8
THE DAGOBAH SYSTEM
IN ORBIT ABOVE THE PLANET DAGOBAH
The dark-green planet loomed below, its dayside filling the viewport. The Dathomirian Curse was still sailing comfortably in the orbit R-3PO had set for her, and so far there had been no contacts with satellites or ships of any kind. Just in case, though, Ageless had shut everything off except life-support and passive sensors. He had not yet looked for an approach vector for a landing. Making sure they were undetectable was his focus right now. He wore a headset, from which he listened repeatedly to the message R-3PO had decrypted.
“Do not come near this place,” said a raspy, beleaguered humanoid voice. It was layered on top of the original recording, which R-3PO had translated from. “Attempt…no rescue. He means…he means to be left alone. Leave us all to our deaths. Leave us. Here…there is only death.”
Ageless wiped away the translation and listened only to the original message.
“Act’no by come hee,” said the same exhausted voice. “Ageen…nay ma ch’rescue. Gasha be…gasha be left himself. Away with us to tey’dark. Away with us. Thiz been place…be only for you tey’dark.”
“This must be the flight recorder message that Gaffrey said has been lingering out here around Dagobah for years,” Ageless said. He adjusted the signal gain, to try and clean it up. “You said this was some kind of thieves-cant that your former master used to know?”
Sitting in the co-pilot’s seat next to him, R-3PO nodded, a humanoid-like gesture he'd picked up and now was stuck with. “Yes, sir. My master’s name was…well, tell the truth, I don’t remember. I believe I was given a selective mindwipe before the Rebels left Echo Base, just in case I was taken aboard one of their ships and my servos were sifted for Alliance secrets. In any case, the mindwipe was incomplete, and so I do recall bits and pieces of this thieves-cant.”
“So then it was left by smugglers?”
“If I had to guess? Yes.”
Ageless looked ahead through the viewport at three small chunks of an unknown starship’s hull. Two of the pieces appeared to be from a wing of some kind, and the other was definitely part of a cockpit. And within that cockpit portion was a flight recorder sending out a final emergency message. Ageless had already remote-sliced the flight recorder. It wasn’t that difficult, the Curse’s antenna could pinpoint and then receive leaking radio signals from the transceiver/receiver inside the dead ship’s comms, which performed the encryption that made the device secure. These leaked signals appeared as only peaks and valleys in the radio waves before they were converted by the Curse’s computer into the ones and zeroes that made up the base electrical signal. Looking at the base signal, he was able to use his slicing skills to send back a ping, tricking the flight recorder into thinking he was a systems admin, and thus giving him greater access to the ship’s memory banks.
Not much was left in the memory banks, they were too badly damaged, but there was enough to illuminate some of this mystery. According to the logs, the ship had been moving about the planet Dagobah for weeks, searching for signs of intelligent life below. When it had finally picked up a small, unidentified metallic aircraft, for some reason the crew decided to fly down low above Dagobah, and then started to bomb the surface. But then something happened. The ship (whose name was mentioned once as the Farseer) began to suffer structural damage, but not from any turbolaser fire. One of the logs mentioned “the bulkheads bend inwards, like we’re being crushed by a giant, invisible hand.”
The last recording from the Farseer’s captain indicated they were climbing back into high orbit, but their fuselage suffered a massive rupture and the message ended abruptly. Ageless suspected the ship had simply come apart in orbit. Most of its pieces had fallen back to the planet, but a few still remained in decaying orbit.
He leaned back in his seat. Behind him, somewhere just down the corridor, R4 was tinkering with some panel that had started coming loose. “Someone else was here. Hunting Vader’s quarry. Perhaps some bounty hunters the Empire sent, and they only got here after the quarry left this place. Then...something happened to them."
“You can’t know that for sure,” R-3PO said.
“No. But why carpet-bomb the surface for no reason?”
“Perhaps this ship belonged to a gang lord, and the people hiding on Dagobah at the time were his or her rivals. Or perhaps it was the Empire, as you say, but they were only looking for pirate encampments.”
“None of that feels right to me, not when judged against the Farseer's crew’s actions.” Ageless sighed. “What about you, Arfour? Pick up anything on your scanners when we first got here?” An astromech’s scanners could sometimes pick out unusual bio-readings that could be missed by a ship’s sensors, mostly just odd heat signatures. Didn’t happen often, but it had been known to occur.
