“Is he dead?” Jacen asked.
“No!” Leia answered sharply. “Come on. Let’s get into the temple.” The twins scampered ahead down the ramp.
The sharp jungle smells brought warm and fresh memories to Leia as she walked across the clearing. Fallen trees, decaying leaves, and flowers mixed into a potent brew of scents. She had proposed the empty ruins as a site for Luke’s academy, but Leia had never managed to visit—and now she had come only to see her brother lying in state.
“I’m not looking forward to this,” Han mumbled. “Not at all.” Leia reached over to squeeze his hand; he gripped hers, holding tighter and longer than she expected him to.
Robed figures emerged from the temple, drifting out of the early-morning shadows. She quickly counted a dozen. In the lead she recognized the rusty-orange face of a Calamarian female, Cilghal. Leia herself had seen Jedi potential in the fishlike woman and had urged her to join Luke’s academy. Cilghal had managed to use her proven ambassadorial skills to hold the twelve students together in the terrible days following the fall of their Jedi Master.
Leia recognized other candidates gliding across the dew-damp ground: Streen, an older man with wild hair tucked haphazardly beneath a Jedi hood; he had been a gas prospector on Bespin, a hermit hiding from the voices he heard in his head. She saw tall Kirana Ti, one of the witches of Dathomir whom Leia and Han had encountered during their whirlwind courtship. Kirana Ti stepped forward, flashing a bright smile at the twins; she had a daughter of her own, only a year or so older than the twins, who remained in the care of others back on her homeworld.
Leia also identified Tionne, with long silvery hair that flowed down the back of her robe. Tionne was a student of Jedi history who wanted desperately to be a Jedi herself.
Then came hard-bitten Kam Solusar, a once-corrupted Jedi whom Luke had dragged back to the light side. And Dorsk 81, a streamlined, slick-skinned alien who had been cloned generation after generation, because his society believed they had already developed the perfect civilization.
Leia didn’t recognize the other handful of Jedi candidates, but she knew Luke had been diligent in his Jedi search. The call still rang out across the galaxy, inviting those with the potential to become new Jedi Knights.
Even though their teacher now lay in a coma.
Cilghal raised a flippered hand. “We are glad you could come, Leia.”
“Ambassador Cilghal,” she said. “My brother—has there been any change?” They walked heavily back toward the oppressive temple. Leia believed she already knew the answer.
“No.” Cilghal shook her squarish head. “But perhaps your presence will do something that ours cannot.”
Sensing the solemn mood, the twins refrained from giggling and exploring the musty, stone-walled rooms. As the party entered the gloomy ground-level hangar bay, Cilghal led Leia, Han, and the twins to a turbolift.
“Come on, Jacen and Jaina,” Han said, grabbing their hands again. “Maybe you can help Uncle Luke get better.”
“What can we do?” Jaina asked, her liquid-brown eyes wide and hopeful.
“I don’t know yet, honey,” he said. “If you come up with any ideas, let me know.”
The turbolift doors flowed shut, and the platform rose to the top levels of the temple. The twins clung to each other in sudden uneasiness. They had not recovered from their fear of turbolifts since the last time they had ridden one all the way down to the decaying bottom levels of Imperial City. But the ride was over in a moment, and they stepped out into the grand audience chamber of the Great Temple. Skylights spilled sunlight on a broad, polished-stone promenade that led to a raised stage.
Leia remembered standing on that stage years before, after the Death Star had been destroyed, presenting medals to Han, Chewbacca, Luke, and the other heroes of the battle of Yavin. Now, though, her breath caught in her throat. Han groaned beside her, a deep, grieving tone that she had never heard him make before.
On a bier at the end of the room lay Luke—like a body stretched out for a funeral in an echoing, empty chamber.
Her heart thumped with dread. She wanted to turn around so she wouldn’t have to look at him—but Leia’s feet compelled her forward. She walked with a rapid step that became a run before she reached the end of the promenade. Han followed, carrying the twins, one in each arm. His eyes were red as he fought to keep tears from flowing. Leia already felt a wetness on her cheeks.
Luke lay in repose, swathed in his Jedi robe. His hair had been combed; his hands were folded across his chest. His skin looked gray and plasticlike.
