by Troy Denning
We can save her.
Han didn’t ask what it would cost, because he didn’t want to know. He would give almost anything to save Leia—his sight, his hearing, his sanity, his life, his spirit—whatever it was that made him Han Solo.
But Han had lived around Force-users since the day he’d met Luke on Tatooine, and that was long enough to understand the temptations of the dark side. If he asked for Leia’s life, he wouldn’t be saving her—he would be condemning them all. That was how the dark side worked. It seduced and promised, and sometimes it even delivered. But the cost? The cost was always too much. The dark side took everything a person was—and a big piece of who his loved ones were, too. Han and Leia had learned that when Jacen fell to the dark side. The entire Solo family had paid the price—especially Jacen’s twin sister, Jaina, who had been forced to hunt him down and put an end to his reign of terror.
Go away.
Han felt as though he had nearly spoken the words, and the rustling shadows did retreat—but only an arm’s length. The shadows were patient. They knew that eternity was a long time to listen to the suffering of a loved one, so they would wait. Han’s mind would change … eventually.
In no time at all.
“Go … away.” This time, Han did manage to speak aloud, and the shadows whispered away, back into the forest.
In their wake, they left a swirling cloud of smoke and the rising crackle of fire. A yellow curtain of flame had appeared in the narrow space between Leia and Marvid, still only centimeters high but rapidly climbing.
Han pushed himself to a seated position. The effort sent waves of agony coursing through him, and he quickly grew weak and began to tremble.
But he didn’t allow himself to collapse—couldn’t allow himself to collapse until Leia and Luke were safe. He pointed toward the rising wall of flame.
“Hey, Leia! Luke!” His voice was not exactly loud and booming—but it was audible. “Get up! Fire!”
Luke staggered to his feet. Leia just uncurled, far enough to look in Han’s direction. Then she uncurled some more. Her hands went to her mouth, as though she was trying to yell.
When nothing came out, she gave up and simply pointed.
Han looked over his shoulder and saw a meter-high wall of flame behind him, rising in front of Craitheus’s wrecked powerbody. Han tried to stand … and collapsed, exhausted and in pain. He looked back toward Leia and found her shining more brightly than ever and already lurching to her feet. What had become of Marvid, there was no telling. The flames behind Leia had risen to two meters, and they were too bright to see through.
Acrid smoke began to curl down out of the trees, filling Han’s lungs and belly. He coughed and let his head drop, nearly passing out from the pain.
A second passed, or perhaps it was an eternity, then a pair of golden figures emerged from the smoke, so dazzling it hurt Han’s eyes to look at them. He stared anyway. They were Luke and Leia, healed by the Force and looking stronger—and more powerful—than ever.
Leia came to his side. Through the radiance, Han could see that her vac suit had been melted away around her midsection, revealing a large swath of pebbly skin that looked almost like armor. She knelt at his side and slipped her hand beneath his head, and his agony began to fade.
“Han,” she said. “I told you to be careful.”
“Look … who’s talking,” Han answered, struggling to breathe. “I’m not the one … who looks like … she walked into a hot fusion core.”
“Always the smart guy.”
Smiling, Leia leaned down to kiss him, and Han felt his strength begin to return. She always had that effect on him.
Luke cleared his throat. “Sorry to interrupt, but we need to move on.” He used the Force to create a path through the wall of flame, then motioned for them to follow and started forward. “This fight isn’t over—and if we give the Qrephs a chance to regroup, it’s only going to get harder.”
“Regroup? Are you serious?” Han asked, reaching to retrieve his blaster rifle. “Marvid might have made it, but don’t waste time worrying about Craitheus. I put half a dozen blaster bolts through his brain, and then I blew up his powerbody—with him in it.”
“And you were hit by two cannon bolts, while I took a micropulse straight to the belly,” Leia said.
Using the Force to lift Han along with her, Leia rose and started after Luke. “What makes you think the Qrephs are any easier to kill in this place than we are?”
“The Force is strong in here,” Luke added. “Very strong. It heals even non-Force-users, and it heals quickly.”
