The New Jedi Order: A Vision of Confluence

XV: Under Ice

The Great Temple and surrounding edifices of the complex in the Massassi Site shared similarities in design and structure. There was a clear architectural through-line that held, even in Exar Kun's grim, black-stone temple. Monolithic blocks made up the substrate of the enormous ziggurats, but they remained clean and almost sterile in their stately simplicity. Smooth, flat-sided, but rarely cluttered with carvings or ornamentation. There was a quiet austerity in the designs of the Great Temple and the others. Even the Temple of the Blueleaf Cluster, with its etchings that gave it the name, barely bucked this trend. The blueleaf motifs carved into the outer sides of that temple were simplified, like they were stripped down to the least necessary to convey the image of the fern.

Anakin wasn't sure if it meant that this particular temple was raised before or after that period on Yavin 4, because the further the trio delved into the dark, the more and more it diverged from what he knew best. The chamber that the vong beast - not a sithspawn - chose as a lair revealed itself to bear dense carvings on all the walls, with the ceiling made to mimic the constellations that could be seen in the night skies. Anakin panned his lume across the repeating scrollwork that encrusted the walls, recognizing none of the designs. Tahiri pointed out enormous, darkly colored metal chains that littered the floor, anchored into eye-bolts of staggering size.

Clearly, these once held the vong biot in place. Just as clearly, it was where it had broken free from, if the shattered links were any indication. They were as thick around as Anakin's thigh and the sight of them bent and wrenched open was sobering. They got off easy with that monster.

On the one hand, that was a good sign that there might not be any more creatures afoot, if this one had been an unwilling captive. It even hinted that the ancient Sith brought it here from elsewhere and the vong would miss its death. On the other hand, if this temple was as old or older than the temple complex of Yavin 4…a Yuuzhan Vong creature chained up here for millenia had some implications Anakin didn't quite want to unpack yet.

Aeonid Thiel did not like Anakin's plan to delve deeper into this new temple: the Astartes' uncertainty bled clear in the Force. He'd called the Praxeum, warning of the new discovery, then relayed down to Anakin that Kam Solusar would reach out to Uncle Luke, though he might not be able to get a connection until the Jedi Master was out of hyperspace again.

Another difference to the Great Temple he knew best, this temple seemed to be arranged like a cylindrical stack. The first chamber, which they came in through and the beast used as an entrance, acted like the topmost of the stack and was half again as large as the chamber beneath, where the beast slept. Wrapping around this stack of round chambers was a gently declining corridor that spiraled down as a shallow ramp. The overall shape was like a screw, with the outer corridor acting as the thread twisted around the stacked chambers of the center.

They poked around the chamber that the biot had once been contained in, but aside from the mighty broken chains and some glittering shards of glass - too rounded to be anything but containers or flasks of some kind - there wasn't much to see. The carvings on the walls were a language Anakin hadn't seen, likely some ancient Sith dialect. Sannah pointed out a few designs that ended up being topographical maps of Yavin 8, as seen from space. She knew the world better than Anakin or Tahiri, of course, it being her home, but why the builders felt the need to etch in those maps was anyone's guess.

They took the encircling corridor, leaving the monster's dead body cooling behind them. A full circuit delivered them to a sealed stone door, like a slab, that was twice Anakin's height. There weren't any visible switches or controls and probing around with the Force didn't reveal any special mechanisms that answered only to a Force sensitive, like could be found at places like the Blueleaf Temple. They left that one alone, descending again down the spiral to the 'fourth' floor.

Tahiri rapped her knuckles against the solid stone of the fourth floor's cyclopean door, a mirror to the one they'd just seen, closing her eyes and sending Anakin a questioning brush. He leant her a hand and she borrowed some of his strength, rapping the door again. This time, she struck with the Force too, a solid thud of transmitted telekinesis.

She pursed her lips, knocking again, again, leaning her ear close.

"Sounds like it's solid in there. Ice got in, maybe."

Knowing the difference between wind-packed sand and treacherous, fine-grained and shifting tracts of desert could be life or death for the Sand People, and in her youth before she was found by Tionne, Tahiri had a preternatural feel for the density and solidity of terrain.

She knocked one last time, shaking her head.

"Yep. Definitely not worth trying to cut our way in."

Anakin hummed, looking up at the four-meter tall span of the cracked door. Some kind of figure dominated the center of it, with a few too many arms and strange looking fleshy-bulbs sprouting here and there.

"Wasn't thinking of it. We're looking for stuff that got out already, not looking to let out something new."

"So keep going?"

Anakin flashed his lume around.

"The temple does, so, that's a yes."

The fifth level didn't seem to have a door, so it meant either they were into a new part of the temple's depths, or that maybe the next chamber down was taller. Truly, Anakin wasn't trying to make sense of the architectural inclinations of some long-dead sith. They would follow this looping corridor down until they found an open door or it ended. If it ended without anything else, all the better. He could chalk up the beast's return here to just be it fleeing to an old haunt and nothing more worrying. For all he knew, whatever precepts the vong implanted into the thing's brain made it dig out warrens on every possible moon of Yavin and it wasn't anything to be concerned about.

Or there would be some ancient vong base down here, like Master Horn found on what-was-that-world again, Bimmiel? The idea of vong secretly holding out, spying not only on the Melodies but the Praxeum made him uneasy, though each time he reached out, feeling for life or any particular voids in the Force, there was nothing but old stone and vague shadows of intent.

Sannah peered up, open-mouthed, at the spitting image of a Melodie. It was an adult female, posed like she was swimming against a strong current. In the light of three hand-held lumes, the statue seemed nearly alive, shadows slithering and moving oddly across it in the cross-wise illumination, catching and bending around finely detailed fins on the Melodie's tail and in the curly and dense plume of her hair, whipping around in a spray of immaculate stone.

The Melodie's upper body, the 'human' part, was pale and veined: marble, and polished to a sheen. Not even dust settled on it and the finish of the statue almost mimicked skin, the way light made it glow. 'Her' tail, with every single scale picked out, was from some dark green and black stone. The membranes of each fin were so thin that as Tahiri circled around to the far side, Sannah could see her lume actually shining through the wafer-thin stone.

The effect was beyond eerie and it prickled hairs on her neck. The pale marble and the dark green stone highlighted how inhuman the Melodie's lower-half was, appearing more like some devouring aquatic monster halfway through the process of devouring a beautiful young woman.

They'd followed the spiraling corridor to its end, which was about at the 'seventh' level of the temple, past another two sealed shut doors. The hall sloped into a wide frame, without any doors closed or otherwise, that opened into a long, rectangular hall. Anakin cranked his lume up, white light reaching out to reveal…the statues.

