Warning: As with the previous chapter I needed to create some non-canon details about the history of the Jedi, the Force, and some other things in this and the next chapter. There being no canon version of early Jedi history yet I used material from my "Fall of the Infinite Empire" fic, which is set around 25,000 BBY. It is based on some of the stories told in KOTOR and SWKOTOR (though I deviated from them in some respects). As with the previous chapter you can understand what is going on without reading that fic, but if you want background on the character introduced this chapter (who will only appear in this chapter), you can read that fic.
Also, I am aware of canon divergence in this chapter with regards to Ahsoka and Rebels. That is intentional and will be resolved within the story, on account of it being a time travel story.
Chapter Seven – The First Meets the Last
After exiting the holocron's strange interface, Rey set about preparing for the trip to Tython. She tried looking it up on the most up to date charts, but found no entry for it. Apparently no one lived on Tython or had lived on Tython for thousands of years. The holocron, or the librarian within the holocron's library (she could not make up her mind which it really was), said that there had been a brief reoccupation of Tython in the centuries after the first Jedi Civil War, led by a relocated Jedi Order. But eventually the Order re-established its central facility on Coruscant and Tython was left nothing but a bunch of ruins, places where relics since moved to the Republic capital had once been located. With the Jedi gone most of the settlers who had followed them there had no reason to remain, and so within a few generations the planet was empty once more. The point the holocron had wished to stress was that there would be no food there, so Rey set about gathering as much as she could.
She also finally set about the process of selling the Lars homestead. If her plan worked she knew she would not be coming back. She had forwarded a document to the local authorities declaring that if she did not return by a specific point in time they were to sell the homestead, and place the money in a trust she had set up a long time ago. Poe and Finn had, in the aftermath of the victory at Exegol, arranged for Rey to receive a New Republic pension. It was a good amount of money for the core worlds, though smaller than they had wanted to give her, but it represented a huge annual windfall on Tatooine, and Rey had needed only about a tenth of it to meet her needs. The rest of it she had put into a continuing trust to benefit the poor of Tatooine. Of course almost everyone on Tatooine counted as poor compared to most other worlds, but there were those who were even poor for Tatooine, and many of them survived through Rey's charity. They lived because of Poe and Finn, she thought to herself sadly. For as long as the pension continued she would allow it to keep finding its way into that trust. But she did not intend to return to this world. Tatooine had provided what was, for Rey, a familiar lifestyle. She had grown up in the deserts of Jakku, and despite her years long sojourn on Ajan Kloos she had never really gotten used to the moisture to be found in the atmospheres of most worlds. At this point she had lived on Tatooine almost as long as she had lived on Jakku, but it was time to leave it behind. She hoped that whoever bought the Lars homestead would show it the love and care she had, even if they didn't know how many consequential events had taken place there.
As she climbed the stairs out of the courtyard for the last time Rey realized she had no idea how the success of her plan would impact those buyers. Would any of this be here if she achieved what she was setting out to do? As she made her way to her ship, she comforted herself with the thought that her plan would almost certainly fail. She didn't even really understand the mechanics of what she was trying to. When she had explained it to the Holocron it had raised many of the worries she had come to herself over the years since the idea had first popped into her head. Anakin had been forced to reluctantly admit the Holocron had some wisdom when it ended up giving most of the reasons Anakin himself had given for why Rey's plan was a bad idea. But nonetheless Anakin promised to accompany her to Tython. The first task had been figuring out where it was. It had taken some time, but looking through Luke's own writings, made while he was living on Ahch-To she realized he had already found it, during his search for the Jedi home world. She wondered what had made him select Ahch-To rather than Tython. The ancient texts, all written after the various Force sensitive communities had unified, spoke of both as sources for the earliest members of the Order. Both sites remained inhabited for centuries after the various Force Sensitive communities made contact with each other. There were Temples on each even after the move first to Ossus and then then Coruscant.