R4 tweeted a negative and kept on working.
Ageless tsked. “What I figured. All right, I’m accepting theories. Who left this warning here? Who killed them? What do we think it means?”
R-3PO took on a pensive posture. “Could it be, sir, that since Darth Vader’s trail is the one we’ve followed here, and Sark was with him, that perhaps there was some unfortunate souls aboard a ship that came across Vader when he was last here, and this message is some sort of last-minute attempt by the dying crew to keep any others from suffering the same fate?”
Ageless tilted his head back and forth, weighing that. “Mmmm...no. Doesn’t make sense. Why would they warn people away from Vader when the Dark Lord isn’t known to just linger out here? It’s not like he was just going to sit here and wait for others to show up so he could kill them.”
“How do you know?”
That struck him with momentary horror. I guess I don’t, he thought, looking mistrustfully out at the void. Then he looked down at the planet. Dagobah. “I still don’t buy it. Why make a last-minute call like that without identifying yourself? And what’s with that part right here?” He replayed the part of the message that said, “He means to be left alone.” Ageless shook his head. “Who’s he? And why advise others to attempt no rescue? Who would be coming to rescue them way out here? What the blazes is out here that anyone would want to see?”
“We’re here,” R-3PO pointed out.
“Right, but we’re here to solve a puzzle, and so far we just keep getting more pieces. I can’t see the big picture yet.”
“So, then, what do we do now, sir?”
Ageless tapped one of his anterior horns, thinking. He gazed down at the planet. There was something familiar about this place. It almost felt…like…
Like I’m being watched.
Ageless stood up, paced around the cockpit a moment, and then leaned against a bulkhead, thinking. For some reason the image of his grandmother around the campfire came back to him. Then he turned back to face the viewport and the dark-green planet below as it slowly rolled underneath them. A strange, tingling sensation came over him, almost exactly like the one before, this time colder. Much colder. Perhaps coincidentally, an epiphany came to him at the exact same time. “Vader came here with Sark in search of a Jedi Master, supposedly long dead. They went down to the surface together, and apparently both got the feeling they were being watched the whole time. Vader left Sark alone for long periods of time, hunting on his own, but always came back empty-handed.” There was a long silence, during which all he heard were the air-scrubbers. “Then the Farseer tried to carpet-bomb the surface, and wound up getting its whole crew destroyed.” He nodded, suddenly certain about it. “There’s a Jedi Master down there, all right, and he’s not dead. And I don’t think he wants visitors.”
R4 chirped a question, and R-3PO slowly looked up at Ageless. “The Jedi have all been eradicated. Do you really think it’s possible one slipped through the Purge?”
Ageless glared at Dagobah, his newest enemy. His newest objective. “He’s down there.”
“What do you want to do, sir?”
“Set a course. I need answers, and this Jedi probably has them. Sark couldn’t find him, Vader couldn’t find him, but I’m going to find him.”
“And suppose you do, sir? What, then?”
And then I’m going to ask him what the Dark Voice is, and what these visions I’m having are all about, Ageless thought, but didn’t say. For there were only two possibilities for what he was going through: either there was something wrong with his mind, and he was truly becoming delusional, or else some other power had hold of him, a power he knew nothing about, but reminded him of the feelings he got around his grandmother’s fire. Dathomiri magick, she called it. Said it was in our family's blood. If it was the former, he was out here for no reason, and would soon lose his mind anyway. If the latter, however, what better person to speak to about mysticisms than a mystic?
“Just start the landing cycle,” he told R-3PO. “Arfour! Go in the back and get me a travel pack ready. We’re going hunting.”
* * *
The coordinates of the area of the planet where the Farseer had carpet-bombed was a good place to start. It was a stretch of nasty marsh by the looks of it, canopied by a dense fog and overlapping trees that sagged from the omnipresent dampness. As soon as the Dathomirian Curse touched the upper atmosphere, she experienced heavily turbulence. “Let’s try evening it out with orbital maneuvering thrusters,” Ageless hollered over the sound of bulkheads rattling. R-3PO obeyed without comment, and the Curse settled down a little, but she was still shivering like a womp rat’s cub caught out in the cold.