The Melodie one was hard to pull her eyes away from. Sannah kept seeing Lyric in its stone face. The other statues were far stranger.

Across from the Melodie was one of a man, arms folded across his broad and muscled chest. Where the Melodie's torso ran into the fish-like tail, the man's lower body was similarly scaled, but far, far longer and more evocative of a giant snake, curled up and up and up on itself. Like the Melodie, the human-half was done in that same pale marble, the lower, snake-like part in the green-black soapstone. Where the Melodie looked to be swimming, the snake-man was carved in a meditative pose, with his head tilted back and eyes closed.

Then there was another: a woman like the Melodie, but her lower half was that of a spider with eight legs, whose knobbled knee-joints reached up over her head. Unlike the snake-man and the Melodie, this spider-woman didn't have a perfectly human upper body. Her face somehow fit another pair of eyes, slitted and smaller and where eyebrows should be. Anakin panned his lume over her marble face and Sannah winced at a hint of long, needle-like teeth between parted stone lips.

A man with digitigrade legs raised clawed and four-fingered hands aloft as if praying. Green-black soapstone was carved to look like sleek fur along his legs and ruffling the backs of his arms to the shoulder. A woman's arms blended into a huge wingspan of green-black feathers, each finger tipped with a ferocious talon. A man bore a rack of antlers and legs that ended in thick hooves. A woman with hands clasped before her had long, wild hair that was more like a mane, green-black and thick and running down her back where it met a canid tail that hung low.

The hall was filled with these hybrid statues, marching in eerie rows on either side like some kind of honor guard. Sannah knelt down next to one of the statue's plinths, her lume catching and reflecting dully off of something tucked right against the stone. It was a little chisel, the kind Melodies used to leave marks in the caves. Wire-wrapped handle with a spade-shaped iron tip maybe an inch long. It fit comfortably in her hand. Weird. Master Tionne might want to see it. Sannah slipped it into her belt for safekeeping.

"I've never seen anything like this in a Sith temple," Anakin murmured. Tahiri nodded in agreement and Sannah had to defer to their much greater experience with, well, Sith temples. Anakin paced back along the left-side row of statues toward the Melodie, chewing on his lip and clearly thinking hard. Tahiri rubbed fingers along the plinth of the spider-woman, tracing carven text that was still crisp and sharp.

Sannah noticed color for the first time and found that behind the rows of statues, the walls of the chamber were neither carven nor plain, but instead painted in massive, flowing murals. The pigments were faded a little, smudged or scratched here and there and occasionally there was a water stain, but were pretty intact. And surprisingly beautiful.

She followed the right-side mural back to the start, where they entered the chamber. Ziggurats rose up out of jungles and there were Massassi hauling slabs to raise them to the stars. Figures with arms held up stood on top of the ziggurats - obviously the Sith lords that enslaved the poor Massassi. It had to be the founding of Yavin 4.

The jungle gave way to stark ice and snow. The Massassi weren't there, replaced instead by young Melodies in the dozens. They were wearing what looked like skins of some kind, like the really crude stuff that the Melodies used to wear generations ago. It looked like just slices-of-life. Some Melodie were sitting around a fire, some Melodie were plucking berries from bushes, some were chasing a songbuk and waving spears.

Was it…a history of her people?

Excitement bloomed in her chest. If she brought back holos of this, it would be the sort of discovery that hadn't happened in…well, she didn't even know how long. Almost nothing was recorded of the days long past, outside of rumored oral tradition the Elders kept among themselves. That was another awesome thing about Changing. It made you stop caring about younger Melodies. Oh, can't tell them stories. Have to keep it around the Elders.

Rushing along, Sannah watched as the Melodies hunted and built huts and - she blushed hard - did things and raised families.

Raised families?

These weren't Melodies! They were human! Not a single tail in sight and no Changings! The art had been too imprecise to show webbed hands. Did humans live on Yavin 8 first, brought as slaves by the Sith and used like Massassi? Did they even know about Melodies, then?

The murals had to have more answers and she started jogging along, not noticing Tahiri joined her, curiosity piqued.

The humans started hunting all the animals she knew best, even the predators like reels, raithes and avril. They were good at it too, if the piles of bodies meant anything. Things got weird, then. The murals turned into something stomach-turning, not showing day-to-day life but constant feasts and rituals. The humans didn't wear skins anymore but were naked all the time, but given how much red paint was used on them, they might have just decided it wasn't worth cleaning all the blood out of their clothes.

That's when a figure started appearing. It reminded her of the Sith back at the start, who were overseeing the Massassi. Like those Sith, it always had its arms uplifted as if preaching and the makers of the mural made sure to embed little gold pins where its eyes would be. Some sort of octagonal halo shone behind its head each time it appeared.

Things got even stranger until the mural showed the humans picking up parts of the animals they hunted and wearing them. Some kind of ritual reason? Did the Sith force them to? Humans strapped antlers onto their heads or ran around with wings of feathers. It was like they were trying to become the animals that they hunted and massacred. Always that Sith figure kept looming over them all, until-

She reached the end of the mural.

"Well, that's spooky." Tahiri declared. Sannah jumped, realizing she wasn't alone. Anakin had fallen in too and was glancing back down the wall.

"I have no idea what any of it means…" Anakin panned his lume up, across the ceiling, then turned to flash it across the backs of the statues. "Tionne might. I'm sure she'll come here herself to study it."

Sannah glanced back at the mural, at one of the last parts. There, a human hacked a great fish in half, spilling its guts out, before climbing into its body like some kind of twisted sleeping bag.

"Blech."

"How are those burning?" Sannah asked, shivering and rubbing at her arms through the sleeves of her jumpsuit. Iron-basketed torches filled with merrily dancing flames ringed the edge of the chamber, burning without smoke. She didn't see any wires or tubes or pipes, nothing to feed fuel or pass along a motion-sensor command to start them up. They'd all just lit at once, the second they crossed the threshold. Right when it felt like the temperature dropped a few degrees.

Only one passage led off the far end of the statue room, opposite to the entrance of it, and that little corridor led them here, this small room. Almost an afterthought.

"You guys?"

Anakin and Tahiri didn't say a word, both of her friends suddenly so still she nearly bumped into their backs.

"Uhm," Sannah mumbled, "hello?"

Her friends didn't say a word. Oh, now the shivers really made her tremble in place and Sannah edged to the side, peeking past Tahiri's side to see just what her two friends were so focused on.

