2
Mara noted that the cave was another pulse point in the Force, and assumed her other destinations would follow that pattern. She noted that various fauna seemed intrigued by the cave, loitering about its entrance. As she approached, a small creature resembling an akk dog but with fur and a small crest protruding from the back of its head approached her. She cocked an eyebrow, kept her hand near her lightsaber. It sniffed her, then placed a paw on her knee and attempted to stand to reach her face. Obliging tentatively, she bent down and reached out a hand to see what the curious thing would do with it. It opened its mouth in what she assumed approximated a smile for its species, nipped affectionately at her fingers, and licked her face. "Oh! Ew…nice to meet you too, I guess." The puppy - for surely its playfulness and trusting nature spoke to youth as surely as if it were human - 'smiled' wider and yipped. "So, what's waiting for me in there? Got any advice?" The pup lowered itself, turned toward the cave mouth, paused as if actually attempting to discern something, trotted forward several steps, then returned to Mara with puckered brows, as if to say, "Sorry, no clue, lady".
She ran her fingers over the furry crest. "Well thanks anyway. Guess I should quit stalling, huh?" The critter yipped again, which she took as encouragement.
Entering the cave, Mara found that the intense daylight of Odessen's star did not penetrate far. There was a large area, swathed in light, ending in a rock wall that curved around the cave's mouth, interrupted by one passage that Mara could see. She was unsure if she was meant to go exploring the cave, but - being used to assignments being more onerous than "go over there and sit" - she chose to err on the side of the riskier option.
Activating the lamp on the bandolier she wore over her jumpsuit, she ventured into the dark passage. It was spacious, compared to other caves she'd explored; it was wide enough for her to pass through with room to spare and almost tall enough that she didn't have to bend to get by. Hunching slightly, she followed the cave as it wound downwards and, if her sense of direction was right (it always was), under the river by the campsite. Looking up, she spotted stalactites and small formations of water that dripped down them here and there. As she began to wonder if they'd hinder her passage at some point, if the path would narrow, it did the opposite, opening into a gaping cavern replete with stalagmites and stalactites. They appeared to radiate out in roughly concentric circles from the center of the cavern, which was barren of spikes. Instead, it featured a small mossy area that circumscribed a pond - perhaps more a very large puddle, she mused, as she neared. Fifty creds says this is my meditation point, Mara concluded, and strode with purpose toward the clearing.
Looking around, she wondered what the place would look like in darkness, so she turned off the lamp. Childlike wonderment filled her gaze as she beheld the twinkling of the mineral deposits on the stalactites and stalagmites, reflecting the sparse natural light available from ambient radiation and the natural luminescence of some minerals. The clearing suddenly seemed to float in an ocean of stars, a sensation so complete that it disoriented her sense of balance briefly. "Okay, yeah, this is a place to meditate. Kinda don't want to ever leave, and I hate meditating." This thought caused her to reflect on mostly-mandatory sessions with Luke, which made her think about how much he'd treasure a miraculous spot like this, which made her - just for the briefest of moments - allow herself to miss him. Then she locked everything back away in her emotional Luke Box and resolutely returned to the moment in which she found herself. Mara Jade, alone, standing on a tiny island in a sea of stars.
She sat and crossed her legs, automatically adopting a Jedi meditation pose, and - reluctantly, it really was a beautiful tableau - closed her eyes. Breathing deeply and evenly, she did that which she had come to do and did not want to do: she reached out to the Force. It was a nearly painful stretching, the metaphysical equivalent of hyperextending an elbow or knee, and she had become accustomed to doing it only in situations of extreme danger. Between this self-imposed limitation and the danger represented by Dark Side access being less taxing than touching the Light, she had gradually become almost completely Force-averse. Lesson #1, I guess: that's probably gotta stop. The cavern slowly and with aching deliberation became alive to her Force-sense. She distinguished the luminescent minerals from the reflective ones, noted where stalagmites and stalactites were on the verge of meeting, traced the patterns of moisture traveling along the ceiling and floor of the cavern.
Reach deeper, a voice instructed. She was almost totally unsurprised to encounter an additional presence, having figured she was sent here for such a thing. Immerse yourself fully in the moment; here in the Living Force, the instant is all you need concern yourself with.
