FicWad

*Title: Love Ignites the Galaxy, Star by Star (*working title only, though it may become the permanent title by default).

Chapter Two: Complications and Improvision

Rating: Uhm, probably a borderline R (?), for the overall work, though I suppose that's debatable . . . PG-13ish, maybe, for this part (?)

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the lovely characters from the Star Wars ’verse, more’s the pity! What I do have is an extremely contrary muse that refuses to shut up and leave me alone . . .

Summary: The future is never a fixed thing. Though certain actions taken at particular possible points of divergence can, seemingly, preclude the possibility of specific future pathways ever coming into existence, other unexpected choices can have extremely powerful repercussions with far-reaching effects upon the possible probable pathways that the future might yet take . . . and sometimes the spreading ripples of those effects can be so powerful that even the present and a part of the past can be altered, if enough raw energy is poured into the process of causing those effects. For Tahiri Veila, the possibility of swaying the current balance of power in the galaxy from darkness and despair back to light and hope seems worth any sacrifice necessary . . . even if she will have to give up her own life and the life of her unborn son to accomplish this. Will her sacrifice be enough to change the shape of the future, though, or will evil yet find a way to triumph, in this the worst and most wide-spread of all galactic wars?

Story/Author's Notes: For general notes on this story and proposed series, please see the entry on this NaNo project, at http://polgarawolf. livejournal.com/140023.html

Specific Chapter/Part-Related Notes: There will be references to events in the Dark Nest trio and a slightly modified Legacy of the Force series in this part!

Specific Chapter/Part-Related Warnings: As one might imagine, it's not a very pleasant thing, to have information stretching across upwards of thirteen years (many of them filled with strife and suffering) dumped into one's brain, even for a Jedi - especially for a Jedi who's made some serious mistakes during those years. Tahiri isn't necessarily deliberately hurting the actual strike team members, but (all things considered) she's not precisely being overly gentle with some of them, either.



Star Wars
The Rebirth of the New Jedi Order
Love Ignites the Galaxy, Star by Star


Chapter Two: Complications and Improvision

27:05:25-27:05:33 After the Battle of Yavin (~1,028 After Ruusan Reformations or ~25,029 After Republic’s Founding)

Do you know why the bantha crossed the Dune Sea? To get to the other side!

– Jacen Solo, Jedi apprentice, age fourteen, from one of many attempts to make fellow Jedi trainee Tenel Ka Djo laugh or at least smile a little



It has not been easy for her, to get to this point.

Flow-walking is not meant for changing the past, but rather for viewing it, learning from it, growing from the knowledge that understanding the past can bring. She has had to take the mental discipline associated with flow-walking and weld it to an entirely new power – something that is akin to the act of self movement via telekinesis in the same way that a toy skimmer is akin to an/ Imperial II/-class Star Destroyer – a sort of Force-powered teleportation that she suspects may have been the original impetus for the legendary Foce-powered hyperdrive systems of the semi-mythical Rakata, the makers of the Star Forge and the first sentient beings in the galaxy known to have hyperdrive-capable technology. Regardless, she’s literally nearly killed herself, getting here, and, to make matters worse, has been forced to suffer through hours of agony, able to do nothing more than remember Anakin – a blazing maelstrom in the Force, channeling so much power that his bones burned dark against the brightness flooding his body, the energy making his cells rupture in chain reactions, the cycles coming faster and faster as less of him remained to contain the energy – and grit her teeth painfully on a scream and pull what little of the Force she could in around her shaking body, calling on every bit of Vongsense possible to keep herself hidden from them (even bending the light itself so that she might hide in plain sight) and making herself so very small in the Force that surely not even a former Jedi Master and Sith Master like Vergere could ever be able to sense her presence.

She’s known since the beginning, when she first conceived of this desperate final hope for setting things right, that this would be her last act, her dying act, and has planned accordingly. The fact that her body – frail, fallible flesh, filled to overflowing with pain, shrieking with pain, her blood running so white-hot with pain that it seems in danger of burning her away from within – seems liable to fail her, now, before she can even do anything, now that she is where she so desperately needs and wants to be, frankly infuriates her. It is through sheer force of will alone that she shunts aside sufficient awareness of her body’s screaming agony to channel enough of the Force again to make herself slip into a dangerously accelerated healing trance – a trance that will either allow her to pull enough of the Force’s healing power into herself to repair the terrible internal damage that the Force itself (not to mention the act of continuing to channel more and more of its energies, even after pushing herself far enough past the margins of safety on her own ability to call on and use the Force, to physically get herself back here) is wrecking on her body, or which will push her over the edge into the same kind of uncontrollable conflagration in the Force that claimed (and will once again claim, if she fails to stop it in time) Anakin Solo’s life.

It is the presence of music – a reedy, haunting melody that comes to her inside her mind, rather than through her ears – that pulls her back, out of the suspension of being that is the trance and into awareness of herself and her merciful quiescent (no longer shrieking pain) body. There is a mournful hint to the music, though the strain is more tranquil than sad, and it is, perhaps, the most beautiful thing she has ever heard . . . and it is, also, painfully familiar. As the song drifts into a flighty passage and beings to gather energy, the instinct to turn and stare skyward, head cocked to the side as though listening, is almost overwhelming. The music repeats its opening refrain, but more powerfully and without any hint of sadness, then rises to a robust crescendo . . .

In the sudden silence, she has to bite her tongue until her mouth floods with the coppery-bright tang of blood to keep herself from shrieking. She knows what’s happened. Ulaha Kore, weary and in pain but without fear – at peace, even – alone in the /Exquisite Death/, with five corvette analogs and a host of skips on her tail, and no question of surrendering. Even if she might’ve been able to survive a boarding party’s initial assault, she could never had endured another breaking. Waiting until as many of the Yuuzhan Vong ships closed with the /Death /and were close enough to perhaps be caught in the wavefront of the explosion, from a deliberately timed self-destruct sequence, was, in truth, the smartest, most noble thing she could have done.

It doesn’t keep Tahiri Veila from wanting to call on the power she gained, studying under Jacen’s (no, Darth Caedus’s!) eager tutelage, to crack this damned worldship in half like an egg.