She thought of what the Holocron had said, about the disputes over the origin of the Jedi Order depending on what you thought was essential to the Order. The group on Ahch-To had certainly been the more monkish of the early Orders, devoted as the later Jedi would be to celibacy and renunciation of the world. But Rey could not quite get past the fact that it had been the Force users from Tython who had found the Force users on Ahch-To and Jedha, and not the other way around. In the end she wondered whether it was because Ahch-To had water and the life that came with it, while Tython was a barren, rocky world. Rey loved the desert, but she suspected Luke never had.
Her ruminations had taken her all the way to her X-Wing. As she climbed aboard she looked out over the plain to the few above ground buildings of the Lars homestead. That place had been her home for longer than anywhere else had been or would be. It had been there that she had trained the only Padawans she would ever teach. She had taken care of it, loved it in a way, and now was leaving it behind forever. For she would succeed, in which case it would not be hers anymore, or she would die a failure. With that sunny thought she dropped into her seat. The twin suns were low in the sky, dawn having only been an hour or so before. She took off and did not look back as the world fell away behind her. For the first time in several years she was excited by what the future held. She was going to fix it all, she was going to save everyone. That was what she told herself as she drifted off to sleep, the stars streaking around her.
She dreamed again, this time of herself drifting through a beautiful world of mountains and forests, and waterfalls. When she grew tired she rested on islands floating in the sky. She was never alone there, for her friend kept many playmates for her. They would sing together and dance on the clouds. But always she kept one eye on the sun, knowing that when it set she must be home. The nighttime did not belong to her friend as the day did. But in this dream she lingered too long, was too far from home as the sun sank low. In desperation she strove to keep up her speed, to resist the natural urge to drift and sail along the breeze. As the golden light of day died around her the green light of the dangerous one grew brighter. She did not risk looking behind her for she had seen that dark tower with its green beacon on many nights, and knew what the growing green meant. She felt as though his breath was on her back and that if her pace slackened even a bit, she would be in his clutches. The she saw her friend, her hair falling thickly around her shoulders, and for the first time thought it strange that the color of her hair should match so perfectly the color of the flame that rose from his tower. As she reached her friend she felt the presence behind her fall away. She was safe again and turned to look at the dark sky and the even darker stain which fled across it, blotting out the stars. Not today she thought. It would not happen today. The little one was not there yet, but she was coming.
Rey woke up again with a start as the X-Wing dropped out of hyperspace. She was not used to such vivid dreams as she had been having lately, and was even less used to their details fleeing her mind so quickly. 'Fleeing' she thought to herself. He had fled before her friend. Who this friend was Rey could no longer remember. But she woke from that dream with a feeling of safety. She saw the world of Tython below her and thought to herself that it did not look barren. She saw clouds and oceans, and the green of life mixed with the brown stone. As she piloted her way down she saw the rocky land and came to understand the holocron's warning. Life could be found here, but the plants looked as though they led a hardscrabble existence. The trees were short and twisted, with tiny leaves barely obscuring the branches from which they grew. The grass grew short despite the seeming absence of animals to chew it down. Rey saw birds flying as she approached the patch of flat land closest to her destination, but saw no large ground animals at all. Through the Force she could feel the presence of small creatures that reminded her of rodents, but they stayed mostly out of sight as she walked from the X-Wing towards the ruins in the distance. The coordinates had been given to her by the Great Holocron and she trusted them, but all she had seen from the air was a slightly more orderly collection of standing stones.
"It's there," Anakin said, causing Rey to jump slightly out of surprise.
"I have asked you to stop doing that!" Rey shouted. The shout broke the stillness of the quiet planet in a way that left her feeling somewhat chagrined. It did not seem the kind of place for any kind of boisterous activity.
"How long since someone came here do you think?" Rey asked.
"I don't know," Anakin answered. "I didn't know about this place. I think most of the Order didn't know. If the Holocron was right about what we are going to find here, this would have been a very useful place to Palpatine and the remaining Jedi during the war."