Melodies had a kind of religion, like a lot of people in the Galaxy did. The protective waters under the mountain were revered for the protection and safety they gave Changed Melodies, taking them away from the evils and dangers of the surface world. Sannah didn't hold too much of the faith of her people, not after learning what she did about the Force and seeing more of the Galaxy. Water was just water and an aquifer was just an aquifer, even if it was somewhere her people had lived for generations and generations. Worshiping their ancestors - Sannah found that made sense and she used to ask her forebears for guidance when she protected the eggs and gathered food. The Force was where all things returned to, so wouldn't her mothers and fathers long past be part of that Force, giving strength to Sannah and her friends?

Some Melodies liked to make little shrines, piling up smooth stones from biggest to smallest or arranging them carefully and then garlanding them in winter-flowers and leaving grass baskets of berries. Little houses for ancestor spirits to rest at and be thanked for their help. She learned at the Praxeum that many beings had means of prayer and faith and liked to make much bigger and grander ways to talk to their spirits or gods or angels. Altars and temples, churches. The Sith definitely viewed themselves as gods among mortals and, well, Sannah sort of lived in a giant temple every day!

Which gave context to what Sannah laid eyes on, what had Anakin and Tahiri transfixed.

The room wasn't that big, maybe large enough an X-Wing might squeeze into it, and right in the middle was a kind of altar, made of that same green-black soapstone that the statues were made of. It was chunky and blocky, tall enough that it would reach just about Sannah's shoulders, but then again, Sannah (and most Melodies) were short compared to the average being. For someone like Master Skywalker, maybe waist height or a little taller.

Weird symbols just like those they had seen carved higher in the temple were all over the altar, except instead of being carved, they were made of some type of gold-red metal and stuck to the stone somehow. Nine symbols, repeated again and again in all kinds of patterns that didn't really make sense, but that octagon shape was always bigger than the rest, which meant it was the most important, probably. It was the same octagon that was behind the head of the probably-Sith figure in the murals.

What sat atop the altar, in a dish of that same metal, made Sannah's heart skip a beat. A skull, grinning and glaring, polished as white as snow.

"Oh no," she tugged at Tahiri's arm. "We really shouldn't be here."

She tugged again at Tahiri, frowning, finally looking at her blonde friend. Tahiri's arm felt like lead, almost impossible to jostle and Tahiri's face - her mouth was open, like she was screaming, but her face was relaxed. Sudden adrenaline heat chased sweat-prickled cold and Sannah saw Anakin had the same expression.

"Tahiri! Anakin!" She dug her small fingers into Tahiri's bicep, yanking the older and taller girl, but it was like trying to tug on a neutron star. "Tahiri!"

Her friends both took a step forward, in sync, Tahiri swinging her arm and tossing Sannah back. Too late, the Melodie girl noticed a perfect, unbroken ring of the same red-gold metal inlaid into the stone pavers of the chamber. She noticed just as her friends stepped across it and every torch went out.

Sannah screamed. She couldn't help it. Darkness struck like a hammer in between her eyes and she fell back, rear-end smarting as she struck stone.

Red light bloomed from two points, blood-red light, red so dark it was nearly black, so dark it almost wasn't light at all and Sannah's eyes took a minute to even register that she could see again, see Anakin and Tahiri outlined by that horrible, horrible red light - it was so bright, it was so bright her eyes teared up and stung and it was like looking up at the sun, it was so bright.

Her stomach leapt and sloshed. She rolled to her hands and knees and gagged, heaving, tears mixing with snot and bile and Sannah sobbed. A sound like water roared in her ears, stone under her fingers suddenly colder than the glacier. Ice cracked and instantly formed over her pile of vomit.

"Tahiri!" she wailed, wanting Tahiri, wanting Anakin, Master Skywalker, her friends, her friends, her mom, she wanted her mom, she wanted mom, mom, the mother she didn't ever know, she wanted her please, someone please, someone hold her and hide her from the light and cover her head and -

+Young Sannah+

A man's voice boomed into the chamber, so loud and so sudden and so close that Sannah was back again, knocked out of her panic so hard that she gasped and aspirated her own saliva, doubling over and coughing, hacking.

+Young Sannah!+ A flood of sensation followed the words - concern and coldness, but not the icy otherworld burn of the stone under her boots but cold like real ice, like the glacier, cold in the lungs like you felt when running -

She knew the voice. Wildly she searched for its origin, but the chamber was lit red and Anakin and Tahiri were black silhouettes and the door they'd entered through remained empty.

+I am not there.+ She saw overlaid flashes of blue and white and - the glacier! It was the tunnel through the glacier! The one the monster dug, the one they had all gone down! For a second Sannah's hands were instead a man's and she blinked hard at the disorientation, choking down nausea again.

+I do not know what I am doing. Am I hurting you?+

It was Aeonid Thiel! Of course! No one else sounded like that 'Astartes', with his voice that was as deep as the waters under Sistra Mountain. She felt it then, the touch of his mind in the Force. It was slippery and strange and had she not been friend with people like Anakin and Tahiri, feeling always the way they could speak without speaking, Sannah would've been unable to close her eyes and concentrate and-

+Mr. Aeonid!+

+I hear you,+ his voice thunders in her ear. +The…Force…quakes. What passes?+

The feelings that came when he said 'Force' made her wince. She felt his mistrust and his agitation made her twitch. Keeping her eyes closed, not wanting to see the Sith Magic that's trapped her friends - because what if it trapped her - Sannah can only tell him what she knew. She thought it and felt it and pictured the moment in her mind, which is impossible not to, because painted against the backs of her eyelids was the look on Anakin and Tahiri's faces, just moments ago, before they stepped into the trap. Slack-jawed and empty-eyed.

+They're caught! It's some Sith Magic, like the Globe!+

+Show me more.+ He said it like an order, but she could feel something behind it. Something so big she couldn't call it an emotion, because to try to name it, to feel it, in her little body, might have overwhelmed her completely.

She did. She pictured the skull and the altar, the ring of red-gold in the floor and the metal symbols all around them.

That emotion swelled and hot tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. She remembered the teachings of Master Tionne, she remembered the meditations, she tried to be a stone in the river. She tried to remember that there is no passion, there is serenity, because if Mr. Aeonid was afraid, if he felt that dread, she might have crumbled into ash right then.

