A/N: And now, the secondlast chapter!

Read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Furgh.

Also, there's a shoutout to Galaxy Of Fear, so keep your eyes peeled.


Tarrah remembered the day when she said goodbye.

She remembered gathering everyone together in the warm metal box to say goodbye and apologise for leaving them. It never made sense to her: she never left them, so why did she say goodbye? Why did the pretty girl with the brown hair cry? Why did the sweet blue girl hug her and beg her not to go? Why was the wonderful one with the cat eyes and the tied-back hair holding her hand as if she was afraid that they'd be torn apart at any minute? Why could she remember that her name was Juhani when the names of all the others were so hard to keep in mind?

Tarrah remembered the pain of when she'd put the sharp thing in her arm, remembered hearing things inside her crack and break, feeling all the strange arms and legs springing out of her body, seeing her body tear through her clothes as she changed forever. She remembered the hammering in her skull that sent thoughts and memories and knowledge pouring out of her mind, emptying her out bit by bit. She remembered Juhani holding Tarrah in her arms and telling her everything was alright, even as she cried until her pretty cat eyes were red.

And she remembered waking up to find that everything was different.


Once Tarrah had been healthy enough to move again, Juhani had been right there with her, teaching her how to walk and talk and do everything needed to be among the other people in the metal box, even though changing shape was easier than walking the human way. She particularly remembered being taught how to walk, toddling clumsily across the metal floor with Juhani urging her on every step of the way, gently encouraging her until she was close enough to scoop Tarrah into her arms.

Once Tarrah had gotten the hang of walking and speaking, Juhani had tested her to see if she could understand the important things, but no matter how hard she tried, Tarrah's mind failed her: she could just about work out that two plus two equals four, but after that, things became too tricky and she begged through a dozen different mouths to do something else before she got really bored. She could only just spell her name with a stick of charcoal – TARRAH in big block letters – but she couldn't quite memorize the last name. At times, she was shown pictures of a strange woman with blonde hair and asked if she could make herself look like it again, but Tarrah got bored with it once she'd gotten the face right: it was so much better to be shapeless.

Ashana understood that. Ashana was like her, could help her understand her new body and how to make Juhani happy… and Juhani needed to be happy, because seeing her sad made Tarrah feel sick and miserable. Whenever a lesson failed, Juhani would start to cry, and Tarrah would feel awful and do everything she could to make her laugh so she wouldn't cry anymore. She would dance and bob and weave and shift into the silliest forms she knew until even Juhani couldn't help but laugh through her tears.

People in white said that Tarrah might be better in time, that some of the "brain damage" might have a chance to heal if "the body's natural capacity for regeneration and longevity are as powerful as the genetic donor's, but it'll still take decades before we can hope to see even the smallest improvements." Tarrah hadn't known what that meant, but Juhani had explained it to her and said it meant that everything was going to be okay, so Tarrah was happy enough.

And in the background, people talked about leaving for reasons that Tarrah couldn't understand. The metal men were sent away "to serve the Republic." The pilot left to raise his son. The big man returned to his people in the hope of bringing them together. The pretty lady went back to serve the Jedi. And after a few days, only Big Z, the blue girl, the old man, Juhani, and Ashana were left.

Days went by, and soon, the metal box opened onto a much bigger world of tall trees and long wooden walkways. Tarrah couldn't remember what this place was called, and her mouth couldn't make the right sounds to say it herself, but it didn't really matter: Juhani said it would be their new home, so Tarrah was happy with it.

And then it was just Juhani, Ashana, and Tarrah, all living together in a little wooden house in a village of Wookiees.


Every day, the three of them would go out into the forest and hunt for food, chasing it down and bringing it back to the village; every day, they would dance across the tree trunks and fly above the shadows, Ashana and Tarrah in every form that was best for fun and travel, taking turns to carry Juhani upon their backs, and all three of them would laugh in joy.

Big Z and the blue girl would pay the village a visit every now and again, but they stayed at the abandoned platform and helped make the machines work, hoping for the day when the outside world could be good to Wookiees for a change. The old man kept to himself down in the dark of the Shadowlands, only paying a visit on festivals and celebrations.