“There’s an awful lot of moisture clogging our exhaust—” the protocol droid began.
“I’ll take care of the flying. You just scan for a good landing spot.”
R-3PO’s red metallic fingers clicked and clacked on the keyboard, then tapped the main console screen. “Sir, there is a terrible amount of interference. It’s possible the plant life here has a very high metal content, or else there are problems with the planet’s magnetic field, like what we experienced between Bespin and its moons.”
Great.
Ageless Void stared through the viewport at a white mist. Dagobah’s one sun, Darlo, was dim this time of year. That was because of Dagobah’s wild orbit, which took it far off in a wide, elliptical course around the sun. Ageless discovered that what little sunlight the planet had was quickly diminished once you got into the thick of the mist. It was practically nighttime, even on the dayside. But what was more worrisome was that one second radar pinged the ground as being five hundred meters below them, then suddenly it was twenty meters, then a thousand. Ageless had never seen such erratic readings. He kept his left hand fastened to the attenuator. He could not trust the altimeter, so he gazed out the window, getting a feel for crosswinds and updraft, somehow able to sense that none of the altimeter’s readings were true.
I know the way, he thought. But how? It’s like I’ve been here before, but I know I haven’t.
“It’s good to see you in such good spirits, sir.”
He made a quick look over to R-3PO. “What?”
“You’re singing.”
“I am.”
“You were. A beautiful, uplifting melody, if I may say so. Very alien to my untrained ear. If I can be allowed some commentary, the song seemed to follow no logical flow, but rather created itself as it went.”
Thinking back a moment, Ageless realized he'd been humming the song his grandmother taught him.
“What is the name of the song, sir? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“Just keep your peepers focused on those sensors, Threepio.”
“Yes, sir. Of course. But…sir, beg your pardon, I had assumed we were going to abandon this mission.”
“Why would we do that?”
“Because we cannot see the ground. It is too dangerous to proceed, especially when no one knows where we are and there is zero chance of rescue.”
“We’re not going back.” Ageless reached overhead and flipped the two switches to activate repulsors. He gazed into the mist. “I know where to land.”
“You do?”
“Yes.”
“But how, sir? My sensors aren’t showing anything except enormous life readings.”
“Just trust me,” Ageless said. He tapped a button and extended the landing gear. Peering into that white fog, it was like he could see the layout of the land. Not the greater details, not how many trees there were or the number of dangerous creatures, just the topography, and even that was general. Somehow his gaze penetrated that fog and assembled a picture in his mind. He knew when to kill all downward speed and cant the front of the ship back, while dropping the rear down fast and skipping over a long body of water, heading for shore.
Suddenly, they were through the fog, and their forward lights set a black, swampy jungle in brilliant contours. There was a rocky shore ahead, and Ageless circled only once to alight on an outcropping. The Curse shuddered as the stabilizers in her landing gear fought for perfect balance, then locked it in and settled down.
It was near perfect night, and the forward lights showed them a single great eye. A serpent’s eye, half as large as the Dathomirian Curse herself! Ageless might have gasped, he wasn’t entirely sure, but he did hear R-3PO let out a quailing whimper before he stood up from his copilot’s seat and staggered backward and fell. Ageless remained perfectly seated, and was fascinated as the gargantuan iris widened, then shrank, and then the eyeball and its scaly owner turned out of the Curse’s floodlights and vanished. Ageless remained perfectly still, following the ancient instinct of all small would-be prey—that if he didn’t move, maybe he wouldn’t be noticed.
When the creature was gone, he let out a breath, and turned to help R-3PO up off the floor. “You all right?”
“I…I never knew I could be so…intimidated by a single entity,” the droid said.
Ageless made no comment. He looked again to make sure the monster had gone. R4 rolled up to the cockpit, dragging a travel pack behind it by its pincers. Wordlessly, Ageless pulled on the pack and clipped on the belt and cinched it tight. He walked down the corridor to the armory, and used his fingerprints on the scanner to open it and take out an A280 blaster rifle and a pair of grenades. He put a holdout blaster in the holster at his hip, and made sure the belt was tight. He wanted no excess. Didn’t want his clothing or gear to get snagged on all the foliage out there.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Sir, are you certain you want to go out there?” said R-3PO. The droid came walking into the armory with R4 at his side, and its quavering voice matched its slightly trembling limbs.