But her beloved is on this worldship, now, with the other members of the strike team, and she might as well slit her own throat now, if she’s going to seriously contemplate an action that would surely result in his death, as an act of collateral damage. No. There are other ways to fight back – better ways, than simply lashing out blindly, in pain and fury, in the full embrace of that wildly surging, maddening power that she has always thought of as the Dark Side, though she’s beginning to suspect that it is less the energy itself that is evil than it is her own agony and anger and madly skewed perception that makes it so intoxicatingly easy to call and call and call on the power of the Force to lash out and to hurt others, to make them hurt as much as (if not more than) she herself is hurting – and she has a plan that she needs to stick to, as much as possible, if she’s going to see this thing properly through.

She came to the Baanu Rass – the Yuuzhan Vong worldship in orbit over Myrkr and the site of the cloning facility for the voxyn – a little more than three full days prior to when the strike team would reach the Myrkr system. She had been hoping to do this the easy way – by finding and killing those Sithspawn traitors, Lomi Plo and Welk, and, thus, removing the need for the team to ever land on the worldship in the first place, allowing them to simply bombard the facility from space and blow the cloning facility to pieces and get the kriff out of there before the Yuuzhan Vong could do anything about it – but she can’t find it in herself to be too surprised that this part of the plan has fallen through. She’d thought that three days would be enough time for her to recover from the trauma of channeling the amount of power it would take her to get here and still find and remove the Dark Jedi and the Nightsister. Obviously, she overestimated herself. Luckily, though, if the years have taught her anything, it is that it is foolish to ever rely on only a single plan of action.

Fair enough. She has detonite, bombs, grenades, remote detonators, charges, and enough other assorted ordinance to destroy this worldship half a dozen times over, if correctly placed. If she could carry it or in some way anchor or attach it to her body, she could bring it through with her, and she brought an arsenal of explosive ordinance with her, just in case her original plan fell through and she ended up needing it.

So now she just has to get off of her backside and figure out the best way to distribute enough of it to blow the voxyn and the Yuuzhan Vong and this worldship back into hell, where they belong, quickly enough to let her track down the strike team before they can manage to get anyone else killed . . . which means she has thirty hours, tops, and then she has to be in a position stop the strike team before they get into that damned AT-AT, or else things are going to get ugly.

Grimacing, she climbs to her feet, pulling the Force in more tightly about herself, to mask her presence even more thoroughly within its bright flows, and pushing away the awareness of the bone-deep ache of her body – a full-body soreness that does not quite pass the threshold into pain, though it hovers at the edge of it, threatening to explode into agony at the slightest threat of provocation, the area around her stomach especially twinging with warning, forcing her to shove down her awareness of just how badly she’s been hurt and just how deep the damage might’ve gone, how close it might’ve come to causing irreparable damage, irreplaceable loss – and grimly begins to gather up everything she’ll need, using the Force to hold and carry the vast majority of it, to overcome the physical limitations of her own small body.

Tahiri has a job to do, and a limited amount of time in which to do it. Best to get cracking while she still can.

***

With ways to avoid being seen or otherwise noticed by both the Yuuzhan Vong and their voxyn (making herself small in the Force makes her all but invisible, to them, and combining that ability with the Force-powered cloaking trick that essentially allows her to bend light around her until she blend seamlessly into the background, the Force erasing all other physical traces of her bodily presence, makes her no more likely to be noticed by a voxyn than, say, an actual stretch of wall in the worldship), it is laughably easy to make use of the knowledge she has of physical layout of the Baanu Rass (thanks to Jacen, who brought her to this damnable place so many times, over and over and over again) and sabotage the worldship with dozens upon dozens of carefully primed, rigged, placed, and concealed explosives. It’s almost too easy – like being back on Yavin 4 again, as a child, and using the Force to run races through mazes with blocks of carefully constructed buildings filled with potential traps and pitfalls and hazards that don’t really require using the Force for anything more difficult than navigation and help getting around more quickly and maybe to occasionally influence the emotions or actions of an animal or two and to rub a few seconds or a minute or two of memory from the mind of some relatively weak-willed individual who volunteered to play a guard for one of the praxeum’s testing games – and she finds herself marveling, again and again, over how vulnerable the Yuuzhan Vong suddenly are once a body finds ways to compensate for their supposed lack of connection to the Force.

Take away the edge that their apparent lack of presence within the Force gives them, and suddenly the Yuuzhan Vong are just as easy to manipulate and dance circles around as any other typical species of sentient beings. If not for the evil they were inflicting upon the galaxy and the Force itself, through their insistence on trying to conquer and “cleanse” all of known space, by any means necessary, she might almost be able to feel sorry for them. Almost. Not quite, though. Not when she knows how completely unnecessary all of the anguish and death and terror and hatred and horror and chaos and destruction they’ve already inflicted (and will continue to inflict, if unchecked) on the galaxy truly is (the New Republic would have gladly agreed to allow the homeless intergalactic wanderers to settle on an unpopulated world, if only the Yuuzhan Vong been willing to ask for help and shelter, rather than trying to seize a new home for themselves from out of the heart of the New Republic!), and not when she knows what it will actually take, to keep them from continuing to fight this war.

It is difficult, though, to muster up any pity for a species the upper echelons of which – from Supreme Overlord through the Shapers, the priest and warrior castes, all the way down to the Intendants – is comprised mainly of pain-drunk religious fanatics, almost all of whom are, to one degree or another, sociopathic in some way. And it is ridiculously easy to remember both the agony of being vivisected while alive by an heretical Shaper curious to see if a Jeedai could be turned, by Shaping and careful application of conditioning pain, into a loyal Yuuzhan Vong warrior, and the extremely painful fact that the Yuuzhan Vong are estimated to have slaughtered or otherwise caused the deaths of upwards of four hundred trillion sentient living beings, over the course of the war (and that’s not even touching on the doubtless trillions of artificially intelligent, sentient droids that were doubtlessly destroyed during their rampages). Her pity, understandably, has limits that does not quite encompass any of the Yuuzhan Vong residents of the /Baanu Rass/.

The members of the strike team, on the other hand . . . well, they’re a whole different matter, now, aren’t they? She would have been willing to sacrifice herself, to keep the entire team – including Ulaha – alive and well, even though it would’ve meant she would never be able to see Anakin again. After all, allowing them to simply blow the worldship – cloning facility and all – out of the sky without ever landing would have not only easily prevented both the tragedy of Anakin’s death, but saved Jacen from being captured by Vergere and broken in such a way that his fall became inevitable, preserved the lives of several young Jedi who didn’t deserve to die on that hellhole, and kept that stolen ship with Raynar Thul and the Nightsister and Dark Jedi from crashing into the midst of the Killiks, on Yoggoy, in turn preventing both the Dark Nest Crisis and the Swarm War. With that option out of her hands, now, though, Tahiri finds herself grimly pleased with the notion that she must confront the team – Jacen and those two Sithspawn traitors included – in order to get them safely off of the worldship. She’s thought about what she might say to Anakin, if she were to ever see him again, and even to herself, on the off chance that their paths might cross, but she hasn’t given much thought to what she might say (or do) to the others, and that . . . well, that right there is an oversight in terrible need of rectification, now, isn’t it?