+It is not Sith Magic.+ He drove a single image into Sannah's thoughts. She didn't understand it, didn't want to, couldn't but it filled the space between her ears, until all she could think and see and feel was what Mr. Aeonid was showing her. +It is the warp.+

A red-skinned alien relaxes on a green-black soapstone throne. Melodies and snake-people and spider-people and all the strange hybrids they saw in the statuary are worked in miniature, piled on top of each other until they make a forest of limbs that hold up the arms of the throne and the seat of the throne, so that the red-skinned alien is reclining on a thousand tiny beings, all propping him up. He looks near-human, as close as a Zabrak maybe.

He is bald, his pate smooth and shining in the light of the torches. Tendrils of flesh dangle from his chin and jaw and cheeks, bedecked with rings and piercings of red-gold and silver and onyx. Elongated earlobes, drawn like wax, are pulled taut by orbs of jet and lapis, wrapped in thin red-gold wire. His robes are rich velvet, black fabric and green stitching, layered and folded with edges as crisp as a dress uniform's pleats. Red-gold necklaces drip from his neck and where they drape over his shoulders, bearing gemstones that slither with some inner light. Gently steepled fingers bear similar rings to the tendrils of his face.

He cocks his head slightly to the left.

Anakin knows what he is.

"Say so," the man orders.

"Sith." Anakin declares.

"I was." He nods, sharp and declarative, like Anakin has passed a test. "A very, very long time ago."

"This was your Temple."

The man - the Sith - chews over the word, trying it on for size. He seems to agree.

"I named it not as such, but it fits for purpose. My Temple. Herein I shaped Great Works, who linger beyond my span."

Anakin jerks a thumb toward the ceiling, gesturing through tonnes of rock and many, many meters to where he knows a body lies dead and still cooling.

"Was that monster one?"

"I claim not credit for the genius of its shaping. It was a curiosity - a prime Curiosity - among curiosities. Long years I plumbed its secrets, miserly though it clung to each." The Sith flicks long fingers, rings rattling and Anakin notices a similar throne to the one the Sith claimed, just beside and behind him. "Be seated, young Jedi."

Something about the offer prickles hairs on Anakin's neck.

"No, I'll stand."

Very softly, the Sith hisses air between sharpened teeth.

"Impudent. The offer remains. You may escape prostration, for you are peer among the touched, not a grasping creature. Your name I require, by right of host."

"Anakin Solo."

"Ah. Sit in company, Anakin Solo, with Melin-Bralam, Lord of the Sith."

His knees flex momentarily as Anakin reaches reflexively for the arm of the throne - he catches himself, straightening back up.

"I said: I'll stand."

"So you will. My hospitality is famous and curiosity boundless, thus do I find little offense in your coming to my sanctum. Satisfy me further, Anakin Solo, and speak the why of your purpose, that I might be a better host and offer a little aide."

"We-" Anakin's throat closes on the word, because it was we, it was three, it was - where was Tahiri - she's in the throne beside the empty one offered to Anakin. She's right there, of course she is, she has been, she is being polite and letting Anakin lead. He could laugh. Tahiri, quiet for once, but Tahiri can be as serious as anyone when the right time calls for it. Her green eyes laugh at him, behind her waves of soft golden hair, the girl smiling up at him. "We were making sure that there weren't more of-" he again jerks his thumb toward the ceiling "-those things around."

The Sith - Melin-Bralam - nods with sagacity.

"That is just purpose. I have offered offense, by proof of my bindings broken and insufficient. In recompense I offer respite and a boon. Sit, Anakin Solo, and rest weary feet."

Tahiri shifts in her own throne, kicking one leg up over an arm, dangling a foot and swishing it back and forth, back and forth, irreverent. Anakin smiles despite himself. His feet are sore and his hips ache from all the clambering and climbing and walking. The throne's seat is stone, but it looks shaped for comfort.

"No, I'll stand."

"As you will. Name then a boon to compensate for the failure mine. Let none say Melin-Bralam owns not his failures, nor shapes no recompense to the wronged. As touched, we are peer; my honor stained."

Anakin considers it. Tahiri lets him think, keeping her thoughts to herself. How much did anyone know about the ancient Lords of the Sith? Well, aside from them being Sith? Anakin meets Melin-Bralam's molten-gold eyes, depthless and cool. Tionne would love to be able to add knowledge to the archives. Maybe Melin-Bralam has a holocron? Uncle Luke would want to see that as well. The Sith seems guileless, open to the Force and Anakin feels nothing from him that is untoward. No alarm bells ring when the Sith speaks.

What if he has weapons? Normal ones, at least. The old Sith Empire had starships and conventional kinds of weaponry, alongside the more evil Sith magics like the Golden Globe. Melin-Bralam might be able to point them to some buried caches, maybe an old Sith dreadnought. Anything will help the war against the vong.

Though - can he really ask for anything if he doesn't know what kind of Lord of the Sith Melin-Bralam was? If he knew, then maybe he'll have an easier time deciding.

"What did the statues mean?"

He meant to ask Melin-Bralam what knowledge of the Force he had. Some Sith mastered evil magic, some were masters of the lightsaber, others delved into trying to see the future.

The Sith exhales a pleasured sigh.

"My Great Works. You descended my 'Temple'. Had you no talent for letters? All my work, laid out to see. My process, etched in stone. That others might know my Genius and my Plan."

Right, the murals. In the statuary chamber. But they just showed humans hunting creatures and slaying them, then eating them - raw, it looked like. Like there was some kind of hunger they couldn't satisfy. Such a hunger. A blood-hunger, a flesh-hunger, so strong they tore the animals to pieces with bare hands and drank deep the steaming blood, that they broke teeth on cracking bone to suckle on marrow sweet. That they rent open bodies and clambered into cavities, to floss teeth with tendon and lap spinal fluid from drooling, riven nerve cords. Until human and beast were indistinguishable, until they supped so deep and so long from so poisoned a chalice, until they climbed so deep into the corpse they slaughtered, until man and woman, naked, painted in gore with bellies distended and stomachs gnawing for more, became more and both less.

Until scales sprouted and feathers flicked and in shuddering pleasure antlers crowned bowed heads and fur bristled.

The etchings move. The murals dance. Crude-cut figures show the transfiguration to Anakin, beginning to the utmost end.

"You made them…" Anakin isn't sure if he feels awe or horror. The moment of realization is too big. It cannot fit inside him entire and sticks out at odd angle, awkward and liable to catch. He cannot digest it all, what he sees, what Melin-Bralam shows him. Overfull, the meal of knowledge spills unchewed from lips and stains his front.

Melin-Bralam smiles a wide and black smile.

"My Great Work. Beyond the Ken of any other Lord. I am buoyed by the Deeper Ocean, in whose swallowing waters the Force is shamed."