“Could have fooled me.” Han pointed at the patch of pebbled hide on Leia’s abdomen. “If you call that healed—”
“And it’s raw,” Luke interrupted. He gestured at Han’s wounds. “Which means that in here, the Force doesn’t always heal according to form.”
Han was almost afraid to look. When he did, he saw that the cannon shot to his belly had scorched away most of his thin lab tunic and burned a hole deep into his abdomen. And now the hole was covered by a translucent membrane that did not look much like skin. But at least the bottom half of his leg, visible below the singed-off knee of his trousers, appeared sort of normal. It was the right size and shape, but so hairy it could have belonged to a Wookiee.
“The Force gets confused?” Han asked, still looking at his leg. “Really?”
“Not confused,” Luke clarified. “It’s just … raw and unformed, I think. And it’s unimaginably powerful. In here, we’re literally made of the Force—and that makes us more powerful, too.” His eyes dropped to Han’s abdomen. “And a bit unformed.”
Han studied his wound for a moment, then shrugged. Being “a bit unformed” was better than being dead.
At least, he hoped it was.
They passed through the gap in the flame curtain, which Luke had just opened. As they emerged on the other side, they entered a fire-charred landscape dotted with narrow basalt spires that rose impossibly high. A carpet of golden lichen covered the rocky ground, mounding into knee-high masses that changed before their eyes into thorny yellow bushes that shot up into tall barrel-shaped cacti. And passing between the two most distant cacti, but still close enough that Han could make out their huge round heads wobbling atop their tiny bodies, were the figures of two Columi.
Walking.
Not floating in powerbodies, but walking on their tiny bowed legs, waddling across the desert like a pair of potbellied nerf herders.
Leia lowered Han’s feet to the ground, then slowly began to release her Force grasp. “Can you stand?”
Han tested his balance and, finding that he was strong enough to keep it, took a couple of wobbly steps. “I’ll be fine.” He released his blaster’s trigger safety. “Let’s go.”
He was not happy to feel Luke’s hand on his shoulder, pulling him back. “Sorry, Han. You’re going to be the reserve on this mission.”
“Reserve?” Han shook his head. “I might be a little slow getting in there, but you’re not having this fight without me.”
Leia stepped in front of him. “Han, we have no choice,” she said. “You can’t use the Force.”
Han scowled. “Yeah, well, neither can the Qrephs.”
“They can now,” Luke said. “When the shadows offered help, the Qrephs didn’t refuse.”
“We have to stop them here, before they escape.” Leia touched Han’s cheek, then added, “And there’s only one way to do that inside this monolith—the same way Luke destroyed their Vestara biot. By using the Force.”
“Yeah? Well, I did some pretty serious damage to Craitheus earlier,” Han protested. “That’s got to be worth something.”
“But you didn’t kill him,” Luke said. “Not permanently. The best thing you can do for us now is to follow as fast as you can, then stand in reserve. We may need you to cover our retreat.”
Han’s heart began to sink, but they were right, and he knew it. Craitheus had returned from near-death twice now, an
d, as far as Han could tell, Han and the Jedi ought to be dead themselves.
He let out a sigh, then nodded. “Yeah, I get it,” he said. “Go on. I’ll catch up and be ready to cover a retreat.”
Leia rose up on her toes and kissed him, long and hard. “Goodbye, Han,” she said. “I love you.”
Before Han could answer, she pulled back and turned away, then ignited her lightsaber and started to run. Luke did the same, and together they raced away across the blossoming desert. Han started after them, gaining strength with every step.
“You, too, Leia,” he whispered. “I love you, too.”
Luke charged across the desert forever, Leia at his side. They had opened themselves to the Force completely, and it was pouring into them from all sides, raw and potent and unformed, neither dark nor light until it entered them and they made it so. It devoured them as it sustained them, filled them with a boiling storm of power their bodies could not long sustain.