Lomi Plo and Welk are easily enough dealt with – part of that little trick Jacen used on Ta’a Chume (before he overdid things and burned out her mind, pouring so much raw energy into her brain that it literally overloaded, not only badly damaging and even stripping the neural pathways but causing first an embolism and then a violent rupturing of that blocked vessel, the resulting hemorrhage sending her into a permanent coma) can easily be adapted into a rather permanent mind wipe. After all, he came up with the technique based on an inventive twist to the basic mind trickery that all Jedi learn, one used by Raynar Thul first to mask his presence among the Killiks for years and keep outsiders away from the hive, until he decided to call on the Jedi for help, and then to influence some of those Jedi to obey his orders and help him and the Killiks – but Jacen . . . Jacen is another matter, entirely.

Jacen may not be evil yet, but he’s balanced precariously on the brink of the chasm. At this point, one small push will be enough to send him plummeting over the edge. Vergere will happily provide that impetus, if someone doesn’t do something both to stop that from happening and to keep him from remaining vulnerable to such a push. It would be safer to simply kill him – a mind wipe (even one made more permanent by accompanying damage to the medial temporal lobe and the hippocampus, the portions of the brain specifically tied to memory) can only accomplish so much, especially in a strongly Force-sensitive twin, and even more especially in an individual prone to being kidnaped by individuals with nefarious goals in mind – yet, unlike the Nightsister and the Dark Jedi, the fact remains that he isn’t quite evil /yet/. He’s dangerous, an extremely high risk, his much-vaunted neutrality and respect for the Force already sliding dangerously towards the kind of self-aggrandized, blindly self-centered focus and depersonalization/dehumanization of others that leads to amorality and egomania. But right now he’s also still /Jacen Solo/, and that means she could no more simply cut him down out of hand than she could walk right up to Jaina and kill her out of hand, just because some day soon, under other circumstances, she knows Jaina would be vulnerable to the lure of the Dark Side.

And then, too, there’s also the issue of the painfully damaged Alema Rar, whose agony and fury over the loss of her sister has made her dangerously unstable and hurt her more than enough to make her badly vulnerable to the lure of the Dark Side. Alema is still a Jedi /now/, but she could potentially become an enormous threat, both to the Jedi and the galaxy at large, if left to continue as she currently is, wounded and angry and wide open and only half a step away from plunging headlong into her own darkness and becoming a Dark Jedi.

Perhaps she’s been focusing too much on the wrong end of this problem. Getting rid of the voxyn and getting the strike team off of the worldship in one piece isn’t the biggest or most difficult issue in play, here. Making sure that the individual members of the strike team are either all neutralized or else made safe /is/. Lomi Plo and Welk are obvious threats. Jacen and Alema Rar are both only half a step away from being as much a danger to the galaxy (if not more) than the Nightsister and the Dark Jedi. And Jaina (unlike Raynar, who loses his ability to be a threat when removed from the presence of Lomi Plo and Welk and the kind of power to be gained by heading the united Killiks and being able, thus, to draw on the collective Force energy of all of the Killiks and Joiners) is almost as much of a danger as her twin or Alema, at this point: take one more person she cares about away from her, and, in the fragile and largely isolated and unsupported state that she’s in, she could easily snap and become a Dark Jedi. Plus, there’s also the fact that Tahiri Veila of this time is a ticking time bomb, so long as her human persona continues to compartmentalize and try to both contain and reject the artificially created and implanted but no less real Yuuzhan Vong personality that’s been placed within her, rather than find a way to strike a balance between the two aspects of her overall nature.

That’s six individuals, on a strike team of sixteen (eighteen, counting Lomi and Welk. Nineteen, counting Lowbacca’s translator droid, M-TD), all of them a threat to greater galaxy. Two are fairly easy to neutralize. One she can deal with by forcing the issue of integration, merging the two personalities together and forging them into a working whole. The other three, though . . . they might require a bit more finesse, to tend to, which in turn means more time.

Tahiri sighs as she reaches the top of the chalk dune below the Imperial walker, just in time to see Jaina Solo, cresting a similar nearby dune, throw herself down the dusty slope in a series of evasive, zigzagging somersaults. It’s a good thing she set those explosives to timers controlled by a remote (with inputs she can change, at need) she’s carrying around with her.

Things just got a little bit more complicated.

***

Tahiri just manages to get to Lowbacca and Jovan Drark and get them out of the AT-AT before they can manage to practically get themselves eaten alive by genetically modified flitnats. The nasty little bugs are already swarming up out of their nests, in preparation to attack, but a swift and judicious application of a Force-generated shield coupled with a strong Force-generated whirlwind protects the two Jedi Knights and takes care of the insects, sending the bugs spraying out into the metal walls and the transparisteel viewport with more than enough force to shatter them in nasty sprays of dark purplish-gray ichor, and she keeps the whirlwind up and functioning until the walls are running with repugnant, foul-smelling goo and the weblike nests themselves have been shredded. She accidentally bounces Lowie’s translator droid off the ceiling once, making Em Teedee wail and exclaim until the little thing almost sounds like the Solo family’s fussy old protocol droid, Threepio, but it’s still fussing when she finally considers it safe enough to let the whirlwind disperse, so she figures it’s a job well done. In the semi-darkness of the AT-AT, Lowie and Jovan mistake her for their Tahiri, so she’s able to convince them to go ahead and grab whatever the frell they thought was so important and get out of the walker before the bugs try to swarm them again, and then sneak up behind them and put them down, quick and easy and all but painlessly, with targeted bolts of pure Force energy, rapidly overloading their bodies and knocking them all but instantaneously unconscious.