Though her eyes remained closed, a figure seemed to 'appear' in her Force sense. It was human, male, and judging by its attire, Jedi. With tens of thousands of Knights and Masters active during the Clone Wars alone, there was no reason she should recognize her tutor, but a vague tinge of disappointment told her that she had expected to. The robes were travel-worn, humbly appointed, and colored in earth tones as was usual in the late Republic era. His hair was long, gathered into a knot at the back of his head then allowed to flow freely down his back and well below his shoulders in front. His beard and mustache were somewhat unkempt, as though he simply hadn't bothered to shave ever, rather than choosing to keep facial hair. His stare was piercing - the shape of his brow, slightly hooded, likely added to this effect, but there was no doubt that the sharpness in his eyes bespoke his ability to see deeply into everything and everyone around him.
She attempted to follow his instructions. It hurts.
And you're a stranger to pain? He inquired. Reach out. Fill this cavern with your awareness until you feel the organisms moving in the pond, then you may leave.
…I'm glad it's really beautiful here, she thought at the apparition, because I'm probably never getting out of here. But she wasn't a stranger to pain and though she was galled to be so blatantly baited into action, she fought through her block to expand her sphere of awareness.
That isn't the way, he admonished. The path of the Jedi is through acceptance.
One, totally not a Jedi, never have been, don't wanna be; two, how else am I supposed to touch the Force?
Forgive an old Jedi his presumption, young one. This is a light side nexus, a place rich in the Living Force on a planet both rich in the Living Force and perfectly balanced and aligned within the Cosmic Force. Jedi used to come here to commune with the Light, but one need not adhere to Jedi doctrine or learn the Jedi arts to feel the Force in this manner. I should have said that the way of the Light is the way of acceptance.
Great, now…what does that mean? Like, what am I doing wrong?
You are trying to touch the Force as you did when you were bonded to Sidious, the spirit rejoined. Through your bond with him, your natural connection to the Force was…shaped. Neither bolstered nor throttled, but carved into the channel the Sith Master sought to create for you. This served many purposes, chiefly so that he would be fully cognizant of your Force signature anywhere in the galaxy, as though you were bonded by blood or love, though neither was the case.
Mara guiltily wondered whether or not that was true, or whether, maybe, she had loved Palpatine at some point and in some way. The guilt sent ripples into the Force; when they reached the Jedi Master, he returned comfort and calm, declining to comment on her errant musing.
Now you must touch the Force the way you, Mara Jade, were meant to.
Her brow furrowed. How - how powerful will I be isn't quite the question I want to ask, maybe, how wide will the channel be?
As wide as it is, young one.
How thoroughly, incredibly, frustratingly Jedi of you, thank you.
The spirit smiled. You remind me of my Padawan when he was not much younger than you are now. Don't lose your humor, it is how you adapt to adverse circumstance and that helps define you in the Light. But perhaps now, turn your mind to what it is mine to teach. How powerful you will become, how wide your channel will be, is another matter, for another teacher. Right now, you must accept that whatever width you feel is the width you have. Do not stretch beyond the point of strain. Touch what you can within your confines. Only that.
Mara thought she grasped his meaning. She had been trying to do what she had learned to do, which meant attempting to make her present level of access to the Force serve to grant her the level of power and presence within the Force she was used to having. But if she could make her means of accessing the Force now match what she perceived to be the level of power and presence she was capable of now - whatever that was - she would be, in effect, accepting her limitations.
Accepting limitations was not a naturally occurring process for Mara Jade, nor was it a simple or easy one to synthesize. She did not know how long she spent in the beautiful cavern, performing the very opposite task to what she'd been attempting in all her meditations with Skywalker. Rather than stretching her metaphysical muscles past the point of strain, she was attempting to locate that point of strain so as to stay just within it.
Not just to stay within it. To truly accept it. The communion between life and the Living Force is a reflection; you do not 'see' my form, but you are experiencing its reflection in the Living Force from my presence in the Cosmic Force. The more your reflection in the Living Force aligns with your actual state, the less disharmony you will experience in your attempt to wield that connection to affect yourself or the world around you. If you can stay just short of that level of strain, as you put it, but continue to be rankled or feel constricted by its nature, you will continue to feel blocked. And, feeling blocked, you will be blocked.
You're not seriously telling me this is all in my head.
No, young one, sadly, we are here in a sense rectifying a most personal violation that was committed against you. To disrupt the very nature of a Force-sensitive being's connection to the Force…it's on par with the worst physical violence any person can visit upon another. But since it has been done, the alteration required to heal is, for lack of a better phrase, in your head. Come to accept what is. Know that it is the first step on a path to changing what is, but do not concern yourself with the path or the journey. Merely accept, in this moment, that your access to the Force is what it is, then attempt to touch the Force with that connection rather than the one you used to have.