“Oh, Luke,” she whispered.
“Too bad you can’t just thaw him out,” Han said, “like you rescued me from Jabba’s Palace.”
Leia reached out to touch Luke. Using her own abilities with the Force, she tried to reach deeper, to brush against his spirit—but she felt only a cold hole, an emptiness as if Luke himself had been taken away. Not dead. She had always felt she would somehow know if her brother died.
“Is he sleeping?” Jacen said.
“Yes … in a way,” she answered, not knowing what else to say.
“When will he wake up?” Jaina asked.
“We don’t know,” she said. “We don’t know how to wake him up.”
“Maybe if I give him a kiss.” Jaina clambered up to smack the motionless lips of her uncle. For an absurd moment Leia held her breath, thinking that the child’s magic just might work. But Luke did not stir.
“He’s cold,” Jaina mumbled. The little girl’s shoulders slumped with disappointment when her uncle failed to wake.
Han squeezed Leia’s waist so hard that it hurt, but she didn’t want her husband to stop holding her.
“He’s been unchanged for days,” Cilghal said behind them. “We brought his lightsaber with him. We found it beside his body on the rooftop.”
Cilghal hesitated, then moved to stare down at Luke. “Master Skywalker told me I have an innate talent for healing with the Force. He had just begun to show me how to develop my skills—but I’ve tried all I know. He is not sick. There’s nothing physically wrong with him. He seems frozen in a moment of time, as if his soul has left and his body is waiting for him to come back.”
“Or,” Leia said, “waiting for us to find a way to help him return.”
“I don’t know how,” Cilghal said in a thin, husky voice. “None of us knows—yet. But perhaps working together we can figure it out.”
“Do you have any inkling about what really happened?” Leia asked. “Have you found any clues?”
She could sense the sudden spike of Han’s turmoil. Cilghal looked away with her big Calamarian eyes, but Han answered with grim certainty. “It was Kyp. Kyp did this.”
“What?” Leia said, whirling to stare at him.
Han answered in a tumble of words. “The last time I saw Luke, he told me he was afraid for Kyp.” Han swallowed hard. “He said that Kyp had started dabbling in the dark side. The kid stole Mara Jade’s ship and took off somewhere. I think Kyp came back here and challenged Luke.”
“But why?” Leia asked. “What for?”
Cilghal nodded, as if her head were too heavy for her. “We did find the stolen ship in front of the temple. It is still here, so we don’t know how he flew away again … unless he fled into the jungles.”
“Is that likely?” Leia asked.
Cilghal shook her head. “We Jedi trainees have pooled our talents and searched. We do not detect his presence on Yavin 4. He must have left on another ship somehow.”
“But where would he get another ship?” Leia asked, but suddenly she remembered astonished New Republic astronomers reporting the impossible news that an entire group of stars in the Cauldron Nebula had gone supernova at the same time.
She whispered, “Could Kyp have resurrected the Sun Crusher from the core of Yavin?”
Han blinked. “How could he possibly do that?”
Cilghal hung her head gravely. “If Kyp Durron has managed that, then his power is far gre
ater even than we feared. No wonder he was able to defeat Master Skywalker.”
Han shuddered, as if afraid to accept what he knew was true. Leia could sense his emotions like a maelstrom within him. “If Kyp is on the loose with the Sun Crusher,” he said, “then I’ll have to go and stop him.”
Leia snapped around to look at him, thinking how Han always leaped headfirst into challenges. “Are you getting delusions of grandeur again? Why does it have to be you?”
“I’m the only one he might listen to,” he said. He looked aside, staring down at Luke’s cadaverous face. She saw his lips trembling.
“Look, if Kyp doesn’t listen to me, then he won’t listen to anyone—and he’ll be lost forever. If his power is as great as Cilghal thinks, that kid is not an enemy the New Republic can afford to have.” He gave one of his lopsided grins. “Besides, I taught him everything he knows about flying that ship. He couldn’t possibly do anything to me.”
It was a somber dinner with the Jedi trainees.
