To The Brink, Chapter 1

The Exile was lying crumpled in the grass, drained from the enormity of what the Masters had been attempting to do to her.  The sound of Kreia’s voice came to her as if from underwater.  She recognized some of the words “truth”…“arrogance”… “harm”… “tragedies”…as they wisped through the recesses of her mind.  She knew these words should mean something but the sound was distant and disjointed.

Suddenly a cacophony of noise rang out.  It sliced through the murky haze of her thoughts and shook her to the very core.  Something was wrong.  Something was horribly wrong.  Summoning all of her remaining power she forced her conscious to surface again to reality and pulled herself to a standing and ready position.  Her vision cleared and she saw them.  Her masters, her mentors were all lying motionless in the grass.  She broke into a run, pulling out her medpacs as she went.  “Kreia, what have you done?”  She dropped to her knees by Master Zez-Kal-Eli but there was nothing she could do.  He was worse than dead, his body was an empty vessel that had been stripped hollow of The Force.

“Master Vrook!” she cried, panic rising in her voice.  Moving to him the enormity of what had happened began to wash over her in waves.  He too was dead, stripped of the Force, stripped of his very essence and in that instant she was unable to move.  She could not look towards the last and dearest of her Masters.

Her whisper was strangled, “Kavar…”  She took a deep breath and stood, moving purposely to the spot where he lay.  She lowered herself to the grass and leaned forward.  She grasped Kavar gently by the shoulders, turning him over and pulling him into her lap.  “Oh Kavar…where have you gone?”  She stroked his hair, “You were innocent.  You listened to me, you admitted the fear of the counsel, you were open to the idea that perhaps the teachings were flawed.  You were not arrogant…you trusted me…”

They had all trusted her, perhaps against their own senses.  Even Master Vrook with his caustic demeanor had agreed to meet in this place and had imparted his teaching upon her.  She realized they had been right about her.  She had killed them all.  Her eyes widened as the rage rose from within her like a tidal wave.  She screamed and it was more powerful than any force scream mustered in battle.  She screamed until she tasted blood.  She screamed until she thought her heart would burst, hoping with her entire soul that it would.

In that moment she was intimately familiar with what had cut her off from the force.  The sheer magnitude of loss was tearing at her.  She now knew that she had pulled out all of the connections herself until she was deaf, until she was blind.  She had done it to keep the storm of anguish from tearing her apart.  Not this time.  She opened herself to the rage, to the agony and let it lash at her.  She would not deafen herself to punishment this time.

Kreia…

Kreia…

Kreia…

The words whispered in her skull, slicing through the undirected pulsations of rage and pain.  Kreia…her anger began to come into focus.  Manipulator…agony joined in.  Betrayer…her power focused like a blade.

“I will destroy you Kreia.  I will obliterate every shred of evidence that you ever existed if it takes my life.  I will end you so thoroughly and so utterly that the Universe will barely register a whisper when it comes.  You will be forgotten.  None shall mourn you and I will use my power to the very end to ensure the force thrives.”

Very gently she lowered Kavar back to his resting place.  He wore a small Ondoronian royal seal on a thin cord around his neck.  She removed it and placed it in her side pouch.  She would return it to Talia and tell her all that had happened in person.  Another heart would be broken, another life thrown into chaos because of the trust that had been placed in her.  Stroking his hair again and for the last time she stood.

“I will not leave you to the Kath Hounds”

Raising her right arm, her newly focused power exploded lifting the Earth directly in front of her into the air.  She buried her masters, her mentors and the last of the Jedi Council in one graceful movement.  Focusing on the remains of the courtyard she delicately unearthed one of the Trees of Life and moved it to rest on the grave.  She coaxed it into bloom, took one long last look and turned to leave.

Her friends.

The masters were dead, Kreia was gone and her friends were sitting ducks in the Ebon Hawk.  The Exile broke into a solid, steady run towards Koonda and the Ebon Hawk as she tugged her comm out of her belt.  

“Atton!” she yelled, “Atton, do you read me?!”

The comm crackled to life, “Something up?” came the slow, familiar drawl.

"Atton!  Where is Kreia?  Has she returned to the Hawk yet?”

“Nooooo…I thought she was with you?” he replied, his voice immediately sounding cautious.

“She was…” the Exile took a deep breath, speaking softly, “Atton, she has fallen to the dark side…she murdered the Masters...they’re all gone…”

The comm registered nothing but static.

“Atton?” she queried,  “Atton, this is important.  I think she may be headed straight for you and the rest of the crew.  I need you to take off immediately.”

There was a sound of the comm being engaged from the other end.  A moment passed and he spoke, sounding more deadly serious than she had ever heard him.

“What about you?”

