How close would this one get?
Rey leaned forward a little to watch another spray of red explode from the largest of the glowing craters, far below the shuttle. Tendrils of lava stretched and broke into globes as it reached up, as if projected by the Dark Side itself, grasping for the hated Skywalker until gravity overcame it and the molten rock retreated to fall to the blackened landscape as a hard, burning rain.
That one hadn't quite made it, but maybe if she lowered the Beltane a little more? She could watch this all day.
Stood on the edge of the loading bay, the landscape beneath her was mesmerizing. Pitch black rock, bent and twisted into smoothly flowing shapes of rivers of lava past, studded with pools of bright red, laced with scarlet veins. To her right, white clouds of ash billowed, angry and dense, obscuring her objective: the temple, and the artifact within.
And somewhere within it, the Darksiders. She could feel them waiting and assumed they could feel her watching. How many they were it was hard to say, because of their proximity to the Temple: a Dark presence, a stain on the Force so intense it could be felt from orbit. Whatever had happened there, whatever evil it contained, had cast a shadow that had all but extinguished light and life from this world.
Rey took a breath and stilled her mind. Showtime.
"To point one," she commanded the craft, and it slid away from the craters, to a position over the ash cloud.
"Lower field."
The wind rushed into the bay and whipped around her, flooding the space with a sulphuric odor and a biting chill. It ruffled the new tunic and pants that she'd had the craft fabricate that morning. They were a little more formal than her standard workwear, a sandy gold edged in white that seemed more appropriate to a warrior of the light than the usual dark grey.
She crossed her arms over her body and stepped off the edge, to plummet downwards, the fall momentarily overwhelming her senses before she could stabilize and connect with the Force again, using it to ensure she stayed upright and not tumble. She closed her eyes and couldn't suppress a smile. The Force Descent was one of the first core skills she had mastered. Idiosyncratic to every Jedi, most used air currents to assist them, like birds, gliding and soaring, but there was no subtlety in her approach, just power and nerve.
The shuttle was left far behind now. It would ascend to orbit and wait, shielded and concealed; no sense in exposing it to whatever dangers lurked below. The ash cloud looked like solid rock as it rushed towards her. Would she feel the impact? She'd not considered that, but had considered the mess the clinging dust would make, and had planned ahead; she wasn't going to show up to the party smothered in grey gunge. Reputations. She constructed a Force Barrier around herself, as she had done against the vacuum earlier, the world silent for a few moments before she emerged into clear air and her attention switched to slowing and stopping her fall, to touch down gracefully onto the flat black plain.
From here, the ash clouds were low and oppressive, casting shadows of perfect dark on the dim landscape, some ghostly wisps broken free to skim the ground. The glow of lava pools and rivers illuminated distant clouds, bathing the scene in a soft red light. Rey stood upon a surface of obsidian perfection, a vast expanse of flat black volcanic glass that reflected the clouds above and clicked against her boots as she started to walk in the direction of the temple. She couldn't see it yet, but could sense where it lay, waiting.
A stray shaft of sunlight pierced the billowing clouds to fall upon the plain in front of her, illuminating what lay within, and her steps faltered and slowed. Rubble, pieces of buildings, machinery. And people. Crowds of them, flocks of them suspended in the hard, black ocean beneath her feet, ghostly and still, some looking to the sky in terror, some clinging to loved ones, their final moments preserved in perfection for all time. An entire civilization extinguished and frozen in a single monstrous, desperate act by a failing empire of evil, a world that had laughed and loved and lived reduced to a beautiful, obscene graveyard by the Dark Side.
And the Darksiders worshipped this desolation. She had descended to this cursed planet to take their beloved artifact from them and see it used for good, but that no longer seemed sufficient. They deserved to have judgement brought down upon their evil fucking heads, and it was her destiny to bring justice and light to this place. It fell to her, nobody else. They were near, she could smell them and now they were fucked, completely fucked; she was going to enjoy this.
Rey picked up the pace and strode onward.
"Nice move," Finn commented, studying the board. Now her Strider was forking his Monnok and 'slug from the outer ring.
"I read Chewbacca was Dejarik champion on Kashyyk, way back, before the Clone Wars," remarked Evrina, the staff-wielding Reywalker and Finn's opponent.