“I am.”
“I’m almost afraid to ask, but does that mean—?”
“No, you’re staying here to watch the ship. Arfour is coming with me, though. I’ll need his scanners. Come on, Arfour.”
“I’m almost afraid to ask, sir, but what does ‘watch the ship’ entail while we’re down here?”
“Lock the cargo ramp after we leave. Seal the ship entirely. No one in or out unless I’m with them. Sit in the cockpit with the door locked and a blaster rifle in your lap. Keep your hands on the controls and be ready to cycle up the engines and come pick us up at a moment’s notice.”
“But what if the sensor interference also inhibits our commlinks?”
“I’ve thought of that,” Ageless said, slapping the button that controlled the ramp. It lowered onto a sludgy ground and sank inches deep, and a cool yet muggy air entered the ship. “I’m going to check in with you over the commlink every half hour with our position relative to the Curse, including distance, cardinal direction and nearby landmarks. If ever I or Arfour don’t check in, lift off immediately and come to the last place we described at once.”
“Yes, sir. And, sir?”
“Yeah?”
“Be careful. I don’t have an organic being’s intuition, but I can collate data and forecast trouble from the problems I see around me. This planet and the circumstances surrounding it are not auspicious.”
“That’s saying the least.” Ageless walked into the cargo bay and grabbed the body of the dead Rebel they had snatched from space. He took great care to haul the body over his shoulder.
“You’re going to bury him here? On this planet?” asked R-3PO.
“Why not? I’m not likely to ever find his family. Rebs go out of their way to hide who they are, lest the Empire finds their families.” He sighed. “But at least if I ever do find them, I can direct them to the place they can lay flowers.”
Arfour was already rolling down the ramp, and Ageless went after him. He sank up to his ankles in the mud. When he was ten steps away from the Curse, the ramp closed behind him and he heard the magnetic and atmospheric seals take hold. The outgassing from the ship’s undercarriage filled the area with even more mist. Ageless stepped down from the rocks. Ahead of him was a black forest draped in dark-green vines. The place smelled of decay. Something large and brown and wampa-sized gazed at him from behind a dead log with three beady eyes, then turned and darted away, vanishing into the darkness.
Ageless looked over at the astromech. “Ready with that zapper of yours?"
R4 trilled and extended his electric welding torch.
Ageless checked his blaster rifle one last time. “Then let’s get to it.”
* * *
It was obvious he was going to have to use the lightsaber. The foliage was far too thick, vines grew between trees and attached like wet noodles to one another, so that it was impossible to tell where one tree ended and another began. Strange black trees wound serpent-like around smaller green trees, giving the appearance that the black trees were strangling them. In fact, Ageless swore he heard the trees moving, tightening, squeezing. Everything is alive and moving here, even if slowly.
The lightsaber was in his hand but unignited. He knew he was going to have to use it, but he did not want to. The saber's blade was bright blue and would announce his presence to anyone watching. But he had to penetrate the swamp, he had to make progress. He tripped over a log and nearly faceplanted into the mud. In places, he sank up to his knees, and once R4 actually turned on his jets to hover above Ageless and extended a pincer to pull him out. They trudged on, watching the hole where he had sunk completely fill in, as if he was never there. This place will swallow you and leave no trace, he thought. Part of him missed Hoth right now. “This is Ageless, checking in,” he said into his commlink.
“Copy,” R-3PO came back. “I read you loud and clear, sir.”
“I’m north of you, approximately two hundred meters away.” Panting, sweating, Ageless looked around for landmarks. The sun was barely visible through the caul of mist that hung over the treetops. There seemed to be three separate levels of mist—the mist in the sky, the mist just above the trees, and the mist that hovered just above the ground. Something jumped off a limb behind him and splashed into a puddle. Ageless saw a moss-covered boulder over to his right, which R4 was inspecting closely. “We’re by a large boulder, looks to be about seven meters tall, has a jagged peak.”
“Copy, sir.”
He had to keep updating R-3PO so the droid would know where to find him if comms stopped working completely. So far, the commlinks worked perfectly.