“Atton, I’m alright.  She couldn’t have been planning to kill me…at least not yet.  I promise you I’m safe but you aren’t.  Please, I need you to take off right now!”  she replied, the urgency in her voice rising.

But no reply came.

“Rand?  RAND?!”

Cursing she jammed the comm back into her belt and picked up the pace of her stride to a sprint.  Her gait cut a swath through the long blades of grass as the wind whipped past her temples.  With each step, broken stalks released a soft, vague sweetness into the air as the sun gently warmed her back.  It was as if the very surface of Dantooine was attempting in vain to soothe her.  

In many ways this place reminded her of Mical-sweet, gentle and coolly composed but powerful.  It was not surprising to her at all that the Jedi Council had chosen to build the Enclave on Dantooine.  The planet was the very embodiment of the Jedi Code.  It was peace, it was knowledge and it was serenity at its core.

Mical…Atton…Bao…her companions.  “How many death warrants have I signed?  Is this your reward for your faith in me?” she thought.  Kreia had been a masterful manipulator.  She had succeeded in destroying the last of the masters in the ruins of their own Enclave and now she was gone and her dear friends were in danger.  Images of them began to flash through her head as she ran.

She thought of Atton.

She had engaged in more than one heated private discussion with Kreia about him.  Kreia insisted that he was a fool time and time again.  In hindsight she realized that this insistence was the first hint of manipulation.  He was no fool; that was apparent to her the moment she met him.  In fact, he had one of the shrewdest minds she had ever encountered.  He had organized his behavior and his very thoughts down to the last detail in her presence initially and his vigilance at maintaining his façade never faltered.  If she had blindly accepted Kreia’s judgment of him and treated him as a fool he would have been lost to her.  Thankfully she had given him her trust and treated him with respect.  In time he allowed her in and revealed the truth of who he had been.  She had helped him reconnect with the Force but he was still so untrained that it worried her.  This was coupled with the fact that he carried an enormous burden of emotion with him that he could no longer control.  More than once it had occurred to her that in another time and another place she could have easily been one of his victims.  She knew he was keenly aware of that and she had felt the guilt within him.  She also had felt his jealousy over her closeness with Mical.  With Kreia bound straight for the Hawk, what would happen to him?  Would she force him to turn to the dark side or would she just kill him outright?

She thought of Mical.

He was the first person she had encountered in years who was not broken in some way on the inside.  The others had assumed he was inexperienced-a wide-eyed innocent, that he was so immersed in his studies that it rendered him totally incapable of comprehending the enormity of what they had survived.   She knew they were wrong.  He had been of age when the Mandalorian Wars had started.  He was more than old enough to remember both the wars themselves and those he had lost to them.  There wasn’t a family in the galaxy that had escaped those conflicts unscathed.  The difference with Mical was that he was a natural healer.  In everything he did, he sought to cure, to fix, to soothe.  There was no doubt that he was powerful.  She had watched him destroy all manner of charging beasts on Dxun without breaking a sweat.  He had also easily led his team through Freedon Nadd’s tomb while she was on Onderon.  In typical fashion he had done all he could to heal the dark energy within.  But what was natural for him was to channel that power towards healing.  He had large, strong hands that could easily crush a kath hound’s neck but he applied them to things like fixing blaster wounds and compiling as many Jedi teachings as he could find.  He existed to make things right and did so with gentle concern and unabashed love.  If Kreia hurt him, if she so much as glanced in his direction…her eyes flared.  

She thought of Bao Dur.

Her soft-spoken Zabrak tech had known her the longest.  She had come to know him so well throughout their travels together on the Hawk and she felt guilty that she hadn’t recognized him initially on Telos.  She had taken quite a spectacular blow to the head but that wasn’t the cause of her memory loss.  When she had severed her connection to the Force she also forced a lot of her memories of the war into the very back of her mind.  Without them continually assailing her thoughts she could function.  It wasn’t that she hadn’t noticed him as a tech back then, she certainly had.  He was bright and innovative and an utter perfectionist when it came to his work but as a General she had only spoken to him directly once or twice in passing.  Complicating matters was his preference to separate himself from the rest of the crew.  It was absolutely imperative for him to have a busy mind and she knew he was happiest when he had some project to work on.  She also knew he was unsure of his appearance when he was around humans.  He was aware of the human folklore surrounding creatures with horns and he never felt truly comfortable when he was in a group of them.  In her mind’s eye she could see him now-hunched over a small circuit panel with his remote hovering nearby.  His features were illuminated by the soft blue light that emanated from his repulsor arm.  His dark eyes were completely focused, his jaw set as he trained his Macrofuser and the tiny web of electronics that lay before him.  He was beautiful to her.

Finally the Ebon Hawk came into view and without breaking stride she raced towards the ramp.  “Dammit Rand!” she thought.

They were all beautiful to her.