"News to me," Finn said dubiously.
"Is it true," Quonar asked, the tall Kiffar lounging beside them with a beer, "Poe light speed skipped out of the Sinta Glacier, through the Typhonic Nebula and Ivexia to get intelligence back to the Rebellion?"
"Cardovyte as well. They were tricky to shake," replied Finn.
"What a guy," Quonar shook his head, that faraway look in his eye again. He'd been quizzing Finn about Poe ever since his connection to The Best Pilot in the Galaxy had become known.
"Be still, my heart," sighed Evrina.
"I'll drink to that," the Kiffar sipped from his pint and exchanged a smile with the girl. They'd been bonding ever since their shared crush on The Best Pilot in the Galaxy had become evident.
"So you were there?" asked Kiro, the taller Reywalker, chin resting in her hand, watching Finn intently; her eyes had hardly left him since he came onboard. Poe and Rey seemed to take this kind of adulation in their stride, but he found the attention alternating between disconcerting and weirdly flattering, and wasn't yet sure where the needle would come to rest on it.
A reply died on his lips as Adra emerged from the corridor that led to the bridge, looking shaken and unsettled, her eyes finding him quickly.
"Finn. We're there, but you better see this," she said before disappearing back into the passageway.
Finn met Evrina's gaze with a shrug, "Sounds serious."
"Sounds like Hero stuff," Evrina smiled as Finn rose from the board to follow the captain into the narrow corridor that wound through the ship to deliver him onto the bridge.
The blast shields were lowered, blocking the view outside the craft. The navigator, a human male reclined in his chair sucking the air in deep breaths while the second-in-command, an older Twi'lek woman, put a comforting hand on his shoulder.
Adra tapped a button and winced as a holo of Ziost popped up, in all its maddening, multi-terrained glory. "If I hadn't hit the blast shields," she announced, gesturing at the globe, "This would have fried poor Eron's brain. What the hell is it?"
"An ancient Sith homeworld," Finn regarded it coolly, accustomed to the sight of the planet and all its contradictions now. "Some bad shit happened here, a few thousand years back, and this is the result."
"And you're going down there?"
"Yeah. She's there, and I need to find her, fast."
"Rather you than me. So where then?"
Where indeed? Rey could be anywhere on the planet's surface. He stilled himself and made the connection, relaxed into the energy around him, the same energy that surrounded her, joining them. The song she sang in the Force made ripples that spread into the infinite to touch them both, carrying a signature in a note he knew so well. He turned the holo with a gesture and found a chain of volcanoes in the northern hemisphere, then zoomed in to one in particular.
"There," he pointed.
Rey saw the path first, its whiteness caught momentarily by the sun, luminous against a landscape composed entirely of black stone and glass. And soon after that, the heads, carved from volcanic rock, each of them taller than her. Two parallel rows of ten flanked the slim white trail. The temple entrance came to her attention last, a plain black cube at the end of the path, just four body lengths on each side with a large doorway-shaped opening that gave access to the underground complex.
Her steps carried her onto the path, which crunched a little underfoot as she walked. She didn't need to kneel and examine it to know; it was constructed from bone, millions of fragments spread here by disciples long gone and cemented over the centuries by drifting ash and occasional rainfall.
The heads, she realized, were suspended a short distance above the ground, presumably by the same kind of Sith sorcery that defied gravity on Exegol and other temples she had seen. Another of their technologies that could have served the galaxy but instead was lost to endless conflict, a casualty of the division of light and dark.
For a moment she felt vulnerable under the gaze of the massive stone faces as they watched her pass and wondered if they could be a trap: lure the unwary and unworthy onto the extremely obvious path, a path of Light no less, and bring some lethal force to bear on them. But the heads did not stir. She had the impression they approved.
The silent visages were carvings of Sith saints. Beings that had an understanding of power, strength and suffering that transcended that of the merely evil. How to use them to create a virtuous circle of ever greater power and pain. How to mine suffering. How to find the dirtiest, foulest parts of the worst beings in the galaxy, the parts that even they would deny to themselves and hide away in shame rather than give voice to or act upon, and having found these, nurture them, employ them in the creation of something bordering on beauty. She admired their dedication to creating works of wonder, of exquisite, alluring purity, from the darkest depths of the soul, and felt the doubt and fear that came from wondering whether she admired it too much.