"Sannah is - she's-"

Where is Sannah? Tahiri smiles on her throne, beside his own empty one. Where is Sannah? He has to tell Sannah - no, he can't tell Sannah. How can he face her? How can he face her? How can he keep it - all of it - to himself? Where is she? Where is she? Where is she?

"She was not invited." Melin-Bralam's voice turns hard and firm, but not unkindly. He is teaching Anakin, he is correcting him. "The spawn are not allowed in matters elevated."

"What did you do to her?" Anakin doesn't sense malice, he doesn't sense-

Wait.

"The Spawn are excluded. Their passage is barred. She remains, until our intercourse is complete. Worry should not trouble your brow. She will serve you still, when this is through."

Wait.

"In grander knowing, I, Melin-Bralam, propose the choicest boon. My holocron: a trinket. Ships of crudest matter: unworthy. Drink of my arts, Anakin who is Alone. Be seated and at my right hand find mastery of my Works, which may be yours."

Wait.

Melin-Bralam raises a hand, palm up, rings glinting on his long fingers. The throne is waiting. Like Melin-Bralam's, it is shaped of thousands of tiny figures, carven from green-black soapstone. They are interlocked and are a mass of living beings, frozen in stone, to hold aloft arms and seat and high-peaked back.

From the throne beside his, Tahiri's electric green eyes meet his icy-blue. She smiles at him, from behind waves of golden-blonde hair. She swings her foot, swish, swish, from where it is thrown over one arm as she slouches, insouciant.

She is there and Melin-Bralam is here, and Anakin senses nothing untoward from either. He senses nothing at all. Nothing at all.

The Force is silent.

The Force is gone.

He senses nothing for there is nothing to sense and the apparatus by which he might have externalized proprioception does not exist.

Melin-Bralam's eyes are depthless pools of rainbow color.

Anakin's hand falls to his lightsaber at his hip, cool and metal and more solid than the world.

He ignites it and sudden cobalt lightning banishes torchlight.

Anakin shivered. No - he quaked, like a leaf, chest suddenly clenching tight and hard, like his ribs are about to collapse. Cold, cold like he'd never felt before, cold like the burn of deep-space chattered his teeth so hard that he bit down hard and clenched his jaw to stop them from chattering right out of his skull.

His lightsaber was bright and his hands clenched so hard around it that he felt a line of stinging pain in his palm, the only sensation beyond distant numbness. Frost rimed the metal of his 'saber's hilt. It covered his gloves. It sealed his hands into fists, clenched tight. His hands were frozen, fingers numb. He couldn't turn off or drop his lightsaber if he wanted to.

He did not want to.

Tahiri also had her 'saber lit and he heard her groan, deep in her throat. A groan that might have been a smothered, suffocated scream. If she saw what he saw, he could understand.

Melin-Bralam was gone. The two offered thrones: gone. A skull, near-to-human in physiognomy, but clearly not, rested in a brass bowl. Blood filled the bowl to the very lip, so that the lower jaw was out of sight and the teeth were stained. On the forehead of the skull was etched a single rune, repeated from the patterns in the halls above. An octagonal mark, eight sides equal, with a four-point star captured within. The mark burned with black-red light. The altar it occupied was black and green, soapstone, like the thrones.

Melin-Bralam was gone but they were not left alone.

A man of shadow, two heads taller than Anakin in height stood impassive, the altar between them. A cloak of velvet night hung from hooks at his shoulders. Gently, his right hand ran along the hem, brushing long, claw-tipped fingers over the fabric. His armor was organic and smooth, scalloped and outsized. Whorls of pearlescent nacre, like a deep-ocean mollusk, broke up the void-dark carapace. His right hand, which toyed with his cloak, was encased in a gauntlet of deepest, purest crimson, a crimson that drip, drip, dripped. The gauntlet was covered in blood, from elbow to finger-tip. Arterial blood, heartsblood.

One leg was that of a man, jointed properly. The other articulated like a hound, knee projecting forward and long, silver-bone claws tap-tap-tapped impatiently from a raptor-foot.

Anakin drew his focus up, toward the man's face. Where the armor ended, at the collarbone, a thousand tiny mica-teeth dug into the man's exposed flesh, anchoring the breastplate. Pale skin was swirled and inked in indigo and crimson and emerald, stitched with pins and piercing of jet. Bronzed scales only millimeters long dusted along his exposed collarbone, growing thicker and wider to encase entire his neck like a living gorget.

His eyes were rainbow. All colors swirled in their glow, shifting across the spectrum in disorder. At times ultraviolet impinged and infrared burned hot.

And he was crowned by horns. Three horns erupted from his skull: two from either temple and one from the center of his forehead. They burst from beneath his skin, arching up and up, another head's height added to his stature. Cherenkov blue limned the tips. The lingering light of dead stars cast down over his features, chiseled sharp and cadaverous.

Tahiri groaned again but her lightsaber beside his never wavered.

The man lifted his left hand. Not a human hand.

"A boon I still owe," he said.

Her friends weren't frozen anymore, but Sannah didn't know which was worse: their stupefied, blank expressions or the sudden terror that twisted Tahiri and Anakin's faces. They both had their lightsabers lit, seeming to push back the black-red light. Nothing else seemed to have changed. Whatever they were afraid of, Sannah knew it had to be in their heads.

+This is ritual.+ Mr. Aeonid spoke to her in words and images. He made her see things she'd never seen before, like a rapid flicker of holo-images. +It has them. I am coming, but I may be too late. You must disrupt it."

Sannah giggled manically.

"Disrupt it?" She shouted aloud, knowing Mr. Aeonid would hear her anyway. She was just Sannah. Anakin and Tahiri - these were their adventures. They went into Sith ruins and broke ancient curses, they freed Jedi Masters and they did all the hero things. Sannah just wanted to be with them. She just wanted to be part of it.

She didn't want to be responsible for it all!

+The brass circle.+

Shading her eyes from the black-red light spilling from the skull, Sannah squinted at the floor. That red-gold metal that made an embedded loop in the tile - that had to be it.

She did her best to picture it in her mind and send it to him.

+Yes. That is likely an anchor. Break the circle!+

How? Maybe there was a rock, she could try to bash it - could she pry up the ring? It looked like it was flush with the tiles, but if she could dig her nails in there -

+Do not touch it.+

So she couldn't pry it up, she - she could - she could - she couldn't do anything! She was just Sannah! A stupid little Melodie who tagged along and now her friends were caught and she couldn't -

Mr. Aeonid didn't so much speak to her as hit her with a wall of -

Sannah flushed, cheeks hot. He believed in her. No, that wasn't enough - he was sure of her. Absolutely sure. He didn't believe in her, he knew she could do it. Sannah the Melodie girl could save Anakin and Tahiri and he knew it. It wasn't even a question.