Those who survived the mission to Myrkr – especially those who later became Joiners – are the easiest to deal with, among the rest. She can still feel her way along the old bonds, forged initially by too many battle melds and reinforced by their time among the Killiks, and all it takes is one good solid push in the Force – an overwhelming demand to stop, to sleep, to delve deeply into unconsciousness – and, aside from Jaina (whose mind she does not yet attempt to touch, remembering that the eldest of the Solo siblings had been talking with Anakin on the journey up to the AT-AT and not wanting to alert Anakin to what’s happening), they drop where they’re standing, all of them, from Zekk and Tekli to Alema and Tesar, not excluding Raynar himself and even including Tenel Ka and Jacen, Jacen’s mind so close to touching Tenel Ka’s that she drags him under with her when she goes down. Ganner and Eryl are so busy whispering to each other that they don’t even notice her as she sneaks up on them and targets them with the same concentrated blasts of Force energy that took down Lowie and Jovan. The other two Barabels – Bela and Krasov Hara – are a bit more tricky to take care of, but she manages to do it, straining herself to deploy a Force illusion strong enough both to keep the wary Barabels from sensing what’s happening around them and to provide enough of a distraction to let her sneak up on them close enough to deal with them as she had Ganner and Eryl and Lowie and Jovan, distracting them with a strong hint of an approaching dust cloud and then coming at them from behind when they turn to investigate.

Her younger self is, she knows, following silently along behind Anakin and Jaina. She waits until they’ve got a dune between them and the Nightsister and Dark Jedi, and then she lets Jaina know that she’s there, floating her voice to Jaina’s ears with the Force and using the girl’s own hair-trigger reflexes against her to bring her around to where Tahiri is waiting for her, where a touch is all she needs to knock the teenager unconscious.

Anakin screams/, across the meld, shouting for Tahiri, and she has to stop a moment and fight to push back tears at the familiar sight of him, the familiar /feel of him, in the Force, the sensation of his mind reaching out along the still-forming, very personal bond tying just the two of them together, and she doesn’t even have to guess when the moment is that he realizes who it is, standing before him, because her mind reverberates almost painfully with his shock.

“Tahiri?” he whispers, lightsaber tumbling from suddenly nerveless fingers, sending a puff of chalk dust up into the air.

“I’m sorry, Anakin. I have to.”

He’s still just standing there, staring at her wide-eyed, mouth hanging slackly open with shock, when she lunges forward and brushes the palm of her right hand against the center of his chest, pushing out into the Force with her will. A flare of muted light under her hand, and his icy blue eyes roll back in his head and he drops, just like a puppet whose strings have been cut.

“What the – blaster bolts! Who the frak are you?”

It’s like looking at a ghost, and not just because the young girl’s face is smeared white with chalk and her golden curls are dimmed beneath a layer of dust. She can barely remember being so young, so full of love and trust (despite the pain), and her smile is closer to a grimace of pain as she steps up close to the teenager, using the girl’s shock to glide in near enough to touch, as she replies, “Why, I’m you, of course, in another fourteen years, little one.” It’s entirely too easy to reach out, to grab, to capture the gaping girl’s face between her palms. “We’re going to need to discuss the ramifications of some bad choices you’re going to make, youngling. But for now I think you need to sit down and /rest/,” she orders, carefully infusing the words with just enough Force-command to make the girl go lax and pliant in her grip. “We’ll talk later.”

Leaving the unconscious girl behind in the dust, she turns towards where Lomi Plo and Welk are still plodding along up the other slope, wholly unaware of what’s been going on around them and most likely already quietly plotting ways to betray the Jedi who’ve freed them from the Yuuzhan Vong. Growling slightly under her breath, she sets out in their direction.

With these two, she will have no need to be gentle.

This, at least, should be enjoyable.

***

Lomi Plo had been sure that, when she and Welk were captured and brought aboard the Yuuzhan Vong worldship, that was going to be it. They were truly done for, this time. Finished. Dead in everything but name. There was no hope of escape, no hope of survival, no hope of anything, except maybe finding a way to cheat their captors by dying quickly and maybe taking one of those damned infernal voxyn with them. The possibility of rescue never even once crossed their minds – after all, who could possibly crazy enough to risk his or her own life, trying to free an avowed Nightsister and a Dark Jedi? – which is why it was so completely shocking, when the contact came, through the Force, faint and shocked, at first, but then more firmly, increasingly heavy with reassurance and protectiveness and the promise of rescue.

The irony of the two of them being rescued by a group of do-gooder Jedi, including not one, not two, but all three of the Solo brats, is so delicious that it’s almost a shame they’re going to have to abandon and betray the brats and the rest of their ridiculously little strike team, if they want to actually survive this ridiculously inept rescue and get off of this thrice-blasted worldship with their bodies and minds and freedom still intact.

Getting the do-gooders to either find and steal them a ship or else scavenge enough parts to jury-rig the starliner in the grotto near the slave city so that they can steal it out from under the noses of the idiotically trusting Jedi is their best bet. Maybe if they play their cards right, they can even sway the obviously unhappy little Twi’lek to their side, get her to help them escape with the promise of power enough, through the Dark Side, for her to get proper vengeance for whatever it is that’s so clearly eating her up inside, making her long so much for the blood and suffering of her enemies that she seemed to not only be listening but to truly hear her, when Lomi said that there’s nothing wrong with vengeance and that it is both a noble and a powerful emotion. With the Twi’lek on their side, they might even be able to capture that damned traitor Zekk and finally pay him back for his treachery, for turning on them and the whole of the Shadow Academy, back when he was their Darkest Knight and they had the two eldest Solo brats at their mercy and the whole of the galaxy still lay ready to fall at their feet, back before these infernal Yuuzhan Vong creatures came along and ruined /everything/.

She and Welk are linked, mind to mind, trudging up yet another chalk dune and silently discussing ways in which they might lure the Twi’lek into a conversation that could lead to her turning, when a voice – almost familiar, almost that of the whiney little blonde bitch with the scars on her forehead, like she got too close to one of those Yuuzhan Vong priests who like to cut on people because they believe pain is the greatest of all gifts from their gods, or some such flarg – suddenly interrupts their brainstorming, growling, “You aren’t going to turn anyone to the Dark Side, you worthless pieces of Sithspit shavit!”