The Qrephs were a few hundred meters ahead, a pair of dark specks racing up a flower-carpeted gulch toward a distant circle of radiance. The shimmering shape would have looked like a pond, except that it stood vertical to the ground and was located at the base of a distant basalt spire.
“Luke, that has to be the gate,” Leia said. “We can’t let them reach it.”
“Agreed,” Luke said. Leia had repeated what Han told her about Barduun, so Luke understood that if the Qrephs were allowed to escape, they would become not only Force-users but insane Force-users, imbued with a darkness that he did not yet understand. “We stop them now. Reach.”
As Luke spoke, he was reaching out. He quickly found the Qrephs, a pair of dark, oily presences burning cold in the Force. He began to pull, and then he and Leia were there, in the shadow of the looming spire, spinning and whirling across the flower-carpeted gulch, catching forks of Force lightning on their lightsabers, dancing ever closer to the two Columi.
A dark blast of Force energy caught Leia square in the chest. She staggered and started to fall backward—then put a hand down and pushed off, came up leaping, and went into a Force flip that carried her to within a dozen paces of their quarry.
What happened next, Luke only felt: the invisible hand of the Force clamping down on his throat. His vision narrowed instantly. The blood to his brain had been choked off. Five seconds, he thought. Five seconds until he lost consciousness.
Maybe less.
He reached out in the Force, trying to find the Qreph who was attacking him—trying to find either Qreph—but he was too dizzy already. His hearing started to fade, his vision narrowed to nothing.
Three seconds. Maybe.
Luke launched himself into a Force leap, whirling his blade through a Jedi attack pattern, whipping his feet back and forth in blind snap kicks and targetless heel strikes. His hearing faded to silence, and he felt himself starting to drop … then the ground came up beneath his feet and his knees buckled.
Desperate to locate his attacker, Luke reached out in all directions and pulled, grabbing at every being he could sense. He felt a jolt of surprise from Leia and let her loose. He found the Qrephs just ahead, standing well apart, two beings full of fear and anger and hatred. He pulled harder and felt them slide toward him, their fear blazing into panic and their anger deepening to rage.
The Force grasp slipped free, and the blood came roaring back into Luke’s head. His hearing returned first, and he heard Leia a few meters to his right, her lightsaber growling and hissing as she blocked a fork of Force lightning.
Then the crackle of more lightning sounded nearby, this time coming from high on the bank of the gulch. Luke tried to bring his lightsaber around to catch the attack, but his reflexes were still too shaky. The fork took him dead center, and every muscle in his body clamped down.
Luke ignored the pain and pushed, then felt the Force lightning slide away as his attacker staggered back. He leapt up—or, rather, tried to leap up—and managed to regain his feet.
His vision had cleared, and he could see the Qrephs twenty paces ahead, fighting from opposite sides of the gulch. Craitheus had sprouted half a dozen horny spikes where Han had peppered his head with blaster bolts, and he was halfway up the right bank, hurling dark blasts of Force energy toward a steadily advancing Leia. Marvid was on the opposite side of the wash, half covered in diamond-shaped lizard scales and still struggling to recover from Luke’s Force push.
Neither Columi was standing on his crooked legs so much as levitating above them. Their gray noseless faces had turned dark and spectral, with a sinister glint of yellow shining in the depths of their huge eyes, and when their hands moved, it was with an eerie grace that made their slender little arms look more like tentacles than actual limbs.
Clearly the two Jedi were no longer fighting Marvid and Craitheus Qreph. They were battling something far worse, something Luke did not yet understand—manifestations of pure dark-side hatred, perhaps, or even ancient dark-lord apparitions desperate to return to the world of the living.
And access to that world stood less than fifty meters away, via a circle of shimmering light too bright to see through.
Luke reactivated his blade and began to advance alongside his sister, pivoting and dodging, slipping past Force blasts and deflecting one fork of Force lightning after another.
The Qrephs were retreating as fast as the Jedi were advancing. The gate stood thirty meters away, then twenty-five … and Luke and Leia were not closing the distance.
A booming laugh rolled down the wash. “Jedi fools.” Marvid’s voice had grown deep and baleful. “You cannot win. We have the Force now, too.”