All she had to do was break the circle.

Was she a Jedi or not? All she had to do was pull on the Force, all she had to do was -

The Force fled like water. It ran through her fingers even as she felt it within her, as she always did. She could feel Mr. Aeonid's focus and his concern and yes, under all that, she could feel his dread, but when she tried to pull the Force and then reached for the ring -

It drained away.

The Force didn't want to be here.

It didn't want any of this.

"No." Sannah pounded her fist on the tile. "No! Come on, come on!"

Maybe it was just the chamber. Still shading her eyes, she scuttled to the entrance and it was simplicity itself to pry up a loose piece of tile with her hands and a burst of telekinesis. She ran back in, skidded on her knees and slammed the corner of the tile into the brass ring.

The tile exploded into dust. Dust.

Shocked, she stared dumbly at the slithering sand that emptied between her fingers. The brass ring shone and mocked her.

If only she had a lightsaber! She should've made Tahiri help her make one, why did all the trainees have to wait, she could just - Sannah slapped her hand to her hip, as if by will alone a shining 'saber would pop into being. Of course, no metallic hilt greeted her, but her eyes flew wide as she remembered the chisel. The little iron chisel, from the statue room! She almost dropped it as she yanked it out of where she'd jammed it in her belt, turning it over in the black-red light.

+Blades are ritual.+ Mr. Aeonid's voice boomed into her thoughts. +Use it! Break the circle, I will be there soon!+

Trembling fingers clenched around the wire-wrapped handle. Sannah raised up the carving chisel, up, up above her head.

With a scream of fury and fear, she slammed the thin, spade-shaped iron tip into the humming brass ring.

Anakin wanted to ask what Tahiri had seen. Whatever that thing was that was sitting with Melin-Bralam wasn't her, he was sure of that now. Had she talked to the same old Sith Lord? Had he made an offer to her?

"A boon I still owe." the towering man said.

"We don't want anything you'd give," Anakin managed to snarl between clenched teeth.

The man - the thing - cocked his head. Dark hair was swept back from its brow, braided and worked with rings of bone. Beads and bones rattled in his tresses.

"You do. You will. You already have."

Fringed lips split in a smile. Teeth cut with runes were revealed.

"Anakin, Anakin, Anakin."

Unlike Melim-Bralam, the man in horns spoke in conversational tones. Somehow, it was all the more unsettling. His voice was deep but not old. Horribly, the tone of it almost reminded him of his own father.

"You can't lie here. This is a place of truths." He gestured, pointing at a burning ring of red-hot brass that enriched the altar, Anakin, Tahiri and the man. He wanted to call it a Yuuzhan Vong, but he couldn't. The armor was right, like some kind of vonduun he'd never seen but close enough to suspect. Its cloak was living, twitching in a breeze that didn't exist, staked to bone-spur hooks that erupted from the man's shoulders. He saw echoes of Malik Carr in it, of warriors he'd fought. Warriors he'd killed.

None quite fit. None could fill the boots.

"Why would we want to lie? The truth is always more beautiful. Isn't it? The Gods don't shame you for being honest."

He smiled a secret smile.

"Well. She would. Doesn't matter. Anakin, listen to me. I'm offering a hand. Right here. Right now."

The man in horns' proffered left hand rose. Three fingers, thicker than a human's, with an extra joint, held close. Two thumbs, one on either side of the wrist.

"Take my hand, Anakin. It can all end, right now."

"What can all end?"

He could barely think. It was so cold. He couldn't feel the Force.

"Everything. Don't you want to save lives?"

"You're a vong. Or something. You don't care."

"I do care. You care. Chewbacca, Anakin. Daeshara'cor. Rhonabeq. Who else has to die?"

"It's your fault!"

Anakin threw the words back. How dare it speak their names. How dare it! In that armor, with those scars -

"Fondor!"

The planet's name thundered in the chamber. Anakin flinched.

"Fondor dies because of you! You had the power. You held that power all in your hands."

Jacen begs him not to. Thracken threatens him. Ebrihim pleads. Everyone wants something. He has the stick in his hand, he sees across time and space. Centerpoint is eager. It leans into his touch. It licks his fingers like a loyal nek. It wants to be used. It wants to want. It needs to function. He can see the space-time ripples of the Yuuzhan Vong fleet encroaching on the shipyard-world. He traces the trembling hollows shaped by New Republic ships as they enforce their own manner of physics on the universe, through hypermatter reactions and artificial gravity. Centerpoint knows them all. It sees them all.

It can see, perhaps, anything it wants.

And oh, it wants to see.

Just pull the trigger, Anakin. Pull the trigger and Fondor is saved.

His thumb, numb, frozen, brushes the activation stud of his lightsaber. Rime crackles as his hand shifts.

"You could have saved the world," the man in horns said. Anakin blinked, back beneath the ice, deep in the temple. "You had the power then."

His smile widened. The man looked happy. Pleased.

"Rejected. You let yourself get tied down."

"Death is never the answer!"

The man in horns laughed. A being like that - when it laughs, it should make ears bleed. Its humor should tremble Heavens and Hells both. It should be the laughter of the maniac, an asylum-cackle. It should not be as warm and mirthful as it is. The man in horns laughed and his laughter was familiar. Devastatingly familiar.

"Death is the only answer. Don't pretend otherwise. Look at you. Your hands are awash in blood. You're redolent of it."

The man in horns bounced his outstretched left hand up and down, drawing Anakin's attention.

"Take my hand. We can be more than Death. Death is always the end, but we can decide when that end comes."

"For who…" Anakin whispered.

The next words spoken are conspiratorial. Whispered from the side of the mouth like a childhood secret.

"For everyone. All things die, Anakin Solo. Let's be the one who decides when."

The man in horns, their voice is familiar. Their laugh - intimate. They remind Anakin of his father. Han Solo has that laugh. The quirk of lips: he's seen it a thousand times. A cocky, lopsided grin. Rainbow eyes that wash now through quartz blue. Hair dark and brown.

"I won't be you." Anakin whispered.

The Man in Horns slowly lowered his left hand, curling fingers with too many joints into a mailed fist. His rainbow eyes flashed hard and bright, slithering opalescent glimmers across his armor, sparking a constellation of dead stars into life between tripartite horns. Something squirmed in the air, liquid and thick, cloying and pressing. Power.

"You won't have a choice," he said in Anakin's voice.