“Anything unusual to report?”
“Nothing so far, sir. There was a bit of movement earlier just outside the cockpit, a flying creature of some kind, perhaps a two-meter wingspan.”
Ageless sighed. “Affirmative. Keep an eye out. Arfour? Anything?”
The astromech tweeted a negative.
Ageless looked around at the mushy soil. This oughtta do for you, pal, he thought, and laid the body of the dead Rebel on the ground. It only took an hour to dig a hole deep enough to lay the Rebel to rest. Ageless said a prayer in his grandmother’s tongue. Arfour watched in respectful silence, but occasionally let out a low, nervous trill as it scanned the wilderness.
They kept moving.
* * *
They came to a hill that reminded Ageless of the one he'd been forced to ascend during his darktrooper training days. It was deceptively easy at first, for it wasn’t very steep, but soon the sludgy ground gave way to the barest of touch, and Ageless lost his balance, fell to his hands, tried to stand up, but before long he was crawling uphill on all fours and getting filthy. R4 was forced to use his jets but sparingly, flying over the terrain and alighting on a rock or tree stump.
Ageless pulled on the limbs and vines all around him, wrapped his hands around thorny roots that came up out of the ground, his lungs burning with the effort, sweat pouring from his brow. Gritting his teeth, he surmounted the hill, and then started down the other side. At one point he lost track of R4, but the droid reappeared, twittering excitedly. R-3PO translated and said that R4 claimed he had become lost somehow, even going so far as to say that the terrain almost seemed to move out here.
Ageless came to an area thick with underbrush and vines with razor-sharp thorns. “Dank ferrik,” he whispered, and finally ignited the lightsaber.
* * *
The first day was like this. They moved eighty or a hundred meters, hacked at vines, sat for a moment so that Ageless could get his bearings and check in with the Dathomirian Curse, as well as eat and drink, and then they plunged ahead, with Ageless using the lightsaber to slice through every bit of briars and brambles that got in his way. They made camp at night, right beside a slow-moving river filled with mud and bubbling. The river was knee deep and smelled of sulfur and decay. Everything here smelled of decay. The place was teeming with various forms of life and all of it was battling with something. Several times they passed the half-eaten corpse of some four-legged creature with rough gray hide, and each corpse had enormous bite marks on it. They had yet to see the creature with that kind of bite. There were a few hours when Ageless was sure they were being stalked, hunted by a pack of five or six creatures. He spotted the four-legged animals on the horizon, but they fled as soon as he and Arfour built a fire.
They had come to the general area where the Farseer had carpet-bombed the swamp, and so it was time to begin their investigation. But they could not do it now, as true night had fallen.
The travel kit came with insta-burners, and Ageless felt like he had already announced himself enough to the local wildlife by using the lightsaber, so a fire wouldn’t be much more of a beacon. After a final check-in with R-3PO, he and R4 settled into a pattern where one of them slept (or recharged in R4’s case) for two hours while the other one stood watch. In truth, Ageless did not sleep much. Or, more accurately, he could no longer tell when he was awake and when he was dreaming, for the longer he stayed out in this stinking bog, the more he felt compelled to sing the song his grandmother taught him by the fire, and the more certain he was that he was back there, on Dathomir, just a boy gazing into the flames and trying to find the stars his grandmother said was within.
Whenever R4 woke him to take over his shift, Ageless never quite felt like he had truly rested. Rather, he felt like he had left one dreamworld and awakened into another. During his watch, Ageless would slowly patrol the camp, walking around its perimeter, occasionally dropping to do twenty or thirty push-ups or squats or stretches. Often, he would sit on a log or a stump, and stare out into the utter darkness that surrounded their campfire. He got the strange sense the forest was staring back at him. It felt like something saw him.
It felt like...like it had before.
Like I'm being watched.
* * *
“You should now be at the exact spot the Farseer’s flight recorder said was the target zone,” R-3PO said. His transmission still came in clear over the commlink. “Do you see any clear signs of damage?”