She whirls rapidly, instinctively starting to chant the spell that will focus her power send a web of Force-energy spinning around the form of her attacker, cutting into the flesh and dicing the body up into pieces, but it’s already too late. Welk is already down, a blur of rapid motion barreling into him and hurling him down the powdery slope, she can’t quite follow, no matter how hard she looks or how desperately she calls on the Force for clarity of mind and vision. She is turning back and forth, shouting for help from the suddenly eerily absent do-gooders and scanning the dunes rapidly for any telltale chalk puffs or flickers of movement, when hot breath abruptly puffs over her ear in a scalding wash of heat, bringing with it a triumphant laugh, and then it feels as if she’s been squarely hit with the leading edge of a Star Destroyer traveling at full speed, ramping up to make the jump to hyperspace. Agony explodes in her back and she goes flying, and she’s in too much pain to scream, too much pain to even think about trying to get her arms up in time to shield her head when the ground finally comes rocketing up at her and she hurtles into it, hard enough to hear something crunch with sickening just finality before blackness drops down over her with all the speed and subtlety of a falling wall.

***

Jaina drifts in darkness, warmly enfolding and comfortingly blank, vaguely aware of the fact that her sense of the meld – the bonds tying her to her brothers, especially – is thrumming and shivering with power, energy snaking up around and inside of her, crackling over her skin and crawling around inside of her mind, pulsing with soothing waves of calm and rest and wait and listen and /hear/understand/. Words drift to her, in that darkness, the fussy voice of the M-TD translator droid that helps them all communicate with Lowie (without having to attempt the throat-ripping yowls and growls of Shyriiwook themselves) and another voice, female, low-pitched, muffled around the edges by exhaustion and sounding slightly rusty even through that tiredness, as if her throat has been scraped raw recently by screaming, but familiar, nonetheless, achingly, intimately familiar, as though, if the owner of that voice were to speak up just a little bit louder and if she could just focus on the cadences and drawl of it a bit more closely, she would instantly know who it is that’s speaking.

“Goodness! So you say those insects would have caused Master Lowbacca and Knight Drark to suffer processor crashes? Well, then, I suppose I am grateful for your actions, though if it would be possible to avoid throwing me against any more ceilings, I would greatly appreciate it. I am fairly hardy, but I am, after all, a droid, and therefore breakable.”

“Of course, Em Teedee,” the familiar and yet not quite placeable voice soothingly replies. “I’ll try to be more careful of you, in the future.”

“My thanks, Mistress Veila – are you quite sure I should not call you Knight Veila?”

A rich note of amusement enters the voice, and she asks, “I think having one Knight Veila around is enough, don’t you?”

The droid protestingly beings to insist, “Well, but if you are also Tahiri Veila – ”

The voice gently cuts the protest off, though. “I am not your Tahiri Veila, though, Em Teedee. That Tahiri is the one who’s going to be staying with you and your party. I’m . . . merely a minor aberration.”

It begins to dawn on her that, yes, the voice really does sound a lot like Tahiri Veila – an older, more tired, much more powerful, and strangely sad Tahiri –and that it would actually make sense (of a sort) if it /were /Tahiri, all things considered, and she is (slowly, her thoughts all a little fuzzy from the sheer amount of power surrounding her, cradling her, running bright ribbons of sparkling energy all up through her) trying to decide just why it is that it strikes her as making sense for that voice to belong to some other, older Tahiri (when it’s plainly impossible for there to be two different, equally real Tahiri Veila’s running around) when a third voice abruptly enters the conversation.

“Fact: you do resemble her. You even feel like her, in the Force. But I do not believe it is possible for you to truly be her. The laws of physics – ”

“The Force defies natural laws of science with its every use, with its very /being/. Do you truly imagine that there is anything beyond its ability to accomplish, if one is strong enough and desperate enough to make the sacrifice required to call on such power?”

“Time – ”

“ – is relative, my dear, dear Tenel Ka. Ask the wielders of the White Current. Ask the Aing-Tii monks. If the will is strong enough, the flow can be re-entered at any point. If the need is great enough, that flow can even be reversed, diverted, redirected.”

“It is not natural – ”

“I’ll tell you what’s not natural/, you selfish, stupid little bitch!” the voice – quite possibly Tahiri, in spite of the impossibility of such a thing – snarls furiously, interrupting. “What’s not /natural is supporting every evil action your Sithspawn lover takes, even when every instinct in your body is screaming at you that it’s wrong, that he’s wrong, that he’s turned, that he’s gone Dark, and then, when you’ve finally reached a point that you can no longer continue to deceive yourself as to his nature – when he’s used a capital ship to fire on the freighter carrying his parents, his twin sister, and a handful of other innocents – being careless enough to allow that Sithspawn father of your only daughter to steal her out from under your very nose so that he can raise her as his own little perfect Sith princess, in an environment so utterly devoid of morality that she will grow believing it is not only her duty but her right to sexually pursue and eventually wed her own half-brother! What’s not natural is not doing anything to stop him – to save him – when you still held his warm and beating/ human/ heart in your hands and you still had the chance! What’s not natural is suffering the murderer of your own unborn little sister and your mother to live, to thrive, to continue to plot against you, and then to have the blind gall to kick up a fuss when that murdering, lying, conniving bitch tries to kill your own daughter, and your Sithspawn lover is forced to take action to see to it that the murderous witch cannot harm your child! What’s not natural – ”

“/Stop/ it! That’s not – I don’t – I didn’t – I wouldn’t – ”

“What’s not natural/, you self-centered, cowardly little hypocrite, is allowing yourself to be made Queen Mother and then using that power to trick the one you desire into giving you a child to be the heir to your throne, in return giving your Sithspawn lover the means to provoke not one but /two /separate galactic conflicts, and then learning so little from those disaster that you go on to not only provide him with the means to escalate yet another potential conflict into a full-fledged galactic civil war but give him the means and the motivation to /burn Kashyyyk/. Do you have any idea how many horrors you facilitated, in your selfishness? He apprenticed himself to Lumiya/ and you never even noticed/! He /murdered Mara, you bitch! He put Ben Skywalker in an Embrace of Pain when the boy was barely fourteen! He killed your own father, when Isolder was just trying to save you and your daughter from the nanovirus! He – ”

“Stop!” Tenel Ka screams, voice shredding apart under the weight of her own anguish. The obvious pain in the half-Hapan’s voice causes something within Jaina to shrink away in fear, remembering the voxyn and Duman Yaght and the breakings in the hold of the Exquisite Death and the keening wails of Ulaha from within the jaws of the voxyn, shrieking over and over and over again in mindless, despairing agony, a part of her wanting to turn away, to curl in on herself and stop listening, stop hearing, stop knowing what it is that’s happening, and the power around her snaps and snarls and crackles with a sudden surge of energy, pressing into her, pressuring her to /concentrate/, to /listen/, to /bear witness/, the strength of the Force squeezing around her mind so great that, for a few moments, it feels as if her brain is literally going to collapse and all of her senses swim sickeningly, her mind buckling slightly under the weight and strain of so many demands. When the part of her trying to fight to turn aside subsides and the crushing pressure eases, the voice that might be Tahiri is speaking again, venomously sweet.