Finally, Mara understood. While her block was real - although that may not be the proper word for this 'shaping' done by the Emperor, given her new understanding - its solution was both 'real' and psychological. She had to both change the way she tried to touch the Force and change the way she perceived that effort.
Easier, she figured, to put the change in action ahead of the change in perception. She released her connection to the Force, then embraced it again, this time only doing what she felt capable of. She was rewarded by a connection that was trickle-thin, likely incapable of lifting anything larger than a pebble, but also totally free of strain. Following the original instruction, she began using that connection to sense what she could of the cavern around her. Again, she felt the subterranean life of the chamber, the movement of the water, but it was all faint to her. She did not believe that this trickle could be used to watch microbial action in the pond before her.
Wait, don't tell me, that's the problem - it won't work because I believe it won't work. The spirit smiled and nodded her onward. As my Master's Master often said, 'size matters not'. Now, he was usually referring to affecting very large things with the Force, but in many ways affecting - merely perceiving - very small things is as difficult or moreso.
Heard that one. You don't travel the galaxy with Luke Skywalker without having Yoda quoted to you incessantly - hey! You're Qui-Gon Jinn!
So I am. There was mirth in the entity's Force presence now.
Always liked hearing stories about you, what few Luke knew. Ooh, you gotta tell me, Kenobi wouldn't - was nine-year-old Vader super obnoxious, or just like regular-kid obnoxious?
Anakin was…precocious. I believe he quite enjoyed his ability to identify me as a Jedi before I was prepared to reveal myself, and he found the Gungan's more painful pratfalls just a tad more amusing than his other antics.
I knew it! I can't wait to tell Luke I met you.
Which you will be able to do sooner, young one, if you continue on your journey. Which you will not be able to do until you have completed your task here.
Right, right…Mara cocked her head to the side. She decided to play with her Force connection. Rather than attempting to sense the whole cavern, she focused it on the tip of a single nearby stalagmite, attempting to learn everything she could about it. Once she had catalogued it to the limit of her present ability, she swept the 'eye' of her awareness around the cavern, occasionally stopping to admire the glint of a particular combination of minerals or make a shape out of collections of spikes the way a child might fancy the shapes of animals in the clouds. She reveled in the painlessness, enjoyed nothing more than the moment and her casual investigation of her unique surroundings.
Now, young one. Focus on the pond now.
Mara 'looked' into the very large puddle. She sensed the motion of the water. She began to distinguish tiny fluctuations in temperature between surface and bottom. As she did, she noted that the movement closer to the surface was faster; as she looked closer, she found the single-celled organisms she was assigned to observe, dancing differently along what could hardly be called currents but constituted motion nonetheless. Quite pleased with herself and nothing if not competitive, Mara focused her attention further, attempting to discern the movement speeds of the molecules comprising the water itself, which she knew would be more excited at the surface than at the bottom. As she felt that strain begin to come on, she ceased the effort and watched the amoebae at play.
Very good. Very good. You may leave at your leisure.
Can I ask you something?
Yes, although I do not promise an answer.
Why didn't you free Shmi Skywalker when you had the chance? As I understand it, the path to her death could have been forestalled by freeing her and it would have left one less stain on Anakin Skywalker's heart. I have no love for Vader, but when I consider what it must have felt like to have won his freedom, to go off to live his dream of becoming a Jedi but at the cost of his mother's continued enslavement…I mean, you're kind of held up as in some ways the ideal Jedi. What happened there?
The spirit was silent, looking on Mara with metaphysical raised eyebrows. She could tell the moment he decided to take on the challenge, as those piercing eyes seemed to turn their discernment inward.
No Jedi is without flaws; this was a mistake of mine. But I will say that it is related both to a tendency - I won't call it a flaw - of my thought processes on a mission, and a quite serious failing endemic to the Jedi order of my time.