“Negative,” Ageless said, nudging a rock with his toe to look underneath. “I get the feeling any damage to Dagobah gets covered quick. Just looking at this place, you can tell life here heals fast.” He used the lightsaber to slice through a giant knot of vines, each one twice the width of a man’s arm, then switched it off and wiped his sweaty brow. “It’s stifling in here. I was hoping to find some sign of what the Farseer’s crew might’ve been hitting, some old shelter left by their target, something to indicate which way they went. But that’s impossible here. Dagobah doesn’t have the—”
Suddenly, a voice whispered behind him. Ageless stopped talking and turned, and for a moment he was certain he saw a man standing twenty feet away, just behind where R4 was parked in the mud. It was a tall, darkly-dressed man, with long, spindly arms, and in his hand he held something. It looked familiar. Ageless had just determined that it was an object similar to the lightsaber hilt in his hand, only longer, made out of bone. Ageless could make out no more details about the dark man before he vanished. "What...the...?" he whispered.
“Sir, are you all right? You broke off.”
Ageless betrayed nothing. “Yeah...yeah, I’m all right, Threepio. Thanks." He shook it off. Must be seeing things. "Arfour and I are going to look around a bit more. If we haven’t found anything in a couple hours, we’re going to head back.”
“Understood, sir. It will be a relief to have you both back.”
There was that voice again. A soft, masculine voice, whispering something inarticulate into his ear. Ageless didn’t even look around. He didn’t need to. He knew the dark man would be there, but that he would vanish as soon Ageless looked. It was like being in a dream, where you knew the rules even as they were being written. And it was strange taking his next steps through the swamp, not knowing if this was all just a dream, an illusion brought on by exhaustion...or something else.
* * *
If it was a dream, it was a devilish and protracted one.
They had prodded the land for two hours, and so far had not even found so much as an ration bar wrapper, or a canteen, or the flap of an old tent, or any signs of scorched trees or grass or rock. No sign anyone had ever been here besides them. R4 did come across another carcass, this one a ronto-sized animal with two heads. Both the animal’s necks had been opened and its belly had been mostly devoured. Ageless thought the bite marks looked like the ones they had been seeing on the other carcasses, and R4 agreed, producing hologram recordings of the others and comparing them.
Ageless no longer heard the whispers calling to him, but he did sense many people around him, or perhaps that was just an illusion, too. Maybe the same unknown predators as before were back, and his troubled mind was only bending the true meaning of what his senses were telling him.
And maybe I’m still asleep. Maybe we never made it to Dagobah. Maybe I died on Phaeda and all of this is my last thought, a vision extended from my last breath. Maybe it only feels real.
R4 let out a low, mournful beep.
“Sir, Arfour says he’s detected a small lifeform,” R-3PO reported , his transmission now slightly staticky. “Very faint, but he says it’s close to you.”
He turned to look at the astromech. “Where is it, Arfour?”
The astromech spun its down head to face the southeast.
Ageless headed in that direction. With each step he sank to his shins. It was like the planet wanted to devour him, ingest him, erase him like it had the crew of the Farseer. Soon he may be dead, and R4 destroyed, and the Dathomirian Curse would be a relic slowly sinking into the mud, with its sole droid occupant calling for help until its batteries were all drained and there was nothing left, nothing to indicate what happened to the former Imperial asset known as Ageless Void.
As he walked, he heard weeping.
Ageless stopped and turned to see his mother and father, kneeling before their son’s grave, weeping for what sort of man he had become. He blinked, and saw his grandmother staring at him. She shouted at him scathingly that she had never loved him, could never love him, and that his whole life had been a joke. She threw her head back and laughed at him. She laughed so hard her mouth widened unnaturally and her flesh began to burn.
R4 tweeted a question.
Ageless turned his back on the hallucination and walked on. He was becoming more and more comfortable with the idea that he was losing it.
He walked through an area where the trees seemed to lean out to grab him. Limbs like fingers groped at his throat. In a rage, he ignited the lightsaber and slashed at them, grunting through gritted teeth. His slashes were wild and undisciplined. Twice he nearly hit R4, and the astromech activated its thrusters and floated away from him.
Ageless attacked the dark swamp angrily, hearing his grandmother’s mocking laugh and his parents’ laments. Then he switched off the lightsaber and stood there panting and glared hatefully at the forest. “You’re not going to do this to me,” he whispered. He took big gulps of air, trying to recompose himself. “You don’t get to win! To blazes with you, you don’t get to win!"