Han used the Falcon’s food synthesizers to create a repast of heavy Corellian food. Leia picked at some spiced, fried strips of a woolamander that Kirana Ti had hunted in the jungle. The twins stuffed themselves with messy fruits and berries. Dorsk 81 devoured a bland and unappealing-looking meal of heavily processed food cubes.
Conversation was minimal, little more than forced pleasantries. They all feared to discuss what really preoccupied them—until Kam Solusar said in a hard-edged voice, “We hoped you would bring us news, Minister Organa Solo. Give us some guidance as to what we should do here. We are Jedi students with no Master. We’ve learned a little, but not enough to continue training on our own.”
Tionne broke in. “I’m not sure we should try to learn things we don’t understand. Look what happened to Gantoris! He was consumed by some evil thing he inadvertently found. And what about Kyp Durron? What if we get lured to the dark side without knowing it?”
Old Streen stood up and shook his head. “No, no. He’s here! Don’t you hear the voices?” When everyone turned to look at him, Streen sat down and hunched his shoulders, as if trying to hide under the Jedi robe. He snuffled and cleared his throat before continuing. “I can hear him. He’s whispering to me now. He talks to me always. I can’t get away from him.”
Leia felt a rush of hope. “Luke? You can hear Luke talking to you?”
“No!” Streen whirled at her. “The Dark Man. A dark man, a shadow. He talked to Gantoris. He talked to Kyp Durron. You shine the light, but the shadow always stays, whispering, talking.” Streen placed his hands against his ears and pressed his temples.
“This is too dangerous,” Kirana Ti said, knitting her eyebrows. “On Dathomir I’ve seen what happens when a large group falls to the dark side. The evil witches on my planet made things terrible for centuries—and the galaxy was saved only because they had no spaceflight. If the witches had managed to spread their dark workings from star system to star system …”
“Yes, we should all stop our Jedi exercises,” Dorsk 81 said, blinking his large yellow eyes. “This was a bad idea. We shouldn’t have even tried.”
Leia slapped both her hands hard on the table. “Stop this talk!” she said. “Luke would be ashamed to hear his students saying such things. With attitudes like that, you’ll never become Jedi Knights.”
She fumed. “Yes, there is a risk. There will always be risks. You’ve seen what happens to someone who isn’t careful—but that simply means you must be careful. Don’t be seduced by the dark side. Learn from the sacrifice that Gantoris made. Learn from how Kyp Durron was tempted. Learn from the sacrifices your Master made in an attempt to protect you all.”
She stood and looked at each one of them. Some flinched. Some met her gaze.
“You are the new generation of Jedi Knights,” she continued. “That is a great burden, but you must bear it, because the New Republic needs you. The old Jedi protected the Republic for a thousand generations. How can you give up after the first challenge?
“You have to be the champions of the Force, with or without your Jedi Master. Learn as Luke learned: step by step. You must work together, discover the things you don’t know, fight what has to be fought. But the one thing you can’t do is give up!”
“She is right,” Cilghal said in her maddeningly calm voice. “If we surrender, the New Republic will have one less weapon against evil in the galaxy. Even if some of us fail, the rest of us must succeed.”
“Do or do not,” Kirana Ti said, and Tionne finished the phrase that Master Skywalker had drilled into them. “There is no try.”
Her heart pounding, her stomach watery, Leia slowly sat down. The twins stared at their mother in amazement, and Han gripped her hand in admiration. She breathed deeply, began to let herself relax—
When suddenly a strangling outcry of death shattered her soul. It sounded like an avalanche within the Force, an outcry of thousands upon thousands of lives wiped out in an instant. Around the table the other Jedi candidates, all those sensitive to the Force, clutched at their chests or their ears.
Streen let out a long wail. “It’s too many, too many!”
Leia’s blood burned through her veins. Painful claws skittered down her spine, plucking her nerves and sending jolts through her body. Both of the Jedi twins were crying.
Baffled, Han grabbed Leia’s shoulders and shook her. “What is it, Leia? What happened?” He apparently had felt nothing. “What?”
She gasped. “It was … a great disturbance … in the Force. Something terrible just happened.”
With a cold wash of dread Leia thought of young Kyp Durron, turned to the dark side and now armed with the Sun Crusher.