“I’ll tell you the same thing I told the Barabels, the same thing I told Jovan and Lowie and Eryl and Ganner, Tenel Ka Chume Ta’ Djo. I am here because I am not willing to let Anakin Solo throw his life away for the likes of you/, nor am I willing to allow another young Jedi Knight die when I might stop that death from happening. I am here because I am not willing to allow Jacen Solo to be taken by Vergere and broken in such a way that he will inevitably, eventually fall to the Dark Side. I am here because I am not willing to allow Lomi Plo and Welk to kidnap Rayar Thul and crash land on Yoggoy and become Joiners and so turn the Killiks into one of the greatest threats the galaxy has ever known. And I am here because I am most assuredly not willing to allow Jacen – to allow /Darth Caedus – the chance to tear this galaxy apart. You will listen to me. You will learn what will have transpired, had I not come. And you will learn from your future mistakes and you will promise with everything that is in you to do better, be better, or so help me, Tenel Ka, I will kill you where you stand/. Without flinching. Without hesitation. I will do whatever is necessary to ensure that things are put right and the future that has shaped me never has the chance to come to pass. /Do you understand? Nod if you understand, little Queen-Mother-to-be.”

“I don’t – I’m not – /I have no wish to become Queen Mother!/”

“Tenel Ka. Look at me, young one. Listen to me. If you do this, if you only work with me here a little, there may yet still be time to save your mother,” the voice that, more and more, both sounds and feels like Tahiri croons in reply, the Force drifting and eddying like smoke among flames between and around her words. “The daughter she would have borne is gone, yes, but there may yet still be time to stop Ta’a Chume from killing her, to use the Force to purge the poison from her system. If she lives, little one, she and Isolder may yet have another daughter, a daughter for Hapes, a daughter who can be raised with the expectation of becoming Queen Mother after Teneniel Djo. You can still be only a Jedi, if that is truly your wish. You can even still choose to have Jacen – publicly, bindingly, legally, wholly – if you still want him, after this, if he survives and if he will still have you. But you must listen and you must learn and you must /agree to do your part/. When the paths of the future have changed sufficiently, I will cease to exist. The Force will take me into itself and I will cease to be, like soap bubble that’s been pierced. No matter how much I might want to, I won’t be able to stay, to make sure that these things – these awful things, these things that you are so afraid of hearing, that you want so much to be able to deny – cannot happen. I’m going to fade away, Tenel Ka. And that means that I have to be able to trust you, to trust that you will do everything you can, to ensure that this future never comes to pass. If I can’t trust you – ”

“Alright!” Tenel Ka’s voice sobs, sounding almost more broken than Jaina can remember her sounding on the /Exquisite Death/, during the three breakings that the Yuuzhan Vong forced her to suffer through. She hears her take a deep, painful-sounding breath, and then, shakily, Tenel Ka repeats, “Alright. Fact: trust – trust is very important. If I – if I trust you – ”

“This will hurt far less, if you trust me enough to let me in. I can break down any mental shields you might try to put up – I know the shape and the feel of you, in the Force, far too well, for you to be able to hide from me, Tenel Ka. I know you, almost as well as Jacen ever knew you – and I would prefer not to have to hurt you, but this is something that you need to experience, through me, to fully comprehend.”

“If I – ”

“Just /stop trying to fight me/, young one. Stop trying to hide behind your walls. Those barriers won’t keep me out, but they’ll hurt you plenty in the process of coming down, if you make me get to you by going through them.”

“But – ”

“/Let me in/, Tenel Ka Chume Ta’ Djo.’

“I – alright. Yes.”

“I’m giving you a gift – a gift of the future, a gift of a future that we will keep from coming to be. The least you could do, little one, is pretend to be grateful for this chance.”

Instead of speaking, Tenel Ka screams – a great, throat-tearing, wordless cry of horror, ragged with terror, naked with anguish and heartbreak and self-recrimination – until she sounds less like a human than like a machine, endlessly, mindlessly wailing for a solid block of awful minutes, without seeming to pause to take in more breath. Finally, though, when the noise has reached such a teeth-buzzingly awful pitch that Jaina has started struggling against the weight of power still pressing her down, trying to push enough of it away to force her eyes open and her body to move, to try to get to Tenel Ka and do something to stop her from continuing to shriek like that, the keening stops, cut off as abruptly as if someone has flipped a switch. In the relative silence, the sobs are shockingly loud, gut-wrenching, and Jaina twitches violently, so full of the need to do something that her heart labors within her chest until it almost feels as if it might burst from the strain of fighting against the power holding her supine.

“There, now, you see? You understand? I told you I would make you know why I came here, why I /had /to come here. This is why, Tenel Ka. This is why I came, why I risked everything to get here.”

Tenel Ka is crying so hard that it’s a miracle she can say anything at all intelligible in between those hiccoughing, wracking sobs. “Anakin – Anakin – ”

“You’ll help save him, now.”

“/Anakin/ – ”

“It’s not too high a price to pay. He would agree with me, you know.”

“My daughter – your/ son /– ”

“You can still have children, Tenel Ka. Someday. And the Tahiri Veila of your time will be whole, by the time I’m done with her. She’ll be able to have children of her own – children of the man she truly loves – one day, when they’re both older. It’s better this way. You know that.”

“But – but –/ your son/ – !”

“Anything necessary, Tenel Ka. Anything. The galaxy doesn’t deserve such darkness.”

“How – why – ”

“No one else would. No one else could. There was only me. I had to. I had to.”

“Jacen – ”

“/Don’t speak to me of him. Don’t you /dare/! Caedus was a monster. He /used /me. Over and /over and /over/ again. It’s only fair I should use what he gave me to stop him from being.”

“But – !”

“/No./ I am done speaking to you of this. You know all that you need to know. Rest now, Tenel Ka. Rest/, and recover. Soon, it will be time for the team to leave. You’ll need all of your strength, then, to see to it that everyone makes it out alive – even those unable to move under their own power. Sleep/, young one. Save your strength.”