Rey did not say out loud that Palpatine would have almost certainly sent Darth Vader to make use of this Jedi relic for which they now searched. The Holocron had said that only a Jedi could use it, and she bet Palpatine would have tried to get whatever was left of Anakin in his apprentice to try to serve as a Jedi one last time. They had begun to climb, or at least Rey had. She noticed that Anakin went through the motions of walking up the hill, but knew that he wasn't really walking at all. He was projecting his presence into Rey's mind in a way that led her to interpret the information as coming from outside herself. His presence was there of course, in a sense. He had described it as a matter of concentrating his consciousness, which was otherwise, it seemed, spread throughout all the galaxy. She had once asked why he was limited to this galaxy if the Force was found throughout the universe, and he had answered that he thought that perhaps he wasn't. But, he said, he found it difficult to manifest himself somewhere he had never been before, unless someone he knew was there. When she had asked him how it was that he came to know her, when he had died years before she was born, he told her it was from her time with Luke and Leia. He had apparently watched them from a distance ever since his death above Endor, and seeing them train Rey, had come to give some of his attention to her. And now that she was on Tython he could easily follow.
"Surely Master Yoda knew of it," Rey said. "The Holocron said that Yoda spoke with him often."
"Maybe," Anakin said uncertainly. "But would Master Yoda have asked about this place before the fall of the Order? You don't really understand how powerful the late Republican Jedi were, or how widely their influence ran. If Yoda needed to find someone he had thousands of Jedi spread throughout the galaxy to turn to. He had all the resources of the Republic government."
"But I thought the Jedi spent years trying to figure out where Darth Sidious was," Rey said.
"Not really. We didn't know for sure there was anyone higher up than Dooku. We thought maybe he had been behind it all. He told Obi-Wan you know?" Anakin said. "Told him about Sidious. We thought, at the time, that it was a ruse. But later, after I took Dooku's place, I felt like I understood. I felt like…if anyone would just help me be free of him, that I could fix everything. I could make all the terrible things worth it. I didn't really understand him until after I killed him, until after I became him."
Anakin shook his head and Rey nodded in silent sympathy. "Anyway," he said, "who knows if this method even works to find someone who is actively hiding? Palpatine and even Dooku after he fell bent most of their power towards hiding themselves from the Jedi. They could be sitting across from Yoda himself, and not give off a hint of what they were."
"Well," Rey said as she leapt from one large stone to another, "we aren't looking for anyone really. We are looking for where someone used to be."
"And we will see if it works," Anakin said as he floated just above the stones Rey was struggling over. After he watched her climb up several more rocky outcroppings he finally said, "Just use the Force and jump."
"Am I keeping you from something?" an annoyed Rey asked. "Do you have somewhere to be? I don't use the Force as a crutch. What I can do without it, I do."
"I understand that. It's a nice lesson for younglings. I taught it to my own Padawan, like a good master. But we are on our way to try the most dangerous and most important thing anyone has ever tried. I don't think the character you build from these last few rocks are going to make much of a difference," he answered.
Rey ignored him and kept climbing. Her real answer, of course, was that she enjoyed it. The feel of her hands on the stone, getting a sense for how to keep her balance on each new rock, the ache in her muscles as she pulled herself up, each feeling was its own little reward. Spending time with Anakin over the years had made her more appreciative of such things. She did not say it to him, but the thought of his spectral existence held no allure for her. She realized that if her plan did not work that she might have to do as he had done, and endure as a disembodied spirit to guide those who came after. If so she wanted as many memories of the feel of the living world as she could get first.
