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The Gash
She was floating. Suspended between consciousness and unconsciousness, hardly aware of the world around her, Yerin reached out into the Force. There she saw a dry canyon—a barren riverbed, once deep, where the waters of life once flowed—a weeping wound. Her consciousness trickled out around the gash, following the branching paths of rivulets, rushing into vast pools and rivers that flowed out to the edges of her perception. Then the dull ache in her stomach blossomed into agony, pain drilling into her abdomen, and she awoke.
The smell of something burning reached her nose before she opened her eyes. Even with blurry vision, Yerin could see that she was barricaded by debris; red emergency lights flashed through the smoke, shining from somewhere deeper in the wreckage. She reached to touch her stomach only to find no wound; no blood dampened her leather vest. With the pain fading fast, she swept the debris aside with a single telekinetic push, loosening her safety belt and rising to her feet. Yerin tugged on her boots and picked up her fallen lightsaber, closing her eyes to focus on the movement she felt outside the door. A tremor in her horns, something ringing above the range of human hearing—something moving outside. Signs of life, she told herself, but she still couldn’t figure out whether or not it was a blessing. Taking a deep breath, Yerin forced the door of her compartment open; she held her lightsaber like a torch as she stepped out into the hall.
Patience, Yerin. Focus on what you can see: the ceiling, the floor, the walls, smoke, debris, the flashing of the lights, a door across the hallway, the shape of a person—a human...
“Varman? Varman Hale?”
Yerin followed him through the wreckage of the transport, the ache in her chest only growing as she silently counted the survivors and the dead. Master Taspul in particular had been well-known to her; she and her former Master had accompanied him in some of his missions to frontier planets in the last years before she was knighted. She remembered following him as he had marched into an embassy with a dozen locals in tow. The planet’s two suns had set and risen again before he had decided that the day’s work was finally done. Some of Taspul’s colleagues had called him argumentative; Yerin inwardly lamented that the Jedi Order would never get to see him argue again. As the five living Jedi gathered and carried the two wounded through the ruins of the transport, Yerin found her gaze wandering back toward them again and again until they all walked into the open air.
If the smoking ship had been a nightmare, the jungle outside was something out of Yerin’s dreams. Profusions of violet flora threatened to smother the transport like the overgrown garden of some forgotten civilization; the air was humid and rich, redolent with the sickly sweetness of humus. Quickly taking off her boots again, Yerin could almost feel the pulse of the world beneath her feet. “This planet is so rich with life,” she said, answering Varman. “And to say that there are signs of water would be a great understatement. I would not be surprised if there are inhabitants—perhaps they can help us and we can help them.”
When she reached into the Force, she felt its rivers all around her, the vital energy of the universe flowing through every root and stem, its currents branching deep into the dark earth. Everything is so alive. Her heart, in the grip of an odd almost-euphoria, leapt in her chest; her mind began to race as she contemplated the possibilities of what could be learned on this planet. Jedi aren’t supposed to feel this way, Yerin. Control yourself; passion is a reckless path. “There is no emotion, there is only peace.” The Force flowed out through the trees in every direction, swirling through the tangled forest teeming with life. Yet she felt something beyond the currents to the east: a place where energy pooled into something more permanent. There the waters of the Force rushed and stirred into the veins of homes and houses.
“There’s settlements here, some ways to the east. In this terrain, I cannot calculate how long it might take us, but there are sentients—many people, a civilization—on this planet. Hope is not lost.”
As the five carved a path through the jungle, Yerin quietly collected samples of flowers and the dew that dripped off of leaves broader than the span of her hand. She often took point, stepping over the tangle of thick roots and fording through the mist with the learned confidence of someone who had traveled to far harsher wilds for research. Her steps were soft to keep from alerting any of the local fauna; she fended off clouds of insects with swift twirls of her lightsaber. Whenever something crawled over her bare toes, she paid it little mind; there were greater concerns ahead. Tangles of vines and tree-trunks yielded to their blades as the Jedi kept hewing through the forest. The same blood-red sap—a familiar sight after building coffins in the clearing of their own accidental creation—sprayed over her blade and onto the hilt of her lightsaber. Yerin kept an eye on the residue, scraping up the drippings and bottling them as soon as the Jedi took a moment’s pause.
Despite her attempts to keep a brisk pace and a cheerful attitude, Yerin’s arms had grown sore from hacking by the time the soft light of dusk began to filter through the leaves. Then two strangers emerged from the brush, heralded by a warning shot. Though she should have been frightened by their sudden arrival, Yerin felt a terrible flutter of hope in her chest. She dropped her lightsaber and followed Varman’s lead, gesturing to the injured Masters on their stretchers. “Our friends need your help,” she said, trying three other languages when Basic was of little use, but all to no avail—she received no answer that she could understand.
Following the others out of the wilderness, Yerin looked around curiously as the group strode down an earthen walkway between the pens where squirming alien eels were being herded into nets. She listened keenly to the locals’ language, watching them speak and studying their gestures as best she could without straying behind, for she was wary of being prodded onwards by the human woman’s bowcaster. Stepping into the city, her gaze trailed over the roofs, watching people carrying baskets of vegetables through the winding paths and hanging clothes to dry. A young Twi’lek girl in an embroidered blouse peered up to her, tugging on one of her own lekku. Yerin touched the striped tendril that tumbled over her shoulder and offered her a smile; when their eyes met, the girl scurried away, rushing around a corner and disappearing into the bustle of the city.
Between the locals’ Aurebesh tattoos and a language even she had never heard before, the city was alien to even someone as well-traveled as she, so Yerin was surprised to see two familiar faces in the darkened hut. “Doctor Lamenk’srey, Doctor Astulli,” she said breathlessly. “It’s an honor to meet you two.” As the Jedi exchanged names with the anthropologists, explaining what had brought them to Bunum, Yerin piped up with questions about the Doctors’ research, admitting that she had always admired their work from a distance. “Are you the first ones from the Republic to make contact with the Bunumi?” she asked, only to have her questions quickly answered when Dr. Astulli spoke of the sparstite mine. Listening intently as the two conversed with Elder Thuda, she spared no courtesy, mimicking the anthropologists’ manners to try and coax a smile from the Elder.
With the unconscious Masters recuperating under the Onethi’s care, she spent the trek up through the village asking both Doctors about the languages of Bunum. She told herself that her mental notes could be scribbled on a datapad later, after the important business was out of the way. My curiosity cannot delay our mission—and what an arduous mission it had been. The trek through the jungle had been nothing short of onerous, all darkness and humidity and soil slick beneath her feet, yet she forgot her pains when she peered down from their perch atop the canopy. Beneath the glowing expanse of the sky—radiant with the rosy light of dusk—sunlight coruscated through veils of silver mist to bathe the treetops below.
“I’m with Quillow—we need to decide on where we stand before taking further action. And I, too, would help Thuda in stopping the mining. It wouldn’t hurt to hear how the Republic would explain its presence here and find their side of the story, even if just to find a peaceful solution, but the mining activities are desecrating the Onethi’s holy land. There are other sparstite crystals in the Galaxy; there is only one Tower of Senlev.”
