The Solo Quest dropped out of hyperspace in the system where Jacen felt that this Force-call was coming from. Ahead was a dusty grey world that looked completely and utterly dead.
This has to be a mistake, Jacen thought. There can't be anything here. Not even a world like Tatooine is this barren. But then he reached out with his Force-senses to find if there was any life down there and...
Please help me, Jacen, that voice said in his head. And it definitely came from the planet up ahead.
Without a second thought, Jacen rocketed the Quest over to the planet ahead. Minutes later, he set his ship down upon an empty desert landscape that somehow made Uncle Luke's homeworld seem alive and flowing with life in comparison; and that didn't include places like Mos Eisley, either.
After Jacen disembarked from the Quest and locked it up, he found that the only standout feature amidst this arid desert world was a small mountain up ahead with a cave.
Here, Jacen heard with his senses. He then walked to the cave and entered.
For several minutes, he found nothing but darkness in his way, with only his lightsaber and Force-senses showing him where he was going.
"Please, help me."
Now that voice was no longer in Jacen's head, or his senses. He could hear it in the real world, in this cave, and it was only further down ahead; however, it sounded... rusty, which was the best word that Jacen could think of.
After a few more twists, turns, and bends in the cave, Jacen saw a fire in the distance. He deactivated his lightsaber, hooked it back to his belt, and approached the area around the fire - which was a campfire - which was surrounded by a group of insects of various sizes.
Jacen stopped in his tracks from fear and shock at the sight of the insects, who stared back at him expectantly. But once he probed their presences through the Force, he began to gain a deeper understanding of them.
They were all part of a hive mind known as Unu. And they were waiting for Jacen for quite some time now.
"Why did you want to see me?" he asked the collective bugs.
And it was then that a human figure appeared from the other side of the campfire, having risen from behind the flames that shielded his presence from the human eye; and being a human figure was an accurate description for the being that Jacen now saw.
The man on the other side, who was now rounding the campfire, had such pale white skin that Jacen could have sworn that he might have been a burn victim; that the wounds that he had suffered from were years old now, leaving a small lump on his face that was once a nose and a lipless mouth. His eyes were a startling green, and he wore an all-black suit with a crimson red cape.
"Hello, Jacen," the being said. His voice was hoarse, coarse, and gravelly; his vocal cords must have been burned, too, by whatever incident that deformed the rest of his body. "As you can sense from us, we have been waiting for you."
Jacen's eyebrows were lowered in confusion as well as a mild sense of fear. "Um... who are you?"
The being's face stretched into a gross replication of a human smile. "Of course you do not recognize us. We have been burned by the Crash. Allow us to reintroduce you to what we once were; we are now UnuThul, but you had known us as... Raynar Thul."
"Raynar!" Jacen exclaimed in shock.
"Yes," Raynar - or, rather, UnuThul - said. "You remember what had happened to us?"
Jacen nodded, leaving aside his confusion by what UnuThul meant by "us." "Eight years ago. The Mission to Myrkr. You were taken by the Dark Jedi Lomi Plo and Welk. We never found you after the war with the Yuuzhan Vong ended."
"Ah, yes, the Yuuzhan Vong," UnuThul said. "Tell us, did you succeed in destroying the voxyn, Jacen?"
"We did," Jacen said. "But we lost the Hara sisters and... Anakin, along the way."
"We are sorry to hear this," UnuThul said. "We presume that the New Republic triumphed against the Yuuzhan Vong?"
"The New Republic didn't," Jacen said. "But the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances did. The government reformed under Chief of State Cal Omas after Borsk Fey'lya died when the Yuuzhan Vong took Coruscant. The Galactic Alliance retook it and sent the invaders out into the Unknown Regions."
"The Vong simply gave up?" UnuThul asked.
"Not 'simply,' but yes," Jacen said.
"But that wasn't all that happened, was it?" UnuThul asked. "What about the transformation in you, Jacen?"
Jacen sighed. He should have figured that Raynar - or whatever he was calling himself now - would sense that change of presence in him, just as Akanah had. He only hoped that UnuThul wouldn't be so judgmental.