Tahiri wobbled forward on shaking legs and stuck her emerald blade through the Man in Horns. His vonduun plastron offered no resistance.

Agony spiked in Anakin's head. His vision doubled - two lightsabers. Two Tahiris - like an afterimage - but she was taller. Her hair was-, her face-, her-

-two clean and unblemished bars of energy transfixed the Man in Horns. Tahiri slashed sideways, the image of the man parting like silk and shadow behind her single blade.

Anakin's own lightsaber fell from nerveless fingers, snapping off before it even struck the floor.

There was a sound like glass shattering; his ears popped and space behind the Man in Horns ripped a sudden wound. A gash, vertical to the injury Tahiri carved horizontal. The air rolled back. Black-red light flared. The Man in Horns collapsed in on himself in a cracking of joints and snapping bones, wet like kindling. Purple lightning grounded against Tahiri's lightsaber, but the blonde girl in front of Anakin held firm, feet braced in a wide stance. Her hair whipped back, filling his sight for just a second-

Everything was gone. The Man in Horns: vanished. The hole in the world, so briefly present Anakin wondered if it was even real: shuttered.

The chamber felt smaller, darker. Emptier. The only light was Tahiri's humming blade, casting eerie green illumination about.

Another girl's voice gasped in relief.

Sannah!

His paralysis was gone. Anakin span on his heel, finding Sannah just behind them both, kneeling and shaking like a leaf. Her eyes were wide, so wide he saw the whites around her irises. The Force swept to his touch. Sannah was terrified - understandable - but also held onto this core of burning excitement. Pride. Tahiri slowly lowered her lightsaber, bringing the humming blade down and clicking back on the lume on her belt before shutting off the 'saber.

She was breathing heavily, a wheeze and click in each inhale, when she turned around.

"You saw it," Anakin whispered. Tahiri nodded, jerky.

She scooped up the skull out of its dry bowl and hurled it. It shattered against the stone wall with an anticlimactic clatter: just a dry, old bone.

Anakin took her in his arms and they held each other, rocking back and forth.

"We're done, right?" she said, muffled into his shoulder. "Let's call it a day."

Sannah's giggle was a hair toward hysterical. She didn't know. He wondered if Tahiri did, if she saw the same thing. Corellian hells - was any of it even real? Or true?

"Okay."

This was how Aeonid Thiel found the three, but minutes later.

The Astartes kicked all three of them from the 'ritual chamber', as he called it, and forbade them to enter again. Anakin watched Thiel work, hands in his jumpsuit pockets and shifting his weight from foot to foot. Tahiri was taking Sannah back to the Thunderhawk, the Melodie stumbling and claiming her hands and lower arms were numb. They'd barely exchanged words, neither of them knowing exactly what to say, but he could feel from Tahiri that she had experienced something similar, before that…horned man appeared. She bore the same stone of worry about Sannah and the coming revelation for the girl.

Aeonid systematically destroyed everything inside the chamber. Anakin had opened his mouth to protest - his Uncle might want to investigate - but decided against voicing anything. Thiel was working with the methodological intensity of a man on a life-or-death mission and Anakin felt the big man's seething anger through the Force. Sannah, what little she'd said through her sudden onset of exhaustion, was that Aeonid had talked to her and told her how to help them.

"It was the warp," Aeonid confirmed, when the two girls had passed out of earshot.

"I thought the warp was how your ships traveled?"

Aeonid, peeling symbols from the altar one at a time and tossing them into a pile, radiating emotion like a live wire.

"It is. The warp is also…a realm. Beside the 'materia' of our world. I can speak only generally. I am not trained or particularly learned in the facts of the empyrean."

Clink. Another icon joined the pile of brass. Thiel first ripped up what he called a 'ritual circle', using his electromagnetic longsword's tip to scrape the oddly soft brass out of its inlaid channel.

"There are aliens in the warp. They are all, to the last, hostile to our world."

There was more than that. Anakin felt it, in his gut. That thing, that man, wasn't just some kind of creature that just wanted to hurt him. It knew things. It knew names, it knew - it knew about Centerpoint.

"So you know how to fight these things."

Aeonid inspected the bowl perched on the altar. Gently, he lifted it up, looking beneath it, turning it over in his hands. Anakin couldn't see anything strange about it, nor any markings. The Astartes must have agreed, because with a sudden clang he snapped it into two pieces, then snapped those in half again.

"The Imperium has learned practicals. They are weak to bladed weapons and fire over anything else." He glanced, askance, to Anakin's lightsaber at his hip. "I suspect your lightsabers might be particularly efficacious."

"They aren't really a saber."

"Symbolic blades appear to function just as well. Young Sannah used a chisel to break the ritual circle, and that is no dagger."

She'd forgotten it. Anakin hadn't even seen her find it in the statue hall. Now it lay there, the iron tip melted and warped, tossed aside. Aeonid told him not to come into the room, but the Force returned again when Tahiri broke the…spell…of the horned man. Gently, Anakin pulled the chisel to him with a brush of telekinesis, tapping gingerly at the tip. It wasn't hot. It was cold.

If Aeonid knew about this warp, maybe he could answer-

"There was a - a man. He talked to me and Tahiri and he knew things about…about me."

Aeonid spun.

"It spoke? What did it say?"

"He wanted me to take his hand. He said he was offering-"

Aeonid advanced on him, the Astartes' sheer size driven home rapidly in the enclosed space of the temple passageway.

"Put it from your mind. Never think of it again. The things in the warp - they are insidious. They're infectious. Use whatever Jedi training you have to shut the memory away. Do you understand me?"

Aeonid knelt on one knee, now at eye-level with Anakin.

"Anakin. Guide Tahiri on this. Forget its words. Forget its face and forget everything about whatever creature you saw."

"Tahiri killed it," he interjected. "Sent it away, maybe. She stabbed it and then it was gone-"

"Then your lightsabers are not a theoretical, but a practical weapon. Listen to me and speak it back. You will forget what happened here. Just as I am putting my trust in the Jedi to teach me your Force, trust in me on this."

The Astartes was a tangled ball of tension. Whatever this warp thing was, Aeonid spoke with only total conviction.

"I'll try. I'll try not to think of it."

He couldn't imagine how. He had a feeling that man was going to be a feature in his dreams for weeks to come, like Vader was when he was younger. But if Aeonid felt it was important, then it was the least Anakin could do.