So, it was just the three of them.

For a while, everything was okay. But then, days or weeks or months later – Tarrah had trouble telling the time – the Wookies grew angry. There was something about Tarrah and Ashana that scared them, something about a Faceless One that they were too much like, and though Big Z tried to tell the Wookies that they were friends, things got too angry and mean for the three of them to stay.

With some help from Big Z's papa, they found a new place, a burrow in one of the big trees where the three could be safe and happy together…

…but then the raiders from the sky came back, not to take over the forest like they did last time, but just to steal people. Slavers and Lizard Men attacked the forest from above, and though the three of them tried to help where they could, the fire was too much: Ashana was hurt and couldn't change again for days, and Juhani didn't want to see Tarrah hurt, so they had to hide instead.

But as bad as they were, the Slavers and Lizard Men were just people. They could be driven off, and so they were, and both learned that there were easier ways of stealing people and pelts. And once they were forced to leave, there were worse.

Tarrah never forgot the sight of the masked men who'd one day appeared across the trees, simply flickering out of nothingness to attack the villages and hunting parties, killing everyone in their path until every walkway was littered with bodies.

And she certainly couldn't forget the man who'd led them, a man with dead eyes and pale grey skin like cracked stone, a man who couldn't die.

It was a hard fight, but the Old Man, Juhani, Ashana, and Tarrah drove him away as well, forcing him onto a ship and sending it off on autopilot.

After that, Juhani said that it was too dangerous to stay in the light.

So, the Old Man said to them, "I'll be the bait that our new Sith Lord's hunting for; I'll lure him away from Kashyyyk and make it look like Juhani escaped the planet along with me. So long as the three of you hide where the life is most densely concentrated and the Force is at it's strongest, this Darth Sion and his master won't find you."

And so, the Old Man left, and Tarrah never saw him again.

Sometimes it made her cry, but Ashana was good at cheering her up by wearing the Old Man's face, and Juhani had the best hugs to make the tears go away.


After that, though, the only safe place on the planet was in the Shadowlands, near the place where the Old Man had once lived – where Jolee had once lived.

There, Tarrah and Ashana learned to be as big and mean as any monster of the darkness so they could keep the beasts away and bring back food. They learned to protect the Wookiees when they visited and found themselves fighting monsters they couldn't win against. They learned to be clever through "decades" of teaching and lessons and all the love Juhani could give them.

And slowly and clumsily, Tarrah grew wise again, her brain putting itself back together. She knew from the pain she'd felt in her head all those (years?) ago that she would never be exactly as clever as any normal being, but she could know more than she had on the day she'd been reborn. She even begun to learn new names and memorize them.

But for all the wisdom she could share, Juhani could not be safe forever. Juhani was strong. Juhani was clever, cleverer than Tarrah and Ashana… but she still had only one shape of her own, and she couldn't heal as easily as Tarrah and Ashana – who had to keep her safe when one of the monsters of the deep got lucky and wounded her.

And though Tarrah couldn't understand time as easily as her friends did, she could see it was passing for Juhani. They'd been down here for a long time, and Juhani's hair was turning grey, and she wasn't as quick as she used to be, and even her hugs were beginning to feel weak and shaky. Soon, her hair had turned white, the sicknesses she'd used to shrug off had overwhelmed her a little bit at a time, and she'd begun to talk about things that Tarrah hadn't understood – hadn't wanted to understand.

Then one morning, Tarrah woke up to find that Juhani was no longer moving.

And no matter how Tarrah cried and begged and screamed, she would not wake up. Still, Juhani had prepared her for the end, had taught her all that she would need to know: while Ashana struggled to understand why Juhani no longer spoke, Tarrah was shaping her hands into shovels and digging a grave.

Eventually, the same went for the blue girl.