The rest of the journey to the top of the hill, or small mountain as it seemed to Rey, passed in silence. When they reached the top Rey saw the ruins up close for the first time. There were no pictures of them, even in the Great Holocron, and her view from the X-Wing had been fleeting. There were standing stones, each twice as tall as Rey, forming a circle, and much shorter stones holding up the larger stones which leaned over them. At the center of the circle was a hemisphere of stone rising from the ground, with runes etched into its base. The seeing stone. The reason she had come. Anakin manifested himself on the other side of the stone from Rey and looked pensively down at it. What thoughts were going through his head Rey could not guess. Her own mind was a swirling mixture of excitement, curiosity and terror. She was close now to the point where her plan would become real, and that held out the prospect of victory, but also disaster. But she was also fascinated by this place, in a way she had not been fascinated by Ahch-To. She hadn't been a Jedi then, hadn't known anything of their history but stories about events decades before she was born. Since then she had found it too hard to return, knowing that Luke was not there. He had become one with the Force, as all the other dead Jedi except Anakin had. But here on Tython she was as close to the beginnings of the Order as one could get without going to Ahch-To. Or, if the Holocron was right, perhaps at the true birthplace of the Order. And the seeing stone was the key.
"The Holocron said I had to touch it," Rey said to Anakin. "Do you think I need to sit on it?"
"Well, I can't, so it seems worth the try," Anakin answered.
"Ok,….ok," Rey said, trying to hype herself up. "Here it goes."
She placed her left hand on the stone as the first step of pushing herself up onto it, and at that precise moment it seemed to her that the sun died in the sky. She backed away from the stone quickly and looked up at Anakin as she did so. Once again, as in the vision of the library in the Holocron, he appeared as a living man, not as a ghost. He was looking up at the sky and when Rey followed suit she saw the stars and, to her surprise, two moons which had not been there a moment before. It was then that she pieced together that she was in another vision, just one that looked exactly like the ruins she had been standing in, except at night. When she noticed that Anakin was looking over her shoulder and past her Rey turned around to see a woman looking back at her from between two of the standing stones. She wore a plain brown robe which covered everything but her head. Her skin was a rich dark brown, and the hair that fell from her head in tight coils was white. When Rey looked into her eyes it felt as though the woman was looking right through her, as though her eyes could see the movements of Rey's mind, and all the substance of her soul.
Rey, disconcerted at the intensity of the woman's stare, took a step backwards and nearly tripped over the seeing stone behind her, but just as she began to fall she felt two hands grab her shoulders to catch her. She looked to her right to see Anakin looking back at her, a worried expression on his face.
"I'm ok," she said as she stood up. That he could touch her here was off-putting. He had only ever been a voice, and an image only she could see. But then, there in that place, she had felt the strength in his hands. She thought for a moment of her own father. Had his hands been so strong?
"Perhaps not," the woman said, "But he had a strength of his own that the Chosen One lacked, for your father faced Sidious and never gave in to him."
Anakin gave the woman a stricken look and then slowly nodded in acceptance.
"But it is a strength of a different kind, the strength to climb out of the hole one has dug for oneself," the woman said, nodding slightly in Anakin's direction. Her voice had a quality to it that made it intimidating without being frightening. It seemed to echo and resonate with the stones of the ruins so that it felt to Rey as if it was coming from all around her. She stepped forward and smiled gently to Anakin, who took a step back, his face full of shame.
"Who are you?" Rey asked.
"Who you came here to find," the woman said, as she took another step towards Rey.
"We came to use the seeing stone," Rey replied.
"Exactly," the woman said, coming to a stop in front of Rey.
"The Holocron said we could use it to…," Rey said.
"Hmmm, so you have been talking to him?" the woman replied with a rueful smile. "Well that makes sense I suppose. It has been a long time since anyone came to see me, and I think perhaps he is the only one left who remembers me."
"Why do you talk about it like it is a person?" Anakin asked.
The woman smiled and said, "He used to ask me the same question. Used to insist that he was just a machine. 'This unit' he used to call himself. It took a fair bit of convincing to get him to see himself differently."
"Are you a person?" Rey asked.