Ironically, considering what it was my task to guide you to do, on missions I had a tendency to become target-fixated. Jedi missions have objectives, even the diplomatic ones. We were thrust into what was supposed to be a diplomatic mission, with a clear objective, that became a hostile situation with a fluid set of moving-target objectives. Protect the Queen. Oh, wait, no, protect the bloody Handmaiden. Escape Naboo. Get to Coruscant to plead Naboo's case before the Senate. Return the Queen - and all the handmaidens, just in case - to Naboo safely, so she can forge an interspecies peace treaty in less time than it takes to finish a cup of tea by literally begging. Escort her to the palace so she can foolishly throw herself onto the front line of a police action. Oh, and defeat the first Sith anyone has seen in a thousand years of assuming them defeated. (Well, I assumed it. I think Yoda may have known better.)
Into this chaos comes the Chosen One. As mindful as I remain of the Living Force, it had been impossible not to take continual stock of the galaxy's slide into darkness. I could not abandon Anakin - to do so would have been to abandon the galaxy itself, and that was before we discovered Darth Maul on Tatooine. But I still had mission objectives. It is not an excuse to say that I was attempting to manage several top-priority items by that point - merely a reason for my failure to take onboard the additional challenge of securing the freedom of Shmi Skywalker.
The failure of the Jedi Order, meanwhile, was to recognize the severity of the plight of the Outer Rim. It wasn't just Hutt-controlled space; from the Mid-Rim outwards, that slide into darkness had disproportionately affected the disenfranchised, and the size of the challenge vastly outstripped the resources of the Jedi. At the time, we lacked the political capital or skill to motivate the Senate to action on such matters; we were the tail, not the akk dog. So slavery was a matter about which we threw up our collective hands and a battle we ceded to the Darkness.
And I think, because we were trained to do what good we could in the galaxy and turn the rest over to the Force, lest we Fall due to disharmonious emotion and attachment, we failed to see the value in righteous discontent. Even if we had been unable to affect slavery on a scale that reflected positive change in the galaxy writ large - if we had maintained a strong institutional discontent over it, a frustrated anger that kept it at the top of our list of Things the Jedi Will Fix As Soon As We Can, I believe I would have seen more easily the value in the freeing of one slave.
As it turns out, the plight of the Mid and Outer Rim contributed directly to the outbreak of the Clone Wars; I now perceive that plight to have been orchestrated with great care by the Sith over the course of that millennium of stealth.
You have given me something to reflect on, young one, thank you. I shall enjoy throwing this in - I mean, bringing this - to Yoda's attention.
Mara nodded sagely. So, basically, you were blind. Like, you were unable to perceive the value of that one life on the galactic scale, even though that life was directly tied to your vaunted Chosen One and clearly - because, you know, he was a child and she was his parent - helped to regulate his emotional balance. And therefore his balance in the Force. And therefore the balance of the Force in, y'know, the galaxy.
The piercing gaze returned to Mara but the apparition did not speak for long moments. Then:
Yes, I believe that is a more succinct manner of expressing my point. Though I would like to observe that it neglects several nuances I feel are important in my defense.
Mara smirked. I knew I'd like you if we ever got to meet, Jinn. You're a stand-up guy, for a Jedi. Way to take one on the chin - kinda reminds me of how Skywalker gets when he realizes he's wrong.
Which, in your company, was often.
She laughed. Which, in my company, was very often.
You're quite fond of our Luke.
Her eyes narrowed. I don't know that I'd put it precisely like that. We're good friends. I…rely on him. Which is not a thing I enjoy doing with people.
I… see. Well, we in the Cosmic Force who are of his lineage are also fond of him. He is a quality Jedi, especially considering his nontraditional and abbreviated training.
Now, young one, on with your quest.
Smiling, Mara opened her eyes, wondering idly how much time had truly passed. By the popping in her left knee as she stood - an old injury that didn't heal quite right (because Palpatine wouldn't allow it) - it had been at least a couple of hours. Stretching, she looked around the cavern again and found that the unparalleled beauty she beheld with her eyes paled beside what she was able to observe in the Force. She switched on her lamp and left the cave.
The not-an-akk-dog (she really needed a name for the thing) ran up to her as she emerged, yipping and capering about her. "I don't think anyone's been this happy to see me...maybe ever?" She smiled and hunkered down to a knee to greet her new friend. She looked up into Odessen's expansive, moonless night sky, breathed in the scents of the (she judged) late evening, and reached out with the Force again. Enjoying the new painless sensation, she looked around for a test of her power level. Turning back to the cave mouth, she spotted a pebble and summoned it to her.
It waved at her, wiggling merrily on the ground from which it otherwise refused to budge.
"Okay, still got some work to do." But she smiled again. Progress was progress.
