A clay-like, opaque sky looms over a rainbow landscape filled with a variety of peculiar plants. It is morning. In this meadow, Rey is reading through the Jedi texts again. She whispers to herself, “It’s starting to make sense now.”
But she hits a roadblock. So she closes her eyes, and tries to re-connect with the Force. As she tries to search for it, she starts speaking, “Tell me where you are hurting. Let me help you.”
A voice answers her: “You could never help me.”
Rey opens her eyes, and in front of her, a few feet away, is Kylo Ren.
“It’s been months. Why are you back?” she asks, exasperated.
“You think I want to be here?” he answers. Then, Kylo becomes alert, and stares at her. He notices she’s hiding something from him. A serious expression dawns upon his face. “I sense someone powerful near you. Luke is alive?”
“He’s the one who will stop the Force disruptions.”
Angrily, Kylo says, “He thinks he can stop them?”
Rey snaps at him, “So you’ve noticed. The anomalies ripping through the universe? The Force that’s spiraling out of control? There’s something more important at stake than this war. Once that is dealt with, we will go after you and the First Order.”
“A distraction. That’s what those anomalies are. Crushing the Resistance is far more important.”
Rey retaliates, saying, “You’ll never win.” She tries to walk away, but there’s nowhere she can go. Kylo asks her again, “So you weren’t talking to me. Who were you trying to talk to?”
“It’s none of your business.”
“It was the Force, wasn’t it?”
Rey stops, then asserts, “Don’t be ridiculous. The Force isn’t some living thing.” She lets out a short, faint laugh. “What, do you think I’m crazy?”
Kylo replies, “No, I think you’re bad at hiding things.”
Rey turns around and walks up to him, “Then tell me. What do you think the Force is?”
“Perhaps it has a soul.”
Rey walks back. No, she thinks to herself. It can’t be.
Kylo calls out, “I feel it deep within you. Somehow, you know that place, too.”
Rey remains silent.
Kylo continues, “Han taught me the secrets to handling Mavubiks when I traveled with him. But that was just a chore. No one else saw it as a game, or knew the words to the tricks I created. There is only one other person who would.”
Rey finally shouts back, “And she wants nothing to do with you ever again!”
They are covered by silence. And then Kylo, in a hushed tone, speaks again: “So it is you.”
“You knew Anakin,” Rey yells, her heart pounding rapidly, her breath short. “What did you do with him?”
Kylo shouts back, “Why are you asking me? You know the answer already!”
Rey whispers, “No...” She tries to deny it as much as she can. “It couldn’t have been you.” She regains her composure, “Stop this. I don’t want to hear about it again. I’ve moved on, and the only thing I want to do is to help the Resistance defeat you.”
Just then, Rey feels herself fading away. Kylo feels it too. They are leaving this non-physical world.
In his parting words, Kylo tells her, “It’s either Luke, or me.”
Rey replies, “You were the one who wanted to leave.”
“You don’t understand; I just couldn’t show you why!” A questioning look grows upon Rey. She asks, “Show me what?” She steps towards him. But before Kylo can answer, he sees her fade away.
He wakes up back in the First Order base, and suddenly feels a rush of water pour over him, as if he was drowning. He coughs and tries to breathe, and scrambles to sit up. As soon as he does, he sees Serei next to him, holding a dripping, near empty glass of water. He’s in a meeting room, and was sitting in front of a large, circular table.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Wh- what the hell are you doing?”
Serei, looking guilty, says, “Um, a bunch of us were in the middle of a presentation by Hux, and then you started dozing off. We couldn’t get you to wake up and Hux got so angry that he just left. It’s only been you and me in this room for the past 20 minutes. I tried everything I could to wake you up.”
Kylo wipes the water from his face with his gloved hand. Though irritated, he says nothing, and struts out of the room.
LUKE is standing on a mountain cliff, overlooking the branches of blue, green, red and violet streaking through the plains. The sun is almost setting. Reddish clay covers the cliffs. Rey, bothered by something but trying to shrug it off, walks into the picture.
“How did your meditation in the sacred expanse go?” he asks her.
“I came across some roadblocks, but I’ve gotten past them. I’ve cracked a lot of the Jedi texts. I know what they’re about.”
Luke looks at her, with a steadfast look in his eye, “I’m ready to listen.”