"As much as he is. As much as your friend here," the woman answered.
"Are you the first Jedi?" Rey asked, unable to keep the excitement from her voice.
The woman looked at Rey intently as she considered her question. "How could there be a first Jedi? The secrets of the Force were never just given to one person, or one group. The Jedi were a community, that was the point. They were a coming together, a unity bound by a great purpose," she said at last.
"Were you the first leader of the group here on Tython?" Anakin asked.
The woman cast her eyes downward and thought for a second before replying. "That woman died a very long time ago," she said as she turned to face Anakin. "I am what remains." Anakin clenched his jaw as his eyes widened in response to her remark.
Rey saw his reaction but, not understanding it, decided to carry on. "You are connected to the seeing stone?"
"That is not quite it. I am the piece of her she left behind. I am either in the stone, or I am the stone, depending on how one chooses to look at it," the woman said.
"Why did she do that?" Anakin asked, his voice heavy.
"To help her people find what was lost," the woman said.
"What had they lost?" Rey asked.
"Each other," the woman said. Rey thought about that answer for a moment and looked over to Anakin, who seemed engrossed in his own thoughts.
"We…we need your help," Rey said.
"Of course you do," the woman said. "Why else would you come here?"
The woman's comment having drawn her curiosity, Rey asked, "Do people not come here often?"
"No one has come here for any reason for more than 2000 years, and they were not Jedi" the woman said. "The last time a Jedi asked me to help them find someone was hundreds of years before that."
"Why do you think that is?" Rey asked. "A device that can find powerful Force users. It's not the kind of thing one should lose."
"Because I have limits that mean I am not of help for many kinds of searches," the woman said.
"What are these limitations?" Anakin asked.
"I cannot be used to find just anyone, or just anything. It takes a depth of feeling, of attachment, that the seeker typically does not have towards their quarry," the woman explained.
"Why is that?" Rey asked.
"There is nothing particularly special about the stone. The material at its core has certain special properties, but what it can do it can do because of how it was used," she answered. "It works because of what was left behind, and it works only to do what it was used to do originally."
"Which was?" Rey asked.
"Watch over her children," the woman answered.
"That doesn't sound very Jedi of her," Anakin said grimly.
The woman cast a sad look in Anakin's direction. "The rules they placed on you, we didn't have those, not at the beginning. Some of the others, on the other worlds, had traditions like that and we let them keep them when we found them. But they were never our way here on Tython. We would have never told you to let go of her," she said.
Anakin opened his mouth to speak but found he couldn't. Her words, the facts about what the Order had once been, stirred up his regrets, his recriminations and his shame, and he was temporarily overwhelmed. He turned his face away from the two women, to hide the signs of his sadness.
Rey, as much out of pity as anything, drew the conversation back to the purpose that had brought them to Tython. "So if we lack a personal connection to what we seek, it won't work?"
"It is easiest if you have that kind of connection to what you seek. Love finds the way more surely than anything else. But it's really about the strength, the depth of the emotion that drives your search. With that you can cast your sight far and wide," she explained.
"But strong emotions are the path to the dark side," Rey said.
"Yes, and they can be the path back to the light, can't they Chosen One?" she said. Anakin nodded slightly, his back still turned to them.
"Over time the Jedi Order grew powerful, became afraid of the risk that a life of emotion, of passion represented. A Jedi given over to selfish, covetous passion can be a terrible thing. To protect the galaxy they chose the path of self-control, and in doing so gave up selfishness, but also love. And when the Chosen One came, he found an Order that could not provide him what he needed," she continued.
"You have been watching over them?" Rey asked.
"Yes, I have been watching my Jedi all these long years," she answered.
"What emotion drives you?" Rey asked.
"A very good question Rey," the woman said, a proud smile crossing her face, a smile that had been seen by the very first Padawans, whose names were now long forgotten, whenever they pleased her. "The same as always did. I did not give you life, as I did my sweet girls so long ago, but you are, all of you, my children."
