Epilogue
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The grottos beneath the Praxeum were warm, dark and humid. Away from the sprawling jungles above, the moon grew quieter and closer, full of seeping stalactites, crystal pools and infinite winding passages that snaked deeper and deeper and deeper still. Entire ecosystems of species made their lives down in those depths, breeding cave-fish without eyes and colonial insects feeding from nocturnal mammal droppings. Down in the darkness of the grottos was no great fear, for life pressed all around as vibrant in the Force as a lume and as welcome as the depths of her homeworld. Cilghal lazed in one of the many, many pools, taking long, deep breaths of the cooling waters, contrasting to the warmth of the air.
It helped soothe the aching in her lungs and throat. Each breath she pulled on the Force, let it flow through her like the oxygenated waters and on each exhale she washed out a little bit more of her fevers. Shriveled cells full of degenerated organelles autoclaved, feeding scrap nutrients to their neighbors. Withered lamella surged with fresh blood and renewed. Shriveled alveoli plumped out.
It was a work of weeks, slow and steady, and fatigue drew on the Mon Calamari again. She could only manage a quarter hour, perhaps half. At least an improvement from needing full submergence in bacta, tended to around the clock by medi-droids even while she bent every fibre of her being toward clinging to life. She didn’t fear death, but she still had so, so much more to do. Sometimes Sannah joined Cilghal, keeping her company, the young Melodie a delight as she powered through the waters. Even as a child and not in her mature form, Sannah was as powerful as swimmer as any Mon Calamari.
Tionne’s gentle presence tickled Cilghal’s senses and she craned her neck, peering back toward the turbolifts that led to the upper grottos. The silver-haired woman, in black-and-silver robes, raised a hand in greeting and beamed.
“Good morning Cilghal,” she whispered, as if afraid to break the serenity of the pool. “How are you feeling?” Tionne drew up to the side of the pool, barefoot, and eased down to sit at the very edge, trailing toes in the cool water.
“Better every day.” Cilghal slowly swept her webbed fingers through the water, enjoying the flow over her digits. “I had the strangest dream while I slept.”
“Oh?” Tionne asked.
“I dreamed I was back in the creche.” Her dream was so vivid, so lifelike, that for a moment after waking she struggled to remember where she was, pulling herself up through cloying layers of blurring reality. Part of her demanded she fall back asleep, chasing the dreamscape, nostalgic and eager to return to that stranger, realer world until full wakefulness took hold. “It was a science lesson and we were learning about…I’m not sure what. I don’t think it is any animal native to Dac that I know. We were all so full of energy and I didn’t want to wait for the lesson, I wanted to go swimming.” In that matter-of-fact, dreamlike way, she just knew that her friends were out exploring the reef without her. She didn’t want to learn about boring old fish, she wanted to see them! “But something was so important that I had to stay and listen.”
Tionne hummed interest, not interrupting.
“It’s the most vivid part. She was teaching us about a kind of cephalopoid that lived in the deep reefs. It had the strangest kind of life cycle. It was a hermaphroditic organism and it self-fertilized. My teacher was telling us about how strange its reproductive cycle was, I think as an example of the complexity of life. It’s something that’s important on Dac. This creature, when it was female, it would give birth to its young, which were these tiny, tiny perfect copies of its adult form. But what made it unique is that they wouldn’t detach from their umbilical cords. Instead, they stayed connected to the mother and wandered just around where the mother was anchored. The adult forms fused themselves to limestone, like an anemone. It’s so strange, I can still see the holograms if I close my eyes.”
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“There’s nothing like that on Dac?”
“Not that I know of. Well, I can’t pretend to know every species, but it seemed so strange that I’m sure I would have heard of it.”
“We could look it up?”
“Maybe.”
“Continue, I’m interested.”
Cilghal submerged her mouth again, cooling her throat and vocal chords a moment.
“The young would feed and explore while still attached to the mother, and the umbilical started to work both ways. The mother would pass nutrients to the babies and the babies would pass excess back to the mother. It was helpful for the mother, since once this species anchored itself, their tentacles shrunk, so the young could wander much farther than the mother could reach.”
“That’s a very symbiotic relationship.”
“It would be, except that there was more. While the young were growing, the parent would undergo metamorphosis and shift to male.” Cilghal shivered, remembering the vivid holograms showing what came next, the way her teacher delved into detail, more than was necessary. She could feel the pit in her stomach, as her child dream-self trembled and listened well. “The parent would reel in the young by their umbilicals, using his vestigial tentacles. They showed us how the young would struggle and struggle, trying to get free. Some managed to snap their umbilicals and flee, bleeding into the water around them, but those that didn’t - the parent, now the father, would eat.”
Awake now, remembering her dream, she wondered why it had been such an unsettling concept to her dream-self. Nature was inventive and nature was amoral. Animals did whatever they had to to proliferate and continue the species. A stintaril eating a whisper bird didn’t hate the poor bird, it just needed the food. Nature couldn’t be evil or cruel, not really. That was for sapients, the struggle that consciousness had to overcome.
“The lesson was about how that struggle was necessary to pinch off the arteries and veins in the umbilical cord and to strengthen the gills of the young. Without the struggle, they couldn’t live on their own. For the parent, eating those that couldn’t get away returned nutrients for the next generation and pruned the weaker offspring that might not survive in the wild. Such a strange kind of thing: she breeds, he feeds. I don’t know why it stuck with me.”
“Dreams can mean many things.” Tionne drew her feet up from the pool, tucking them beneath her as she sat leaning on one arm. “Especially for those like us. Do you think it was a metaphor?”
Cilghal shrugged, ripples chasing each other away from her, across the glassy surface of the pool.
“If it did, I can’t find it. Just a strange dream.”
They sat in silence for a while, a comfortable one, of friends who had no reason to fill the air. Since returning to Yavin after Priestess Elan’s assassination attempt, Cilghal had spent more time with Tionne than she had in years and remembered how well they got along. The silver-haired Jedi Master had asked only what she could do to make Cilghal’s recuperation easier, keeping Cilghal company during many long nights when the lingering, rapacious infection of the yuuzhan vong parasite burned hardest. Tionne was no healer, but she lent a shoulder and a measure of her own strength to Cilghal. Ism Oolos, Mara’s own specialist doctor, had suggested Dac might help Cilghal the most, embracing the life-web of her homeworld, but she thanked the stars each day she’d chosen Yavin.
The moon just spoke to them all, all the Jedi, in ways none could really describe. Home in a way that her water-shrouded homeworld just wasn’t, peaceful in a way that a jungle just shouldn’t. And the children, all of them, so active and energetic, lent a powerful balm all its own. Strange dreams, but she was a healer. Wild thoughts and imaginings borne from fever and illness were a condition she knew well, and she put it from her head. Already her eyelids drooped, feeling heavier and heavier, her small-but-growing pool of energy drained from even a brief conversation. Her dream teacher’s words came back to her as she drifted off into welcoming slumber, running through her mind on loop. She breeds, he feeds.
A many-tentacled cephalopoid hauled in its young, puncturing them with one, long, sword-like tooth, held in a jawless maw. Cilghal thought nothing more, taken by dreamless, restful sleep.