Chapter 10: ED : Chapter 8: If They Have More Time III
I try this time, as I always do, to make out any portion of his reply to the invisible and inaudible speaker(s), but fail as I always do. His face breaks apart into tendrils of thick gray smoke which then spread to blot out the entire picture.
...
The second and final portion of the fragmentary dream is an ambiguous snapshot. Two hooded and formless shadows stand nearly opposite each other in the foreground.
Nothing visible of either beneath long dark cloaks except their eyes. One pair of eyes is a sulfurous yellow which flickers momentarily to dark brown; then back to yellow.
The other set are mismatched orbs of yellow and baleful red. Well behind the pair of lesser shadows stands a huge darkness only suggestive of a humanoid form.
It's only distinguishing feature being the obvious tilt of it's topmost portion. Giving the impression of a figure deliberately looking away from the foreground of the image I see.
I see both fragments multiple times in rapid succession. Until an insistent noise pulls me from my troubled slumber.
The chiming of the chronometer on my wrist drags me back to full wakefulness. I check the device and see six hours and two minutes have passed as I lever myself off the cot and begin loading the small fanny-pack like pouch I hang from the rear of my belt. The smallest datapad I own, two spider-droids of my own design the size of my fist.
Each with simple and silent repulsor-lift boosters used to allow them to "jump" to places they can't scuttle to in near-silence. One dragony-nautilus slicer-droid I purchased after saving up my meager stipend for a year, then heavily retooled into something only quasi-legal.
It's the size of both a grown man's fists put together, and that's without it's four-inch long interface cables extended. There's only so much meditation one can do, and my barely adolescent body can't be pushed to it's limits every waking hour.
Master Dark Woman approves of my increasing my technical proficiency in what little free time I'm not meditating or training, but I'm ninety-nine percent sure she can't follow the fine details of my technical pursuits.
A couple of the dried fruit ration-bars (the only ones I can stomach), a flask of water, and twenty-five feet of climbing-line with collapsible grapnel round out the pouch's contents.
Setting the pouch on a convenient bulkhead outcropping adjacent to the gantryway, I take a couple of paces back and drop into the active meditation katas that Adept Vinrae taught me.
It took me quite a while to be able to develop sufficient focus to perfect my form to the point doing so was unconscious, and remain a steady channel for the low trill of the Force throughout my body as I glide through each movement, but now it's all memorized essentially. While I move, I feel the stiffness beginning to fade, and can't help smiling.
When it comes to many minor things, Dark Woman takes a very hands-off policy. Feeling there are some lessons better internalized as lived experience rather than preached-upon instruction.
Giving myself time to run through a few active meditation sequences to chase away the stiffness ensuing after an intense workout being one of these lessons.
I feel; rather than hear or see my Master approaching behind me. Her tiny pulse of approval at seeing me already up and meditating a gently-plucked harp chord in the Force.
I frequently say her approval of me is rare, but that's her intentionally communicated praise I'm referring to. At least I think the non-verbal chords of approval and disapproval are unintentional on her part.
She's certainly subtle enough to leave such a thing unspoken, but I'm unsure if that fits as part of her style. In any case, she retreats back into the cockpit without saying a word.
Just checking up on me, then. I resist the temptation to sigh while transitioning from a high to mid-block, then advance a step as I mime a strike-series high-low-mid.
Reminding myself for the umpteenth time that from her perspective I'm a twelve year-old boy she's completely responsible for. One she cares enough about to want to prepare me to survive lethal perils engendered by adults and their killing machines.
Which is what makes her apparent sadism a mix of the heartwarming and maddening for me, but so hard for a real child like Aurra Sing to cope with. With my adult intellect and maturity, I grasp that Dark Woman is so cruel to be the most helpfully kind.
Block a blaster-bolt aimed at your Padawan's head, you save their life today. Ramp up the deflection practice-droids stinger until it's capable of causing minor blistering during training, and you save their life countless times in future.
I drop deeper and deeper into the flow of the Force as the kata sequences grow more complex.
Which eventually ends the conscious musings for now, as the subtle song of the Light grows ever more intricate and attention consuming. Until I am but one tuning fork, struck again and again from varying angles with varying degrees of intensity.
The almost imperceptible thump of the courier setting down rouses me from the depths of my meditation.