"I have changed," Jacen said. "And so has the rest of the Jedi Order. Neither of us look upon the Force as light or dark any longer. It's how we won the war."
"And this new view of the Force," UnuThul said. "Has it given the Order any new powers?"
Jacen shook his head. "No."
"Then how come we saw you after the Crash?" UnuThul asked.
"Saw me after the Cr- What are you talking about?"
"When the ship carrying Raynar Thul arrived," UnuThul elaborated, "and crashed, we saw you, Jacen. We saw you standing out in the distance, but you didn't help us. Yet, we also sensed that you weren't there, that you were unable to help us."
Now Jacen was really confused. "I don't understand what you're talking about. Um... when did this ship crash?"
"Eight years ago," UnuThul said. "Not long after the ship escaped from Myrkr."
Jacen's expression fell into one of absolute confusion. "But I couldn't have been here. I was... being transformed." He wasn't sure how much he wanted to reveal about his teachings under Vergere to UnuThul.
"Then it makes sense that you were not here," UnuThul said. "Come; we will take you to the Crash. Perhaps, then, it will make sense for you." UnuThul then walked past Jacen as the rest of Unu surrounded the men, leading the way out of the cave to the outside again.
Once they were all out, they rounded the mountain, and there, they reached a mound that, on his flyover, Jacen initially mistook for a boulder. But upon inspection, he found that it was a ship caked in sand, no doubt from sandstorms or something like that, and Jacen could just barely make out the words Tachyon Flier somewhere on the hull.
The Tachyon Flier. Yes, this was the ship, Jacen remembered. This was the ship that Lomi Plo and Welk used to take Raynar, along with Lowbacca's translator droid M-TD, back aboard the Baanu Rass so many years ago.
"We have not yet reached our destination, Jacen," UnuThul said. He and his entourage of insects had stopped to face Jacen so that UnuThul could point at another nearby mound in the distance. "That is where we saw you. If you go there, you will understand."
"Can I at least look through this ship first?" Jacen asked.
"No," UnuThul said with an abrupt tone that took Jacen slightly aback. "This site is sacred to us. No one is to enter or touch this vessel. And besides, there is nothing inside for you to find anyway."
"Why is this site so sacred to you?" Jacen inquired.
"Because this is where Raynar Thul died," UnuThul answered.
Jacen hesitated before asking his next question. "What happened to the other occupants of the ship? The Dark Jedi, Lomi Plo and Welk, and the droid M-TD?"
"They all perished," UnuThul answered.
"Like Raynar?"
When UnuThul said nothing, Jacen started to really worry.
"Come," UnuThul repeated. "There is nothing for you here. Only there." Again, he pointed at the distant mound.
Jacen hesitated again, but he eventually turned and followed all of Unu to the mound.
Minutes later, he and Unu reached the mound, and Jacen stood dead center of it, looking out upon the Crash.
"I don't understand," Jacen said after a while. "What am I supposed to learn from here?"
"You were here, yet you weren't here. How could that be?" UnuThul sounded almost as confused as Jacen; and the insects even rumbled confused murmurings themselves.
Jacen thought about it for a short while before a startling realization clicked in his head.
The only way he could be here, yet not be here at the time of the Crash, was from what he learned from the Aing-Tii.
Flow-walking.
But how could that be? he wondered. Raynar and these insects could have possibly seen him if he did flow-walk here. Flow-walking was only looking back into the past, not interacting with it.
Or so Jacen had been told.
Was it possible that Jacen could, in fact, travel back in time? Was he fated to come here, to flow-walk back in time for Raynar to see him, so that UnuThul could call for him?
"I think I know how this is possible," Jacen said. "If you will please remain silent."
And then he fell into a flow-walking trance.
He traveled all the way back in time to the point where he knew that the Crash would happen. He looked into the sky, and he saw the Tachyon Flier approach the ground in a rapid descent, the ship itself practically on fire from a bad entry through the atmosphere.
Even though he knew the ship's fate, Jacen was still surprised to find that the Flier didn't outright explode once it impacted with the sandy ground; yet it nevertheless burned.