Ageless clipped the lightsaber to his belt. A cinnamon-y and moldy aroma climbed the night. His feet slowly sank into the mud, like the planet was trying to claim him. He turned his focus inward, and walked on.
He made it another hundred meters before he became aware someone was behind him.
“Pass that test, everyone does not,” said a strange voice.
Ageless stopped in his tracks. He turned around slowly and saw nothing but darkness behind him. But, once his eyes adjusted, he saw a small creature seated on one of the trees he had sliced in half moments ago. The figure could have been mistaken for a lump on the tree, and the long, pointy ears could have been wicked leaves. Just beside the lumpy, shadowy figure, was R4. The droid was on his side, seemingly deactivated, though no damage was visible.
Calmly, Ageless drew his holdout blaster.
“That song you sing,” the figure said. “Pleasant, it is. Who taught it to you?”
Ageless shrugged. “To be honest, I didn’t even know I was singing.”
With a small cane, the figure gestured. “Away with your weapon, please. I mean you no harm.”
Ageless shook his head. “Afraid the blaster isn’t going anywhere, friend.”
Suddenly the blaster was yanked out of his hand and went flying across the swamp and into the small creature’s hand! In a flash, Ageless pulled the A280 blaster rifle from his back and aimed it at the black lump on the log. The creature held Ageless’s holdout blaster in his hand, but he did not aim it at him. Indeed, the blaster was pointed limply at the ground.
“How…” Ageless began, still unsure whether or not he was dreaming. “How did you do that?”
“The same way all beings do. Reached out and grabbed it, I did.”
“Sithspit. You’re twenty meters away.”
“At least,” the creature said. “But distance matters not. It’s all relative to the mind.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If you walk towards me, get halfway to me, you must. But before you can get halfway, get one-quarter of the way, you must. But before you can get one-quarter of the way, get one-eighth of the way, you must.” The creature chuckled, then coughed and cleared his throat. “It goes on and on like this, where, just to walk towards me, complete an infinite number of tasks, you must. So, in truth, you should never be able to reach me, no matter how many steps you take. And yet, we cross distances all the time. Walk across the room to fetch water, we do. So that must mean the impossible is not impossible at all, and that the distance between objects is no matter. The same goes for time. All the time in the universe, we have, to have this talk. Because time lasts. Where else does time go? What else has it to do, besides last?”
Ageless had listened to the creature’s entire diatribe while keeping the rifle trained on its head. He took one step forward, but he stopped, sensing a barrier. He did not know whence this barrier came, only that it existed, as though the creature had placed some type of forcefield around its little self. He knew that should he take another step, something bad would happen.
“You said I passed a test just now,” Ageless said. “What test?”
“I think you know.”
“No, I don’t. So tell me.”
“Your grandmother, Shreya was.”
Ageless froze.
“Yes. Too young to be her son, you are. Must be her grandson. How is she?”
“How do you know my grandmother?”
“Singing her song just now, you were.” The creature picked at the log he was sitting on with his cane. “Spoke of me, she must have.”
Still not certain he was awake for any of this, Ageless slowly lowered his rifle, but still kept it at low-ready (old habits died hard). “My grandmother…she…she never spoke of you. Unless—”
Then sing the song. Sing the song to Yoda when you meet him.
“Yoda?”
“There. You see?” The creature laughed. “A tight-knit group, the Witches of Dathomir are. A weak woman, your grandmother was not. She would never teach that song to anyone else. Told me that anyone that sang it would be someone trusted, she did. A family member in need of help. Meant everything to her, her family did. Saw something in you, she must have. Knew you would come here, did she.”
Yoda hopped down from the log and walked over to R4. With a small gesture, he seemed to reactivate the droid remotely, and R4 used its many arms to right itself, and swiveled its dome around confusedly.
“Come. Much to discuss, we have.”
Ageless blinked several times, still trying to determine if this was real. His mind was slowly coming to terms with the fact that he was awake and aware. “Where are we going?”
“To fulfill the promise I made to your grandmother.”
“What promise?”
Yoda stopped and looked over his shoulder. “To complete your training.” He walked on into shadow.
Seconds went by like hours. Ageless exchanged a glance with R4. Then, he followed Yoda.