Mission had been a mother for a while now, having found a husband in the visitors she'd brought to the planet to help protect it from the Sith, and her children had long since grown up – either going out into the stars to find something new or staying behind to look after their sick mother. She'd made the old docks into a comfortable little house where machinery and peace could still be found together, even though nobody in the outside world took this world seriously enough to make it important. Still, it was nice to visit her metal house and say goodbye while there was still a chance, before Mission told Zaalbar to turn off the machines that were keeping her heart beating and "let me sleep."

Once her funeral was over, the only friend Tarrah had left from the old days was Zaalbar.

Wookiees lived longer than most peoples – "four hundred years on average," Big Z had boasted – but to Tarrah, years were almost impossible to measure, passing like weeks to her confused brain. There were many battles in those years, even a war with more Bad Men from the stars, but they seemed to fall like raindrops, and every time Tarrah visited Zaalbar in her Wookiee disguise, his fur was a little greyer, his movements a little slower, his wounds a little worse, his battle scars healing slower and slower. But Tarrah said nothing of this, for Big Z was now a "revered Elder of many battles and many triumphs," and she didn't want to make him unhappy.

The last time they spoke, Zaalbar laughed and told her of a "benevolent shapeshifting spirit" that the tribe now worshipped, and once he'd stopped laughing, said that he couldn't have wished for a better person to pledge a life debt to. Because her memories of the time before the pain in her head were still in pieces, Tarrah wasn't sure what to make of this life debt, but she laughed and hugged him all the same.

Hugs made everything better.

But even so, he died in his sleep later that evening.

His funeral was the grandest that the forest had ever seen, with Wookiees from miles away journeying to pay their respects, praising his leadership, his courage, his honour, his wisdom. All Tarrah could do was look on and know that she'd lost another friend.

After that, it was just her and Ashana, her sweet and slightly silly little sister.


They were together for the longest time, hunting and playing across the Shadowlands, practicing new shapes, and occasionally climbing to the treetops to see how things had changed.

Tarrah could see how the docks were becoming more advanced and new metal boxes – or ships, as she'd learned to call them after many lessons – were landing there all the time; Wookiees left on these shops and returned with boxes full of things, and some Wookiees were even called "Senator" by the offworlder pilots and honoured with bows and salutes.

It took a lot of questions to work out how much time had passed, for though Tarrah could understand the concept of a year, she didn't know long a thousand of them were. Apparently, there had been about three of these thousands since Tarrah had first made this world her home, three thousand and nine hundred and something.

All she knew was that she'd spent a long time between visits. But perhaps that wasn't such a surprise: she didn't know anyone worth knowing outside the Shadowlands, for by now, all her friends were dead and gone save for Ashana. Without those friends, there'd been no point in following the passage of time. There was only the endless cycle of eating and sleeping, changing and hunting, playing and mourning.

The rare few Wookies and offworlders that she'd been brave enough to ask about this had looked upon her with confusion, asking how she could possibly be almost four thousand years old, and though she'd shown them her powers and told them of things that the rest of the galaxy seemed to have forgotten, they'd still been a little sceptical.

"It's weird," one of the young Wookiees had said. "My grandfather used to tell me stories about you: he said there was a shapeshifting demigod in the Shadowlands who protected us from the Starborn Dead and the Hungry Darkness, a defender of innocence sent by the spirits to save us all. I mean, it couldn't have been anyone else but you, especially after I've seen you in action… but every time I talk to you, it's like talking to a youngling. You can't write, you can't use machines to save your life, you can barely tell the time, and you even sound like you should be in a creche somewhere. You're ancient, but you still act like a kid!"

And no sooner had Tarrah gotten used to being 'ancient,' it had all started to go wrong.


New ships began to arrive from the sky, and none of them were peaceful: the metal men aboard brought fire and death to Kashyyyk, attacking villages, enslaving the people, burning down entire trees, even fighting the Wookiees as deep as the Shadowlands and as far as the beaches of the planet's lone ocean.

Tarrah and Ashana did their best to keep the Wookiees safe, even fighting the metal men on every front they opened, but there were simply too many of them.

One day, Ashana fell in battle, burned alive by a dozen metal men with flamethrowers, and though Tarrah crushed and tore her way through every invader she met for the next six days, it couldn't bring her back no matter how desperately she screamed and howled in rage.