When he heard this Anakin looked up, revealing eyes that had tears in them for the first time in decades. The woman, seeing this, placed her hand on his cheek and wiped away the tear forming in his right eye with her thumb. "I was always watching. I saw it all. The good and the bad, the triumphs and the tragedies. And I saw what brought you here."
The woman reached out with her other hand and clasped one of Rey's as she turned towards her. Rey felt her heart in her throat and croaked, "I failed."
"No," the woman insisted.
"I did," Rey cried. "I didn't fix things. I was supposed to fix things!"
"You didn't brake those things Rey," Anakin said. "I did."
"You did not," the woman said, pulling the two of them closer to each other so she could see both at the same time. "The Jedi and the Republic had been failing slowly, for a long time. But what did you do Anakin? You destroyed the Sith and brought balance to the Force, just as I predicted you would."
"As you predicted?" Rey said in shock.
"The prophecy, it was yours?" Anakin asked.
"It was. If I had known what the prophecy, the pressure it created, would do the one it was about, I would have never let it be recorded. But yes, long ago I saw what would be necessary, what the Force would have to do in order to balance itself, what you would have to do to bring balance," she said.
"I didn't," Anakin said. "I couldn't even kill Palpatine."
"You broke his power, forced him to use methods of survival he otherwise would not have had to use. Forced him to rely on Rey. Rey who your children trained and mentored, Rey who your grandson saved, so that she could do what needed to be done. And it was done. There had been a shadow over the galaxy for so long it was already old before I was born, and it is gone now. You did it. You succeeded. You can rest," she said.
"But the galaxy is in pieces," Rey said sadly.
"And the people of the galaxy will put it back together again, without the menace of the Sith lurking in the shadows," the woman replied.
"But there are no more Jedi. My apprentices, one is dead and the others went their own way. If the Jedi are your children, then I am the last one," Rey said.
"Then maybe it is time for me to rest too. Maybe, with the Sith gone, the galaxy no longer needs the Jedi," the woman answered.
"No," Anakin said firmly. "The Sith are gone, but the darkness remains. It's in everyone, inside all of them. It won't be the Sith when it comes again, but it will be the same darkness, and no one will be there to stop it."
"In every heart there is the darkness," the woman acknowledged. "But the light is there too. And sometimes the light will win, and sometimes the darkness will. But across the galaxy, balance will remain, and life will go on."
"I can't live with it," Rey said. "Neither of us can. We have to fix things."
"No, that is not what you want. You don't want to fix things, to face the long years of slowly putting everything back together. To start a task which you know will be unfinished, its outcome uncertain, when you die. You mean you want to undo what has already happened," the woman said.
"I want to know if it's possible," Rey said. "And I know who to ask."
"They are gone," the woman said sharply. "That is part of how he brought balance, by removing them. They were a source of instability."
"The gods of Mortis are gone now," Rey said, "but they are still alive in the past. And according to Anakin, time on Mortis doesn't work the way time does in the rest of the galaxy."
"And?" the woman asked, without a hint of confusion in her voice. Her steady gaze convinced Rey that this woman, the first Jedi whether she claimed that title or not, understood exactly what Rey wanted to ask, but would not relieve her of the duty to actually say it out loud.
"I want to find them at a time when they were still alive, and I want to travel to Mortis at that time," Rey said. "Can you do that? Is it even possible?"
"Mortis has its own time, that is true, though even there time moves only in one direction. But I cannot make Mortis open itself to you," the woman explained.
"But there are locations where it appears and where it doesn't," Anakin said. "When they reached out to us during the Clone Wars, they sent us to a particular location."
"Yes, but that spot is determined in part by the time on Mortis. I do not pretend to understand it all, but if you truly want to do this, to risk this, you must reach out to them," the woman answered.
"And we have to get their attention at the time we want to travel to?" Rey asked.
