink and the darkness of the dessert began to engulf us and a few night creatures begin to call in the distance. The light from the flames of the fire mingled with shadows from the desert as they danced in a never ending mix of shades of light and dark. I though about how this might very well match Rustafa's mood as he slowly drew a breath to continue his story.
"I am not going to bother with what this experience did to me." he began, showing the wisdom of age and experience as a story teller who knows what his audience really wants to hear.
"Yet to understand the effect of this experience upon me you will need to know how I got there, what I saw and how I traveled along that ancient riverbed to find this errant Jedi. It was something at the end of the journey, that was the great lesson of the experience. It cast a new light upon everything around me and into my thoughts. It changed the way I understand the force. The experience was sorrowful, but far from exceptional in any way and it was also quite unclear. Yes, very unclear, yet it did affect me and change my point of view on a good many things, including the force."
"When I was a young padawan I dreamed of exploring. I loved to look at the star charts and imagine myself flying off to explore some new planet. I would close my eyes and randomly point a finger into the star charts and think about going to that place. Now much of our galaxy is already known and so it held little interest for me to explore it. But this planet, it was not well known and held many amazing landmarks. The war came and I was unable to explore as my duties required me to be many other places. I had long forgotten about it until it was requested to seek out this Jedi named Coloss. I jumped at the opportunity to take what seemed a routine assignment as it would afford me the opportunity to come to this planet."
"I was allowed to take the assignment although it had been many years before, long before the wars, that another Jedi who had attempted the journey had allegedly died in an ambush from some of the local marauders. They were never able to retrieve his body and no one really knows why he died in the first place. Some say he quarreled with the locals, others say he was attacked by some unknown assailant and defeated."
"I can tell you with some assurance that he did die but why he allowed himself to be killed is still a mystery. I'm not even sure why I went looking for him as he had lived many years before I was born, yet I needed to see my predecessor. When I found what was left of his body, he was laying face down with the head of a native spear sticking through his back. The village was deserted as I'm sure all the villagers feared that great calamities would now fall upon them from the heavens. As best I can piece together from locals of other nearby villages is that he was standing in a group of local villagers arguing with the chief. At some point during this argument someone crept up behind him and stabbed him in the back."
"I never did make sense of the situation. A trained Jedi nnight allowed himself to be killed by one of the locals with a crude spear in the back. I often wondered if he chose to die, allowing himself to pass beyond. This among many questions remained unanswered for me. The desert can do strange things even to a disciplined Jedi mind." he continued. "To find Coloss would require us to travel deep back into the dark corners of the canyon. I took Jacobus and two other Jedi with me.