Eventually, the Jedi arrived to save the Wookiees, bringing them troops in white armour. Together, they drove back the metal men and destroyed them once and for all.

And then the troops in white armour turned on the Jedi and the Wookiees.

Amidst the fire and blood and horror of it all, Tarrah looked upon the world where she'd lived for almost four thousand years, and realized she didn't understand any of it anymore.

She was alone now, lost in a burning forest that was no longer home to her, and surrounded by enemies.

She didn't know what she was going to do now without Ashana.

All she knew was that she couldn't stay here a second longer.


She'd fled the planet that day, hidden away aboard one of the ships returning to the stars, and didn't leave until it landed on the glittering city world where it had come from.

She was dimly aware that this place was called Coruscant, and this stirred a memory of something from the time before the pain in her head had washed away her old thoughts, but she didn't much care. All that mattered was finding a place to hide, to heal her wounds, and forget that she had lost everything that had ever mattered.

Once she had gotten the hang of making her way through the docks, she hid herself away in a vent and waited until she found a ship leaving in a direction that she thought sounded good – though by then, she had no idea what would sound good. All she knew was that anywhere in the galaxy was better than here.

Eventually, voices from below began to thunder and grumble.

"…another kriffing research mission to Lao-Mon? Why the hell would anyone eyes on that place? Nobody found anything there the last time, or the last time before that – all the way back to its discovery in fact!"

"Orders from Emperor Palpatine: it's his belief that the last failure to uncover anything of value was due to weakness and laxity on behalf of the Republic, and he's hoping that a properly motivated research team will be able to fully document the planet's secrets. Apparently, those two freak scientists he's had on hand for most of the war have piqued his interest."

"What, Hoole and Gog? What the hell do they have to do with Lao-Mon?"

"Don't ask me. All I know for sure is that Palpatine's given the order and that's the best we're going to get."

"Well, if Palpatine wants the damn thing studied, maybe he can take a research team into Unknown Space and spend the next three months sweating his life away in some monster-infested jungle!"

"Gods, Krevnel, do you actually want to get shot? Stow it!"

"I still think it's a waste of time."

"Well, it's the only chance for work we're going to be getting this month: if you actually want to be able to pay the bills on that rathole of an apartment for the next two years, I suggest you get yourself down to docking bay 23 within the next thirty-five minutes. They'll take you, Krevnel: they need everyone they can get, bureaucracy be damned."

"But I've already been evicted!"

"Just go there, you idiot! At least you'll have food and shelter aboard the Leshy while you're part of the mission; you can work out where to go next on the way back, change ships at Mustafar or Jakku or some such place, and head to wherever you can find work next."

"Oh, fantastic. Mustafar."

"Or Tatooine. That's on the route back as well, and it's seeing a lot more traffic lately; you can find transportation to just about anywhere from there."

"Is that really the best you could think of, Magnal?"

"Like I said, it's all I've got. Unless you want to find out how the Empire accommodates vagrants, I suggest you get yourself to Docking Bay 23. Remember: the Leshy, Docking Bay 23, thirty-four minutes and counting…"

And before the argument was done, Tarrah was already in motion.

It wasn't too hard to find the Leshy or the Docking Bay, given how many desperate surveyors were talking about it. Once she'd found that strange green metal teardrop waiting for her, Tarrah hid herself aboard, disguising herself as a crate and silently rejoicing as the ship slid gracefully out of the dock and into the void once more, and all but sang in joy as they made the jump to hyperspace.

She didn't know why, but some ancient, intrinsic knowledge told her that Lao-Mon would be the place where she could finally find peace, among people who could care for her and understand her as none of the others had over the centuries.

But for reasons that made sense only to her, she didn't think of it as Lao-Mon.

To Tarrah, the planet would always be Sh'shuun.


A/N: THE END.

Psych! Yeah, I'm going for two endings - sorry, couldn't resist... all those months ago when I wrote the damn thing :)

Anyway, the real ending will be arriving next week. Care to guess what happens next?