Aeonid seemed to accept that and returned to destroying everything about the ritual chamber. With all the brass emblems and the fragments of the bowl in a single pile, he stomped on them, his ceramite boots worn under his Jedi robes sturdy enough to mash the metal into unrecognizable shapes, until it was a blob of tangled and misshapen wire. He toppled the altar, heaving it up without a single hint of the Force to bolster his muscles - how strong did he have to be - and brought it down with a resounding crash that cracked the green-black soapstone slab in two. With his longsword humming and crackling, he gouged and hacked at the walls of the chamber, dense with Sith script.

Not even breathing heavily, Aeonid seemed to judge his work done with a nod, joining Anakin with long strides.

"I would like to return with a melta charge and complete it, but it will do for now."

"It's really that dangerous?"

"No words in Gothic or Basic can measure the danger. Better would be to bomb this site from the air, or orbit."

Anakin balked. The thing had been horrible, yes - at least as bad as the ways Uncle Luke described Marka Ragnos and the Darkest, oldest Sith spirits like Exar Kun. Corran Horn had melted the latter's temple down into sludge, but that always seemed more like catharsis than anything else. Exar Kun's spirit had been destroyed before then.

"Uncle Luke will want to see it first."

"A poor theoretical, but it is not my place. Did you at least determine the origin of the creature?"

Anakin nodded. The two left the ritual chamber behind, passing back into the statue hall. In the light of Anakin's lume and Aeonid's own bouncing lantern, the statues looked far more sinister. Knowing what they were - probably were - cast them in a grimmer light. He was glad the murals were outside their bubble of illumination. He didn't need to see it now, with the new context.

"A Sith trapped it here to study it. It probably hibernated all this time. It means the vong have been scouting our galaxy for a lot longer than we thought."

"Then as a theoretical: it was an ancient organism, perhaps cut off from communion with its handlers. The vong might not know of its death."

If it had a dovin basal, it might have had those living communications - villips. There was just no way to know, short of dissecting the entire Falcon-sized corpse.

"I hope so."

Aeonid activated his com, calling to the two girls.

"We are returning. Young Sannah, Tahiri, are you returned to the Thunderhawk?"

Tahiri's voice was tinny and scratchy, but comprehensible. The thick stone of the temple, much like the Praxeum temple, could interfere with signals.

"We just did. Sannah is having a snack. Is there more water?"

"There is a locker at the rear of the troop bay."

"Oh. I see it. Thanks!"

"There is also medical tape in a secondary locker above. Anakin has informed me of your injuries."

"I'll be fine. The Force can do a lot."

"Very well. Thiel out."

He clicked it off.

Suz was told in no uncertain terms not to go anywhere close to that glacier, let alone the temple within. Aeonid, after lifting the Thunderhawk from the ice, played las-blasts over the tunnel entrance until the ice melted and water ran and several tons of ice collapsed down, sealing it off. "Until we are prepared," Aeonid noted. The Melodies didn't live this far north, but Suz promised if the matter ever came up, she'd direct them away. The Rodian sounded beyond disappointed to be barred from the find, but Anakin knew she wouldn't go behind their back. She was adventurous, not stupid. You didn't mess with Sith artifacts, especially when a Jedi warned you against it.

Sannah leaned into Tahiri, dozing, not quite asleep. Anakin sat across from them both, elbows on his knees, the troop bay feeling massive with just the three of them. They'd been in the cockpit on the flight out from Yavin 4. Instead of just hours ago, it felt far longer.

All things die. Let's be the one who decides when.

There is a curious truth to the sound of one's own voice. Day in and day out, it is the closest and most intimate sound a person will ever know. It comes from within, it wells up from the chest and the the mind, combined, and echoes within the skull. It is the sound that interfaces with the world, at least for those beings that communicate through sound-wave and tympanic membranes. There is a truth that when one's voice is recorded, played back, that there is a dissonance. Stripped from the moderating medium of skull and meat and brain, the soundwaves strike differently. It is a peculiarity that for much of life's existence, in the dim and distant and long-forgotten past of prehistory, no being who spoke words ever knew the true sound of their own tongue. Not until the means to capture and replicate sound was invented could a being finally, truly know their own song.

Though one lives with their voice forever, it is only from without that it can, for the first time, be truly heard.

The man in horns spoke with Anakin's voice. It sounded like Jacen and their father, but Anakin knew it was his. He'd heard his own before, recorded in holos or over the com, replayed. It was why it took time to recognize the truth of it. His own voice. Why should that be the first thing he thought of?

It smiled with his smirk. It grinned with his own teeth.

At that moment, the Force had fled him. He couldn't touch it. That man in horns held out his hand and asked for Anakin's acceptance. He knew the dark side, he knew it as well as his own voice.

Yet for there to be a dark side, there had to be a Force first.

That man in horns, that thing with his voice, his face, with rainbow eyes and ritual scars, it had been as empty as any Yuuzhan Vong.

He believed Aeonid's warnings. He believed him about aliens in the 'warp' that could be dangerous. He believed that Aeonid believed the advice he gave. Anakin also knew, with certainty, that what Tahiri clove with her lightsaber was something beyond anything the Astartes knew of.

Tahiri, shifting, caught his attention with her movement, knocking his thoughts awry. She met his eyes and smiled, fragile, but a smile. He brushed out for her and she was warm, fingertips trailing past him as she ran fingers through Sannah's hair. He could feel the ache of her ribs, how it hurt if she breathed too deep. He could feel, buried deeper than the gentle access they shared, where she shoved down what had just happened. What she'd seen. She smiled on her face and in the Force and Anakin smiled back across both.

Ten credits that she would end up telling him what she saw before he even asked, and then pry his own experience out of him. He'd let her. He owed her, owed her a lot for stepping between him and the man in horns. They could handle it together.

He got an image of Lyric, then a mop of light brown hair. Tahiri was thinking what he was. About the Melodies, what they learned. That wasn't a secret they could keep. Not only did Sannah deserve the truth, but so did her people. Uncle Luke had to know.

Anakin readjusted himself, leaning back to let his head thump against the cushioned seat-back. The Thunderhawk growled and rumbled, shaking like a tramp freighter. Gently, he dozed as Aeonid drove them through the void, past the titan of Yavin, toward a little marble of blue and green and swirling white. What strange snips of images came and went, ephemeral and fleeting he did not remember, held in the half-light between awake and asleep. Time slid past, elastic and liquid, until the frame of the ship trembled and air suddenly howled and hammered outside and then the engines were winding down, whine decreasing and Anakin shook back to wakefulness.

He pinched sand from the corners of his eyes, feeling sweaty and a little off-balance. Tahiri smirked, knowing, closing her eyes for a moment and exaggerating a snore.

Irrepressible, as always. He loved that about her.