The silence that instantly falls is so abrupt and heavy that it echoes/, the air trembling as if from the reverberating clangor of a struck gong, and, through the distraction and confusion of the increasing pressure of smothering power around her head, it slowly occurs to her that maybe-Tahiri is serious/ about all of this – serious about being here from some unbelievably terrible nine-ways-from-Natunda-fedding-thoroughly-farkled future that’s made her old enough to think of Tenel Ka as someone young enough to be labelled so; serious about Anakin (/her/ Anakin, her baby brother, her scary powerful, scary smart, scary self-sacrificing baby brother) getting himself killed so they can get this mission done and get out with at least some of them still alive; serious about Jacen (/her/ Jacen, her twin, her little brother) being broken beyond repair and becoming a Sith Lord and doing all of those horrible things; serious about (Force! Ah, frakking nine hells! Just, please, no – !) Jacen getting a daughter on Tenel Ka and a son on Tahiri and – and – and –

She wonders, a bit fuzzily, if the pressure around her mind and against her skin, holding her in place, will keep her from vomiting, if she ever manages to finish that particular thought.

The maybe-Tahiri voice, whispering in her ear, almost startles her enough to let her body flinch, despite the pressure restraining it, restraining her. “Jaina. I’m sorry. You’ll understand better, later. It has to be this way. It has to be.”

And then a wave of power pushes out at her, along the meld, the bond, the whatever the cifesgemád it is that has her anchored to maybe-Tahiri just as tightly as Kyp and Uncle Luke ever used to be, back in the days when Kyp was still at the praxeum learning and so frantic to make up for lost time (before Mara, before . . . well, before/) that the two of them often couldn’t be fussed to take the time to try to explain things in words when sending things mind to mind is just so much faster and easier, for them, and with that wave comes a crush of information, knowledge, sensory-impressions, memories, and she can’t help it, she /can’t/. She screams. She screams and /screams and screams/ and screams until there isn’t any more breath in her body and she has no strength left to try to draw in more, and she’s still trying to force herself to scream on no air at all when the crushing pressure and the power and push of all that /ingemynda finally become too much and she’s shoved right over the edge, all the way back down into the darkness again.

***

A soft touch to the side of his face – what might be a thumb, drifting slowly across the apple of his right cheekbone – and he bolts into full consciousness, flinging himself upright with a heaving gasp, the absence of the strange Force power that’s been holding him, supine and quiet and only semi-conscious, just barely aware and awake enough to listen without really processing anything enough to react, dissolving so suddenly that its absence leaves his heart erratically racing with shock and a sudden flood of understanding, his pulse thundering in his ears as if he’s been running a very long time and is near to collapse.

“Shhh, now, hush,” the woman crouched down beside him (backlit, so that all he can see is the outline of her small body) soothingly whispers, making him startle again, turning rapidly to his right and flinching away from her unexpected closeness. “It’ll be alright. I promise.”

“Who – what – Tahiri?” he asks, voice weak and thready with confusion and fear.

“/A/ Tahiri,” she acknowledges after a few moments of silence, bowing her head and shifting a little to her left, just enough to turn herself sufficiently away from the light to let him get a good look at her. She’s wearing a body-hugging black jumpsuit, the front fastened clear up the high collar to a point barely below her chin, and her golden blonde hair is bound back in a tight plait that starts at her forehead – a forehead clearly marked with three vertical scars – and ends in a braided knot low on her neck, the circled plait actually seeming arranged to provide some added protection to that vulnerable area. Her face is hard and blank as a carved mask of aged ivory, but her eyes – dark green, striated with bright flecks of amber-gold and smokey topaz along the rims of the irises – are deep wells of emotion, of sorrow and love and something almost like relief. “I’m sorry, Anakin. I know it’s hurt you, to hear these things. But you of all people have to understand. You’ve always been different, Anakin. Special. If the galaxy loses you, the Jedi will be losing something I can’t even begin to define, other than to say that it’s something vastly important, something that the Jedi lost a long time ago. For two years, much of your family has been at odds, debating the role of the Jedi and our relationship with the Force, and you . . . you’ve starting to actually figure it out, haven’t you? You learned something on Yavin 4 that the rest of us don’t know – something that the rest of us have never been able to figure out, that we’ll never be able to work out for ourselves, without you – something that could have made all the difference, if only you’d had enough time to finish hammering out all the kinks and share it with the rest of us. If there’s such a thing as destiny, I truly do believe that it was yours, to find what was lost and to give it back to the Jedi . . . and the galaxy. Don’t you see? You have to make it, you have to live through this, if the Jedi and the galaxy are to have a chance. So really, I had no choice. I could save you. So I had to. I had to do this, Anakin. You understand, don’t you?”

“What – what did you do to Lomi and Welk? I heard – ”

She shrugs. “I neutralized them – overloaded and essentially erased the parts of their brains responsible for long-term memory, and then put them in Force trances to keep them out of the way. I’m pretty sure I completely wiped their minds. If they remember more than language and a few basic motor skills – how to eat and bathe, how to dress and undress, things like that – I’ll be surprised. They may not even know that much. It’s the first time I’ve ever pushed it this far. I may’ve wiped them hard enough to put them back in a state like infancy, instead of just taking all of their memories associated with the Force and their lives as Dark Force users.”

“Why would you – ?”

She makes an impatient gesture with her right hand, cutting him off. “They’re /dangerous/, Anakin. I couldn’t run the risk of them getting away at some point and running for the Killiks. Killiks and Force-sensitives are a bad combination and /should not mix/. Besides, the Chiss don’t deserve what happens to them, because of that kind of combo. They could be extremely strong allies, if given half a chance and a good enough reason to make a more permanent alliance with us. Saving them from the Killiks is a good place to start. And that means keeping the Nightsister and the Dark Jedi from ever becoming Joiners. That makes this the easiest, most humane way to deal with them, aside from killing them outright for their crimes, past and present and future – more humane than what I think Master Skywalker did to Raynar, even, in the long run, after the whole mess with the Killiks – and, anyway, I didn’t think you’d approve of killing them when there was another way of neutralizing them. They’ll be fine, physically; they just won’t remember their lives. You can take them back to Master Skywalker like this and he can see to it that they’re raised to be good Jedi, instead of having to worry about them running off at the first possible chance and wrecking more havoc on the galaxy.”

“And – and Alema?”

“I showed her what she became – what she can still become, if she stays on the path she’s on. She didn’t take it very well. I think she was upset to’ve finally been killed not by a Jedi but by Jagged Fel with some Mandalorian crushgaunts.”

“Killed? /Fel/?”