Looking around me as if I'd just ceased daydreaming and begun concentrating intently once more, I note with relief the residual tension caused by the infuriatingly vague precognitive dream-fragments has been washed away. I soundlessly murmured.
"Flowing through all, There is Balance."
Living as a Padawan of the Jedi Order, and as someone who really; truly touches the Force in an undeniable way all the time, I grasped with perfect clarity how fifty-one percent of the ancient Je'daii came up with.
"There is no Emotion, There is Peace." The song of the Light literally feels like a river of solid tranquility flowing through your body and mind.
If I'd really been scooped up by a Jedi Seeker and brought to the Temple creches as a baby, or even been taken on like the real Anakin as a child, I would never in a million, billion, trillion years question beings as wise and obviously good as Qui-Gon Jinn or Yoda when it came to the Jedi Code.
Unfortunately for anyone with hopes of an Orthodox Chosen One, I'd seen the movies, read a great many novels, and actually given a great deal of thought to what this troubled era in the Galaxy Far Far Away really did mean for the Jedi.
What it should have meant, and how the differences between did and should impacted both the Jedi and the Republic as a whole.
Everyone wanted to blame the Jedi for the tire-fire which was the Fall of the Republic-era, but the truth was the Jedi didn't write the horrible laws which turned half the galaxy into something to be exploited by the other half.
A Senate hopelessly beholden to mega-corporations that made the likes of Apple and Microsoft look like Mom & Pop corner-stores had done that. Rule-by-the-Force had been tried, and it had very nearly destroyed the galaxy.
Instead, the Jedi had stepped back after Ruusan and tried to give the galaxy the opportunity to heal. Only involving themselves when they had a mandate from the people.
I mean; yes, the Order had grown somewhat ossified because of millennia spent in what amounted to a bunker-mentality, but the tragedy of this era wasn't that Darth Sidious perverted the Republic into some kind of dark and twisted inversion of it's true self.
No, it was infinitely sadder and more depressing than that. The Sith gained their long-sought revenge upon the Jedi by becoming part of the Republic hyper-elite, whereas their enemies held themselves apart.
Actively encouraging the people in a position to effect change to live down to their lowest, most base impulses. While the Jedi by contrast offered a righteous, moral example to emulate, but didn't really do anything to encourage that emulation.
Aside from that, the only thing I could still find it in my heart to criticize the Jedi over was their being a little too rigid and dogmatic concerning their own members. Obi-Wan Kenobi so famously said.
"Only Sith deal in absolutes." Yet what was a rule which demanded every single member of the Order have zero emotional attachments except an absolute?
Clearly, all the Altisian Jedi didn't fall to the Dark Side because they permitted themselves abiding friendships and lasting romantic relationships, so in the face of this unequivocal empirical reality I felt a more appropriate position would be.
"Care should be taken concerning emotional attachments, because they can be an instigator for powerful feelings of fear and anger.
Becoming potential avenues to the Dark Side for the unwary and ill-prepared." Hypocrisies like permitting the Master of the Order and his short-list of favored ones to use the Dark Side via Vaapad didn't help, either.
If certain bits of Force-lore were too dangerous for the vast majority of Jedi, then they were too dangerous, period.
Ultimately, it was things like this that left the Jedi needing a second chance. They'd done, and were still doing, so much good.
Yet they were also in need of a shake-up big enough to cause some positions which had been offered unthinking acceptance to be questioned. Ideally, I would find a way to stop Sidious and prevent him from erasing millennia of Light-lore.
Every time I considered the scraps Luke's New Order had been forced to start over with, and the absolutely tiny number of Jedi his Order was able to muster after more than a century; I wanted to break down and weep.
There had to be a way to combine the glories of the Old and the insights of the New in the process of stopping the Sith. All I had to do was figure it out.
Assuming, of course, that Bolq or Maul didn't carve me into cutlets, Palpatine didn't talk me round to becoming a baby-killer, or my own clone troopers didn't fill me full of holes.
"There is no Peace, Without a Passion to Create" I wordlessly reflected. Turning to grab my pack and attach it to the rear of my belt, then falling into step beside my Master as we walked down the ramp onto the planet's surface.
...
I'll appreciate if you guys can throw some power stones to keep the story going.
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