“Something terrible,” she said again, but she could not answer Han’s other questions.
3
The Force moved through all things, weaving the universe into an invisible tapestry that tied the smallest living creature to the largest star cluster. Synergy made the total far greater than the sum of its parts.
And when one of those threads was torn, ripples spread through the entire web. Actions and reactions … great shock waves that affected all who could hear.
The destruction of Carida screamed through the Force, building power as it reflected off other sensitive minds. It rose to a tumult that struck—
And woke.
Sensory perceptions rushed back to Luke Skywalker like a storm, freeing him from the smothering nothingness that had trapped and frozen him. His final shout still echoed in his ears, but now he felt strangely numb.
The last thing he remembered was the serpent-shaped tendrils of black Force wrapping around him. Rising from the summons of Exar Kun and Luke’s misguided student Kyp Durron, the serpents of Sith power had sunk their fangs into him. Luke had been unable to resist their combined might. He had tried to use his lightsaber, but even that had failed.
Luke had fallen into a bottomless pit deeper than any of the black holes in the Maw cluster. He did not know how long he had been powerless. He remembered only an emptiness, a coldness … until something had jarred him loose.
Now, as the sudden clamor of sensory impressions filled him, it took him some time to sort out and make sense of what he could see: the walls of the grand audience chamber, the lozenge-shaped stones, the translucent tiles set out in hypnotic patterns, the long promenade and the empty benches spread like frozen waves on the floor, where once the entire Rebel Alliance had celebrated their victory over the first Death Star.
Luke’s head buzzed, and he felt giddy. He wondered why he should feel so insubstantial, until he looked down—and saw his own body still lying prone and motionless below him, eyes closed, face expressionless.
Astonishment and disbelief blurred Luke’s vision, but he forced himself to focus again on his own features. He saw the faded scars from when the wampa ice creature had attacked him on Hoth. His body was still draped with the brown Jedi robe, his hands crossed lightly on his chest. The lightsaber lay at his hip, a cylinder of silent plas
teel, crystals, and electronic components.
“What’s going on?” Luke said out loud. “Hello?”
He heard the words thrum through his head like vibrating transmissions, but they made no sound at all in the air.
Finally Luke looked at himself—the part of himself that was aware—and saw an insubstantial image, like a ghost reflection of his body, as if he had reconstructed a hologram using his impression of what he looked like. His spectral arms and legs appeared to be garbed in a flowing Jedi robe, but the colors were washed-out and weak. Everything was sketched with a lambent blue glow that sparkled as he moved.
With a rush of awe and astonishment Luke suddenly knew what had happened. Several times he had encountered wavering spirits of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda, and his own father, Anakin Skywalker.
Was he dead, then? It sounded ludicrous because he didn’t feel dead—but he had no point of comparison. He recalled how Obi-Wan’s and Yoda’s and Anakin’s bodies had all vanished upon their deaths: Obi-Wan and Yoda leaving only crumpled robes, Anakin Skywalker leaving only the empty body armor of Darth Vader.
Why, then, had his own body remained intact, stretched out on the raised platform? Could it be because he was not yet entirely a Jedi Master, completely given over to the Force—or could it be that he was not truly dead?
Luke heard a whirring as the turbolift rose to the top chamber. The sound seemed eerie and unnatural, as if he were using senses other than his ears to hear.
The turbolift doors slid open. Artoo-Detoo extended his front wheeled foot and rolled out, moving slowly, almost respectfully, along the polished stone promenade. The droid proceeded toward the raised platform.
Luke’s shimmering image stood in front of his body where it lay in state, and he watched with joy as the little astromech droid came to him.
“Artoo, am I glad to see you!” he said. He expected the droid to bleep with wild excitement. But Artoo gave no indication that he heard or detected Luke.
“Artoo?”
Artoo-Detoo trundled up the ramp to Luke’s shrouded body. The droid hooted, a low, mournful sound that expressed deep grief—if droids could feel such emotions. It tore Luke apart to see his mechanical friend looking at the body; his optical receptor winked from red to blue and back again.
Star Wars: The Jedi Academy Trilogy III: Champions of the Force Page 3