“Yeah. He’d been hunting her for a long time. She was a Joiner for the Killik Dark Nest and they really did a number on the Chiss. She nearly got Jaina before Jag finally got her.”

“Killik – ?”

“I’ll explain. I /promise/. I’ll share with you everything I know. Just . . . you have to promise me something, first, Anakin, okay?”

“What kind of something?” he asks warily, head spinning a little from trying both to keep up with everything his fully alert brain is trying to process, from when he was only half-awake, and to stay abreast of the flow of information from this other, older Tahiri.

“It’s nothing hard,” she rushes to assure him, one of hands twitching a little, as though she’d like to reach out and touch him but doesn’t quite dare. “I just want you to promise to try to take better care of yourself, okay? You don’t know yet what losing you would do to your family, but you’re going to, and I don’t think it’s going to be too much to ask, for you to promise to be more careful and stop throwing yourself headlong into danger every time someone is in trouble.”

“If someone’s in trouble and I can help – ” he instantly starts to protest.

“Anakin. Your family – the Jedi – the galaxy – they all need you. I’m not just asking for me, love. I’m asking for the sake of /everyone/.”

“But – !”

“You’re so close to understanding what it is that we’re missing I can practically/ taste/ it, Anakin. You’re important – more important even than Jaina or Jacen, certainly more important than anyone else on this strike team or this thrice-cursed mission. You’ll understand, before we’re done here. One way or another. You’ll understand. And if you won’t promise me now, you’ll promise me then.”

“But Tahiri, I don’t understand,” he insists, working hard to make his shaky voice come out firmer, steadier, without cracking. Greatly daring, he reaches out, placing his right hand over her still slightly twitching, strangely familiar small right hand. “What happened to you? What made you like this, so hard and so – so /sad/, and – ”

“I’ll show you. I’ll share. But you have to lie back, first. I’m going to put you back under for this. I don’t think I could stand to hear you screaming.”

“/Tahiri/ – ”

“Lie back, Anakin. /Now./”

A noise of protest rises up the back of his throat, but he can’t quite keep himself from obeying, no matter how hard he tries to resist, the Force pressing against him all the inexorable strength of an incoming tide. His hand tightens around her’s, long fingers closing with desperate tightness around her too thin wrist, and he makes himself try once more to talk to her, to reason with her, but gets no further than a single, painfully whispered, “Tahiri . . . ” before she shakes her head and rotates her wrist, pressing the bone hard against the joint of his thumb until he has to move and she can extricate herself from his cramping fingers and loosened grip.

Placing that hand palm-down across his forehead, she leans in over him, shooting him a small, sad little smile, and tells him, the Force infusing every word so that they impact his senses with something almost like physical weight, binding him with irresistible strength, “Go to sleep now, Anakin. You’ll understand everything when you wake back up. I promise. Just /sleep now/.”

A smaller noise of protest lodges, unvoiced, in the back of his throat as he helplessly obeys, sliding back down into full unconsciousness even as he feels the bond tying him and Tahiri – his Tahiri as well as this Tahiri – flare bright with power, weaving them into a single entity, in the Force, in preparation for the sharing, the information, she has promised him.

***

A voice whispers in his ear, light, sweet, feminine, familiar, and utterly venomous, “I should just kill you and be done with it.”

“Wha – ?” Jacen flinches, startles awake, tries to sit up, and finds himself utterly unable to. Frowning, confused, he pushes at his body until his head, at least, finally obeys him and rolls over to the side, letting his head tilt over to his left. Squinting, he blinks his eyes – the eyelids feeling like small leaden weights, difficult to slit open and even harder to make open completely – and then frowns even harder, even more puzzled and bewildered than before. “Tahiri? Is that you? What – ?”

“I should do the galaxy a favor and run you through with my lightsaber and leave you where you lay to die, you filthy animal,” the woman – who looks like, sounds like, feels like Tahiri, only not quite right, somehow, ever so slightly off – growls at him furiously, lips drawn back from her teeth in a blatant snarl.

“Hey, quite fooling around! What are you – ?”

“/Hypocrite!/ Going on and on and /on/ about the dangers of the Dark Side and the dangers of tipping the balance of the galaxy towards darkness, and what do you do? What do you do, you unspeakably foul monster, but go Dark and become a Sith the moment the option was presented to you? /Damn you/, Jacen Solo! Damn you and thrice damned to you, Darth Caedus! I should just cut you down and be done with you!” she spits at him, voiced filled with loathing and anger.

He just blinks at her, unable to do anything else. “What – what – ?”

Her voice rumbles harshly in the back of her throat. “I should kill you, Jacen Solo, and be certain that you will never have the chance to become Darth Caedus, but – may the Force forgive me! – I won’t. Anakin doesn’t want me to kill you. Anakin thinks you can still be saved. Anakin would die a little, inside, if you were to die, even now, even knowing what he knows about you. So thank your little brother for your miserable life, your self-centered little traitorous kung. I’m sparing you for him/, because /he wants it, and for no other reason.”

“Tahiri – ”

“/Don’t you talk to me/, you karking Sithspawn! You have no right to talk to me! You lost any right to ever talk to me again, after what you did to me!”

“But – !”

“Shut up! /Shut up, shut up, /shut up! I hate you!”

“Tahiri . . . ”

A hand – slim, small, dainty, even, but for the callouses on it from obvious repetitive use of a lightsaber – slams down across his lips, forcing them with painful hardness back into his teeth and flooding his mouth with the choking coppery tang of blood. His body automatically arches, a little, panic flooding him with enough adrenaline to let him move more than just his neck, but she presses with insistent, irresistible strength, and he finds himself thoroughly pinned. “You stole the last of my innocence, Jacen Solo. And now I’m going to take away yours. Have a good long look at yourself and what you did – what you proved capable of doing and of wanting to do, as Darth Caedus – to me, to your family, and to the rest of the galaxy at large! Live with yourself, then, if you can. If you /dare/. I don’t give a flying kriff if you ever come back out of the memories again, you frakking Huttspit flarg. Take a nice, long, leisurely look. It can be the last thing you ever see, as far as I’m concerned!”

He’s moving his mouth under that crushing hand, trying to protest or frame a complete question or something when a wave of Force floods out of the woman leaning over him and crashes into him with all the agonizing shattering force of a moon drawn down into its planet. His shields and his mind all break open, instantly, irrevocably, and then he shatters, too, under the hideous weight of the darkness being forced into him.

The hand remains vise-tight around his mouth. He isn’t even allowed the chance to scream before the darkness drags him under.

***