Actually, Luke thought it more likely that the Force had them, but he did not say so. The time for talking was past.
Ten meters.
To his left, Luke noticed a boulder resting atop the rim of the gulch. He sent it tumbling toward Marvid’s head.
The Columi’s hands quickly fluttered up and hurled the boulder back toward him. By then Luke was overflowing with the Force. He felt as if he were burning from the inside out, being incinerated by the raw power flowing into him and through him. He launched himself over the boulder.
“Now, Leia!” Luke turned a hand toward Marvid and poured himself into a fierce blast of Force energy. “We end this now!”
The impact sent Marvid tumbling, head throbbing and chest aching. Skywalker’s attack should have killed him—he knew that. He could feel the fractures in his skull, feel how his eyes were bulging from their sockets. But the laws of biology were not the same inside the monolith. Here, the Force sustained all things, rejuvenated them and made them strong.
Even Columi.
So, instead of dying, Marvid went flying into his brother, and together they tumbled through the desert thorn brush, their thin limbs flailing out of control, their big heads banging into the ground time after time.
Then they stopped. The shadow spirits inside them began to call on the Force, drawing it into their battered bodies, using it to mend their fractured bones and heal their bleeding organs. Then he and his brother rose, standing on their own thin legs.
It made Marvid feel primitive and brutish, alive in a way he had never before experienced. Like an animal—like a vicious, hungry animal that knew only appetite and fear and rage.
Craitheus stepped next to him. “Can you feel it, Marvid?” he asked, turning back toward the basalt spire where the gate was located. “The power?”
“I feel it,” Marvid replied, also turning. Skywalker and his sister were about twenty meters away, Skywalker circling toward their left while the Solo woman moved to block their path to the gate. “The Force is ours. The galaxy is ours.”
“The galaxy is ours,” Craitheus agreed. “After we kill Skywalker.”
The shadows did not like that idea. Marvid was seized by a sudden desire to rush the Solo woman, to blow her out of his path with Force lightning and flee through the portal before Skywalker could stop them. He ignored the urge. The shadows were responding
only to their own fear, trying to escape the immediate danger so they could flee into the galaxy and sate their appetites.
But Marvid knew better. He was smarter. For Craitheus and him to achieve real power in the galaxy, Skywalker and his sister had to die—now, inside the monolith.
Marvid started back toward the spire. “We’ll feint an attack at the gate,” he said, “then whirl on Skywalker and take him by surprise.”
“Excellent,” Craitheus said. “We take them one at a time. With Skywalker gone, the Solo woman won’t stand a chance.”
The desire to attack the Solo woman grew more urgent. Rush her now, the shadows urged. Marvid ignored them and stepped to his brother’s side. The primitive instincts of the shadows were no match for the strength of Columi minds.
Han raced after Leia and Luke, keeping up as best he could—which was not at all. He watched their silhouettes spinning up the yellow gulch far ahead of him, bouncing off the tall cacti and the dark basalt spires, growing constantly brighter and larger. He felt strong enough to fight again, but no matter how fast he ran, he could never catch them.
How could he? They had the Force, and he didn’t.
The two Jedi had become golden balls of lightning, dancing back and forth between the rumbling darkness of the two Qreph brothers. The fight became a battle, the battle a war, and the war a conflagration—an endless storm of thunder and blood that raged across the yellow desert for all eternity.
Luke saw the Columi turn toward Leia and the gate, then he extended his free hand, grabbing them both in the invisible grasp of the Force. He jerked them back in his direction and they came flying, launching themselves straight at him—fully in control. He saw them spinning around in midair, their hands rising to attack, and realized he had fallen for a ploy.
Luke released his hold. Too late.
The Columi were already spraying streams of dark-side energy at him, hammering him with a torrent of cold, pummeling power. Luke staggered and almost went down, caught one stream on his lightsaber, and had the weapon torn from his grasp. He began to stumble back, fighting to keep his balance and bring up his own hands.