"I don't know if attention is the right word. Mortis is a strange world. It is not some dead rock in space. But yes, the connection must be far enough back in time, or at the place where Mortis was long enough ago to do whatever it is you plan to do," the woman said. "But please reconsider this. There is still much good you can do here, in the world as it is. And there is much to value in what you have already done."
"It's not enough," Anakin said.
"Will it ever be?" the woman responded. "Is there anything you could change that would take away the pain you carry with you?"
"What do you know of my pain?" Anakin asked bitterly.
The woman turned fully towards Anakin and put her hands around the back of his neck. Rather than struggle against this embrace, as Rey expected him to, he simply bowed his head. The woman placed her forehead against his mop of brown hair and said, "I saw when you came into this world, on the very planet of my birth. I watched you and your mother as you made your way through Tatooine, I watched as they took you away from her, because of the prophecy I made. I watched you grow, fall in love, and then fall to fear. I saw all your sins committed in despair, and I saw your final victory. I know what it is like to lose one's home, to lose one's children. Nothing can make up for it, and you should stop trying to do so."
Anakin gently moved his hands to her wrists and removed her hands from the back of his head. He straightened up as he let her go and her arms fell to her sides. Looking her in the eyes he said, "I know you are right. I know the pain will never go away. I know the shame will stay with me forever. We are not doing this to get rid of our pain. It is not for us; it is for all the others. Everyone who suffered because of what I did."
The woman turned to Rey and asked, "Is that why you are doing this? To save those he failed? You did what you were supposed to do Rey. There is nothing for you to feel ashamed of."
"I should have done more," Rey said.
"What more could you have done?" the woman asked.
"Saved those who saved me," Rey answered.
"Is this about Ben?" the woman asked.
Rey winced at the sound of his name. "You see everything, don't you?"
"No. When there were thousands upon thousands of Jedi in the galaxy I saw such a small sliver of what they did. But since before you were born there were so few left. Luke and Leia. For all too short a time, Luke's Academy. By the time you came to my attention, there were really only four of you left, not counting your grandfather, who always hid from me, without even knowing I was here," she said.
"How long have you been doing this?" Rey asked, horrified by thought of what existence was for the being before her.
"A long time, but it is not as bad as you are thinking. A lot of the time I am…sleeping, I suppose. I dream, and my dreams are shaped by the flow and balance of the Force. When it tips too far one way or the other, I take a more active interest. But I couldn't watch all the time, or my mind would have gone to pieces a long time ago," the woman said. "But you aren't answering my question. Are you doing this for Ben?"
"Yes," Rey said. "And Poe, and Finn. And Luke and Leia, and Han, and everyone who deserved to live a full life untouched by war. You say all Jedi are your children, but I am not a child. I have thought this through. I know what I am doing and why. I just need your help, and I am begging you to give it."
The woman nodded her head slowly and then walked over to the stone. She stepped up onto it with one graceful step, despite it being as tall as her waist, and then settled into a cross legged position. She looked up at Rey and said, "I will do as you ask, and hope that the beings on Mortis can convince you of what I could not."
"You will show us the way?" Rey said.
"I can find a path to a point in space where Mortis can be accessed if the door opens. The beings within can open the door. Perhaps the Force itself can. Sometimes Mortis is one place, sometimes another. Where it has appeared in the past there are weak points in space and time. And it has been theorized, by Jedi Masters who lived long after I did, but long before you, that from such points many strange places can be reached," she explained.
"We will find them in a time before they die, correct?" Anakin said.
"Yes," the woman answered.
"But that would be before they met me," he said, a look of confusion on his face.
"It would take a mind beyond both of ours to understand before and after in that place, but I agree that there are risks involved in you going there, when the other time you went, you destroyed them," the woman said.
"Will they even be able to see me there?" Anakin said. "Despite what you have made it look like, I am dead."