A short while later, three figures emerged, one carrying the other two out. All of them were horribly burned, and the ones who were dragged out were both unconscious, if not dead.
Even from this distance, Jacen could tell that the figure who carried the other two out was Raynar, and the unconscious ones were Lomi Plo and Welk.
After the wounded Raynar sagged to his knees and let the unconscious forms of Plo and Welk drop against the ground, he looked over to Jacen's direction... and they locked eyes.
"Jacen!" Raynar cried. "Help me!"
"Help me, Jacen!" UnuThul cried, breaking Jacen out of his flow-walking trance, and back into the present world.
The burned man grasped at Jacen's shoulders, turning him around from facing the Crash site as he practically shook Jacen.
"You've got to help me!" UnuThul - no, Raynar, Jacen realized - pleaded. "My mind! They've taken over my mind, and I can't leave them!"
Jacen finally got a grip on Raynar's own shoulders and stilled him. "Raynar, calm down. I can help you. If you just come with me."
"He cannot come with you, Jacen," a female voice said from behind Jacen.
Jacen was then tackled from behind by someone he couldn't see, and he fell upon Raynar as the weight of other beings - most likely the insects around them - started to prevent Jacen from escaping.
"Because you will be with one of us," the female voice said, breathing into Jacen's ear. "And with all the power that you have acquired in your time, you will help us take over this galaxy! To expand from this desolate wasteland, and succeed where the Yuuzhan Vong failed in their conquest; the complete subjugation of all under the rule of the Killiks!"
Jacen recognized that voice; it belonged to Lomi Plo, he remembered. And he couldn't help but remember that Killiks were an ancient insectoid race thought to have been long extinct by now.
That last point, however, wasn't important at the moment. What was important was the fact that he couldn't be taken by Plo and these bugs.
"If you want me for my power, Plo," Jacen muttered, his breath strained by the weight crushing him in, "you shouldn't have just tackled me."
With all of the inner strength he could muster, he sent a giant Force-wave that sent every single being flying off of him in all directions. He then pushed himself off of Raynar and turned to face Lomi Plo, who had fallen next to her Dark Jedi compatriot, Welk, among a group of the insectoids.
Unhooking and activating his green-bladed lightsaber from his belt again, Jacen leaped in to swipe Plo and Welk dead in one fell swoop. But the two Dark Jedi pushed themselves off and rolled away, leaving Jacen to slash at nothing but the sand beneath him as Plo and Welk jumped to their feet on either side of Jacen to activate their red-bladed lightsabers.
The Dark Jedi then rushed in to Jacen - Plo from the left, Welk from the right - and then Jacen flipped back once so that the dark siders were both fully in his view. He began to trade blows with each of them, expertly dueling them off, even as they started to back him up under their own onslaught of slashes.
As the two-on-one duel progressed, the Killiks around them started to rush in to aid Plo and Welk, Jacen sensed. So he had to divert his attention away from the Dark Jedi as he began to cut down the insectoids around him, sometimes managing to outright jump and/or flip away from both Plo and Welk to handle the bugs.
Eventually, however, four Killiks managed to get past Jacen's defenses to tackle him by the legs down onto his back. Four more bugs held his arms down to prevent him from using his lightsaber, and one of them tried to wrestle the weapon out of Jacen's hand as Plo and Welk advanced upon him.
But then Jacen unleashed a volley of Electric Judgment from his free hand, electrocuting the Killiks who were holding him down to death, leaving their lifeless corpses crispy as he rolled back to duel Plo and Welk again. More Killiks tried to attack Jacen again, but he managed to cut them down with as much difficulty as he had before, though none of them managed to succeed in holding him down like those eight other bugs.
However, the duel soon ended when Jacen felt a hot, sharp blade pierce his right thigh from behind. He fell to his hands and knees, his lightsaber deactivated and clattering away, and he managed to look back to find Raynar standing there with his own lightsaber's blade - which Jacen noted was red, most likely because Plo and Welk wanted Raynar to be a Dark Jedi like them (and they could have given him a spare red lightsaber crystal to boot) - being the one that gave Jacen pain that he didn't expect to endure.
