NOVEL WEB AND THE SEA MET THE SKY
He is floating on his back. The water is warm, like a bath, and as it laps against his cheeks he licks his lips he tastes brine. No moon smiles down on him, but rather stars unending. A great span of them, from lost horizon to horizon, flecking the dome of night. They wink and twinkle, and memories of science classes tell him it is atmospheric effects. He breathes deeply. It is a smell of warm spun sugar and splattered ink.
The lapping waves are gentle, barely cresting over his bare chest, tickling against his feet. He mastered floating like this in lazy afternoons, taught by Tenel Ka and Lowie. The wookiee always looked a fright after dips in the lake.
He can float here forever, in the quiet darkness, held up by the buoyancy of salt-water and beneath the ever-burning starfield.
Lap, lap, lap. Tap, tap, tap.
Salt stings his eyes. Jacen sinks and kicks, paddling upright, wiping at his face. His feet flutter, his hands wave and the waves are a little higher. Not chop, not enough to start to break, but he can feel himself rise and dip, rise and dip. He can't just drift here anymore. Now he has to tread.
He doesn't want to stop looking at the sky. There's the Bakchou arm. Tingel arm. The Rishi Maze glows brightly. He's watched the Galaxy wheel overhead on many worlds, but he's never seen it from this angle. He must be far above the core, well beyond the thin disc, beyond even the stellar halo. Few worlds have the privilege of this vista and he's filled with pleasure at this chance. Beautiful.
He hears a sound, the first real one that wasn't the quietest whisper of gentle waves. He turns his head. One has crested. The briefest spray of white-foam shines in the starlight. It's beautiful. In fact - it's better. The stars, they dance on the ocean as it comes alive, instead of just being a sedate mirror. Jacen wonders at the interplay he sees. The way the waves bend light, the way star-clusters and nebulae slide down from crest to trough. Parts of the galaxy that might never meet cross paths in reflection.
Water is a solvent, a medium for life. It's so precious because by its presence, it can break bonds and forge new ones. A little chop is good, because the foam shatters stagnant starlight like a prism. It winnows out each color from white and Jacen watches short-lived rainbows all around him.
It's enough to draw tears of joy from his eyes. Salt mingles with salt.
The caps start to curl. From crest, there comes now peak and lip, whitewater frothing, barrels rolling. One ducks him underwater and he kicks strong, right back to the surface, shaking water from his hair. Salt stings his eyes again.
Alright, he thinks, that's probably rough enough. It's harder to see the reflections of the stars now, just jumbles of light and color playing across the ink-dark ocean. He has to look up to remember where they are.
Swooping weightlessness fills his stomach as a wave rolls up beneath him.
On reflex, he touches the Force to ease the power in the water and guide him gently down the shoulder.
It's like a flare.
It's no longer choppy - the waves are enough that even a Mon Calamari would pause. Jacen spits and coughs, fountaining brackish mouthfuls as he is tossed, side to side, up and down. The ocean isn't giving him a chance to catch his breath: instead of gentle, aimless crests now each wave bears down on him and him alone. They hit, one after another, a rolling toll that rings him like a bell, that tumbles him and dunks him and he swims and kicks and loses sense of up and down until he bursts free again, coughing, flailing.
It's too much, it's too much now and he can't spare a moment to look up, to see if the stars are still up there, he has to focus on swimming, on just staying alive. Where's Jaina? Where's Anakin? Why is he alone here?
Uncle Luke? Where are you? Why am I alone?
The waves catch him in their troughs and whirl together. They slap him back and forth and the water, so warm and buoyant, is bruising and hard and feels like tides of duracrete.
Uncle Luke! His mouth fills as soon as he opens it to shout, to call for help and he is choking, aspirating, nose running and eyes leaking and it's too much, he can't keep his head up -
But his toes drag on sand and Jacen realizes, all along, the ocean wasn't an ocean at all, it was just a bay. Shallow. He stands, the water is only to his knees, less. The waves try to batter him down, but as he stands clouds tug at his salt-bleached curls and tickle at his nose and make him sneeze. The waves lick at his ankles.
He sees the stars again, the whole galaxy spun above him. It's close enough to touch now. All he has to do is reach.
On lost horizons, all around, the rim of the sky goes out. The galaxy is truncated. Cropped. Bounded. Jacen frowns. It doesn't make sense. He squints.
It's not the sky - it's a surge. A tidal bore, a surge, a wall of water miles high. Vertical. The sort that is forged when a river empties into a sea, or when -
A Moon rises. A black moon, carried on the northern wind, the southern wind, from all axes of the tempest. It rises from within the ocean, from beneath him, and it rushes through him and up, up into the sky. It eclipses the plume that is the Core, blotting out the center of the galaxy like the pupil of some great eye. It is a dark circle, rimmed in white light, cold white light, and the horizons come closer. The bore bears down.
The waves that had tossed him, the waves that made battles and the battles that made waves, join and conjoin and mount higher. Past his calves, to his knees. The sand beneath him is soft and he sinks in it, toes digging in deeper.
The moon, that moon, that great pupil, swallows. Stars recede behind it. The galaxy is a halo, a thin ring, coronal filaments limning darkness. Describing it. Bounding it. The cold white light brings no illumination at all. It exists only to measure the dark. Totality approaches. The last gasp of light is shattered: orange and blues, greens and yellows, indigo and violet, red - a rainbow, scattering. Iron and clotted blood curdles on his tongue.
Gravity of the moon, that moon, tugs. It pulls and it is what is rising the sea, it is what surges the water past his thighs, his hips. Everything pulls toward. It is a limit-mass, a Schwartzchild radius, a bound of all measures within which the permutation of existence hangs.
The moon, that moon, is familiar. Jacen cries out. The Force does not answer. It will not answer, not here, not now. It abandons him, it leaves him. Jacen is empty and in that emptiness the moon, that moon, beats the drum of his chest until his ribs vibrate, until his heart stammers and blood pounds in his eyes.
The rainbow light scatter, multitudinous, fragile, threads that loop the cyclopean ring of the moon, that moon - an iris, an iris, the hollow void of the black moon a pupil blown wide, in eyes of rainbow that fill all the sky. Hidden behind, the screams of all the galaxy.
The bore is here. It has penned in all time and space, it has him in a hurricane's eye. The dark water rises limitless and in conjunction, the wave will crest beyond all consideration. It will bear him up, it will fill all the world until there is nothing but the waves and the moon, that moon. The halo of the moon breeds faintest prism'd light and the waves will feed on it all.
Jacen's knees tremble. It is moments away.
Jacen, his grandfather whispers. Stand firm.