"Seriously?!" yelled Adra over the roar of the wind, clinging to a rack fixed to one wall of the loading bay.
Good question, thought Finn, as he walked towards the open bay doors and peered over the edge, down to the hellish scene far below of dark swirling rock, red glowing lava and white clouds of ash. He clapped his hands and rubbed them together in anticipation. Not ideal, but there was no other way to catch up with Rey fast; Adra wasn't going to take them down into the clouds, and he had a feeling time was of the essence.
"Yeah, seriously," he replied, "I've done this before. All part of my training," sounding more confident than he felt. It was true he'd made a couple of half-decent Force Descents, three or so years back, but he'd only just been getting started when he'd quit the academy. Was it the kind of skill that once learnt, stayed with you for life, or would it take time to come back? If it took any more than ten seconds, he was history.
"I'll wait one day," Adra confirmed, "After that I'll call Dameron."
Finn turned back to her, "Thanks. And watch yourself. If anything looks off or threatening, get out fast."
The captain held tight to the wall and stared at the angry world below. "You're crazy, you know that?" and then to him, "She better be worth it."
"I think so," he shot her an assured smile, "Which makes me even crazier than you know."
He turned back to the world before him, one step away but so very far below. Don't overthink this. You can do it. You are one with the Force. Strong with it. This is your destiny. Get back into that Hero groove.
Two deep breaths, a stilling of the mind, and a jump into the void.
A rush, overwhelming. The noise, the blow of the wind grazing his face, pressure on his limbs and chest, the acceleration, the dizzying, sickening fall ripping his breath and thoughts away.
He was a fool. It had been too long, too little practice in connecting and using Force skills, let alone in situations like this. He'd forgotten how to do it. What a ridiculous way for his story to end. If they both came back as Force Ghosts, she'd never let him forget it. She would haunt him for all eternity, mocking the time he'd flung himself out of a ship in a ridiculous attempt to save her life and blown it in spectacular fashion.
Thoughts of eternal ridicule broke through the sensory overload and took him out of the rush, calmed him. He could do this if he remembered what he had been taught. Take your mind back to the training, Finn.
He steadied his flight first. Felt the air and the Force within it, between him and the ground. Felt the energy within that space. More than enough to slow his fall and direct him to where he needed to go. Connect with it. Use it. An updraft, sensed to his left; he moved across and rode it, slowing his fall, letting it slide him over to where the ash clouds looked thinner. The billowing grey mass rushed up to meet him and he instinctively used a Force Push to separate it and see where he was headed, to ensure he wasn't about to land in a crater full of lava. Looked good; just a flat black plain below.
The landing was a touch heavy, but controlled enough to avoid serious injury: if he'd been told a couple of minutes ago that the price to be paid for such reckless insanity was a couple of bruises, he'd have accepted it gratefully. First challenge over, now to find her. Finn turned, scanning the vista of rock and glass, shrouded in a shadowy gloom, illuminated by the soft red glow of lava on the clouds and scattered pools of light created by shafts of sunlight. No sign of her, but he could sense the direction in which she lay and set off, led by the Force.
As he walked, he became aware that the glass under his feet held secrets, hidden deep, revealed by the sun when it pierced the clouds and dove into the obsidian sea to show him what this world had once been. The remains of its civilization. The dead.
Finn realized that he had stopped, and inhaled sharply as the shifting light exposed what lay barely a body's length below him. A girl, reaching up, up to the sky, to where he now stood, her fingers reaching for the soles of his boots, eyes and mouth wide, beautiful in death, a life reduced to a frozen relic of a world disappeared. Her name had been Kira, he realized, without understanding how. She had been waiting for a boy, on a sunny day, when it had happened, when she and everyone around her had been engulfed by a terror and chaos that stretched moments into an eternity before ending in an abrupt and final silence. Finn broke free of the girl's gaze, pulled his cape around him and walked on, and did his best not to think of what had happened here when life had stopped, millennia ago.