If only Vergere's teachings made me immune to all pain, Jacen thought.
"We can sense now that you will not be so willing to join the Killik hive mind, Jacen," Plo said as she and Welk approached him again.
"Not like Raynar here, even with all of his resistance," Welk said.
"As you can see," Plo said, "he is, in the end, loyal and compliant to us."
"But since you are too dangerous alive," Welk said, "we will have no choice but to... well, you know." He gave a smirk that was more awkward than menacing, given his burns.
"Such a shame," Plo commented. "Such power, such promise, all wasted."
She and Welk then raised their lightsabers to simultaneously strike Jacen down.
"No!" Raynar cried.
He abruptly pulled his blade out of Jacen's leg to stop Plo and Welk's blades from killing Jacen. The latter then took the opportunity to reach out with the Force to call his own lightsaber back into his hands, reactivating it even as Welk sent a Force-wave that threw Raynar away.
"You ungrateful, treacherous little-"
Welk's rant to Raynar was cut off when Jacen plunged his blade through his chest.
Plo gasped, and then struck out to decapitate Jacen. But he ducked beneath the swing, pulled the blade out of Welk's body, and rolled out of the way before gracefully pushing himself back to his feet with one hand; the lightsaber wound in his leg was all but forgotten, with his training from Vergere allowing him to forget about it (at least for the moment).
As Welk collapsed to the sandy ground dead, Plo rushed past to attack Jacen with renewed rigor and fury; not even the Killiks wanted to get involved in taking down Jacen, probably because they didn't want to get in the way of Plo's rage. The viciousness of her attacks, however, led to Jacen slipping in concentration, for the pain in his leg caused him to stumble back and fall for the ground.
But in the second that it would have taken for Plo to strike the vulnerable Jacen dead, a red lightsaber blade was plunged through Plo's chest from behind. The lightsaber in her raised hands was deactivated to clatter to the ground, and her body slumped dead as the red blade that killed her was deactivated.
Standing in her place was Raynar, who looked down upon Jacen with worry. He then looked out to the Killiks.
"You're all free now," he said to them. "Go home."
Without any clicking or clacking protests, the Killiks simply turned away and scurried away, many of them burrowing into the sandy ground for whatever they could find or had previously established.
Raynar, after hooking the red-bladed lightsaber to his belt, then reached down and picked Jacen up, helping him to his feet by letting Jacen place an arm around his shoulder.
"Thank you for helping me," Raynar said as they started to slowly proceed to the Solo Quest. "You have a bacta tube aboard?"
"Yeah, but a patch should be able to heal this right up," Jacen said. "But you look and sound like you need a year's worth of immersion in that tube."
"You look good, too," Raynar remarked sardonically.
"So what took you and those two-" Jacen nodded back to the corpses of Plo and Welk "-so long to call to me?"
"They sensed you weren't powerful enough to make you join the hive mind yet," Raynar explained. "Once you were, they let me call you."
"I'm sorry they did this to you, my friend," Jacen said.
"There are no need for apologies, Jacen," Raynar said. "You saved my life, and helped me vanquish another threat to the galaxy, as well as breaking me out of that bug hive mind. Man, you have no idea how weird that was, never mind having two Dark Jedi control your mind."
"If you think that's weird, try being one with the Force to the point where you actually were the Force for a moment," Jacen said.
"Shut up," Raynar said playfully. "Is that what happened to you?"
"It's how I ended the war with the Yuuzhan Vong," Jacen said. "How I killed their Supreme Overlord, who actually had the Force himself, by the way."
"Really?" Raynar asked in disbelief. "How could that be? I thought all Vong didn't have the Force."
"It's a long story, I'll tell you on the hyperspace flight outta here," Jacen said. "You know, speaking of hyperspace flight, have you heard about a living planet that could do that?"
"Sounds like you had a strange time after Myrkr, Jacen," Raynar remarked.
"Oh, you have no idea, my friend," Jacen said.