Rey tells him, “The texts aren’t just manuals about how to craft things. It has stories too. And all the events that we’ve been going through... are similar to the ones that occurred in this chapter of the book.”
“Visiting Etilma? Saving its people? Meeting with the guardian? Does it mention us?”
“No, not literally. All the stories seem like nonsense. But in them are patterns that I realize repeat themselves throughout history. One of the stories is about rebellion. Fighting against a greater power. There’s a villain who turned to the dark side, a great weapon, and his son.” Luke listens in with even greater intensity. Rey continues, “I believe it’s an event that must have happened many times before, throughout these millions of years. Another is about two planets joining together for peace and unity. The stories themselves aren’t important; the patterns are.”
“If these stories were written long ago, how could they refer to events that are happening just now?” Luke asks.
Rey replies, “It’s because this text is a collection of force visions. My guess is that Jedi masters would meditate and write down what they felt. The force visions they had were about patterns that would occur not just once, but many times, in a cycle over and over.”
Luke follows up and says, “How do you know all this?”
“This isn’t the first time these planets were visited, in this order, for the purpose of stopping the Force disruptions,” Rey says, “Remember the poems about the five people- each of them being a personification of the planet we have to visit? We’ve already visited two of them. There are clues that one of them- the strongest one- is above the rest. It may even take the control out of whoever’s doing all of this.”
“Then we have to find that one. It’s the most important.” Luke pauses, thinks for a moment, and says, “All this goes with something I’ve been thinking about. If what...” Suddenly, Rey’s vision gets blurry. She tries to fight it, but she feels herself fading away. She hears Luke continuing to talk: “...you’re saying is true, and the very first planet we visited was Etilma, where I...” Her vision is getting darker and darker, and she feels like she’s fading from the world. Luke’s words begin to grow quieter and quieter: “...set foot on long ago, then some I must be connected to these...”
Rey feels herself fading away in blackness. It’s happening again. Her connection to the other world. But just then, she hears “REY!” She wakes up to the sound of Luke shouting at her.
“Rey! You zoned out again. Just like-”
“Like Ben?” Rey says without thinking, then gasps and tries to take back her words.
Luke’s eyes widen, and asks, “How did you know?”
“Just... a lucky guess,” Rey sputters.
Luke sighs. “Before Ben turned to the dark side, sometimes I’d find him zoning out in the middle of my lessons. My other students would mock him for it, and I tried to get them to stop. When I asked him what he was doing, he just wouldn’t answer. He was a quiet, kind kid, but he didn’t get along with some other students, who thought he had an unfair edge over them for being the teacher’s nephew. Eventually, as he struggled to stay at my academy, he began to change.”
Rey pauses, in deep thought, and then asks Luke, “Were you close to him?”
Luke replies, “I tried to be. I wanted to help him. I told him that he had the potential to be a great, compassionate Jedi. That he had time to grow and learn from his mistakes. I could feel that he wanted to try his best, but there was something about him that I just could never reach. I sensed an innate darkness in him, so when he first asked to join my school, I told him I had to work with him on his issues before I could. But I could never find the time to do so. It wasn’t until his powers grew, and Leia and Han couldn’t control him anymore, that I realized I was his only hope left. But I couldn’t help him. No one could.”
Struck with too many painful memories, Luke leaves the grounds, leaving Rey alone.
THE sun sets. As Rey sits in the meadow at night, she continues to try to contact the Force. But no matter how hard she tries, it never calls back to her. She whispers to herself, “What should I do?” There is no breeze, no running streams, no echoes of creatures in the night. Just her. A moment passes, and at last, she gives in, whispering, “The Hooded Beast.”
A voice answers: “I knew you would be back.”
“I need to see it. What you wanted to show me.”
“It’s all true. There’s a world, nothing like this one.”
Rey speaks back to him: “Can we ever visit it again?”
“We have to try.”
Rey opens her eyes, and finds herself with Kylo in the darkness again. They don’t speak another word to each other. Immediately, Rey kneels down on the dark surface beneath her, and places her hand on the ground, then begins to draw a strange symbol. As she does, a neon flickering glimmers, tracing out her outlines. Right after she does, Kylo kneels down and join her. They start drawing faster and faster, as if it is all coming back to them with more and more familiarity as they relinquish themselves to it. As the two draft these strange symbols, they look each other in the eyes, and then, a flash of incredible light transports them into a different world.