"There, as here, the difference between the living and the dead fades away. Their world is, in a way, a construction out of the Cosmic Force, a bubble of temporality and physicality within it, just as our universe is. But it has its own rules. You will have power there and you will face danger," she explained. "I cannot tell you more, for I know only what Jedi sages have said over the years. I have never been where you seek to go. Before the woman I was died, she had only ever heard a whisper of Mortis and the beings living there. You are entering the realm of legends, and nothing is certain."
The woman closed her eyes and in the sky above them the stars began to change. It was as though the whole planet of Tython was hurtling through the galaxy, the stars speeding past them until suddenly the planet would change course, and then again. They wound their way through the sectors of the galaxy until finally it seemed as though they came to rest. When the stars in the sky stopped moving it was as though the world of Tython disappeared and was replaced with another. They found themselves in an immense grassland. Rey and Anakin looked around while the woman remained seated. Only the seeing stone itself seemed to have made the trip with them from Tython to this new world, though the grass was so high it was barely visible. To Rey the air felt thin and dry, not unlike Tatooine, but also chillier than Tatooine would get even on the coldest night. In the distance she could see sharp rocky outcroppings forming small canyons, but also large conical rock formations sticking out of the ground like large stubby fingers.
"What is this place?" Rey asked.
"He knows," the woman said.
Anakin looked around with a puzzled expression on his face before asking, "Is this Lothal?"
The woman nodded and Rey asked, "What's Lothal?"
"I came here to track down a Rebel cell once," Anakin said. "They had two Jedi with them. Ahsoka was with them. I think she had been training the other two, maybe just the younger one. They were there with her on Malachor when I….anyway, they got away, but after that Grand Admiral Thrawn built a factory here. Eventually he was able to find the rebels in question on a nearby world. I forget its name."
"Atollon," the woman said.
"That's right," Anakin said, remembering. "Phoenix squadron the rebels called themselves. They were preparing an invasion to take Lothal back, had gathered several other cells to join them, then Thrawn hit them. They made the Empire pay a steep cost."
"Who is Thrawn?" Rey asked.
"A Chiss admiral. Brilliant. If he had been human Palpatine would have probably made him a Grand Moff by then. Then he wouldn't have led the assault himself and wouldn't have been killed by the two Jedi there. I can't remember their names. Anyway, they both died doing it, but most of their fleet got away after they killed Thrawn." Rey was surprised at how talkative Anakin had become. Then, after a moment, she realized it was because he was excited. For the first time he really believed her plan might work.
"Go to the Lothal system and reach out with the Force, and perhaps you will be granted entry to Mortis," the woman said before standing up. When she did so the world of Lothal disappeared, and they were back on Tython.
"Thank you!" Rey said with more hope in her soul than she had felt in many years.
Anakin simply bowed to the woman and said, "Master."
"I ask in return only that you think carefully of what you do, and consider that perhaps the only victory possible will fall short of your dreams. We live in a galaxy of untold numbers of beings, each with their own power, their own choices, their own destinies. Not all that you wish for can be," the woman said. She began to walk towards the edge of the ruins, and Rey felt sure that when she passed beyond that boundary they would be removed from this spectral version of Tython and they would never see her again.
"Wait!" she cried out.
The woman turned back to her slowly and raised an eyebrow.
"We don't even know your name," Rey said.
The woman stared at Rey long and hard before answering, "I have no name child. I am the stone. My name died with the woman I was, a thousand generations ago. Sometimes you have to let your self go if you are to carry on." Then she turned around and walked out of the stone circle.
Once this happened Rey and Anakin were back in the daylight of Tython, and Anakin was back to being a ghost. Rey looked at Anakin and smiled, then set off running down the rocky hillside. Using the Force she jumped from stone to stone with impossible speed, power and grace, and laughed as she did it. The woman's final words had not been enough to dampen Rey's new hope. Anakin stood at the top of the hill and watched her, his smile a mixture of joy and sadness.
