Planet-Eater 88 (Patreon)

She was home. Why had she been brought home? 

As Ruckle groaned in pain and xMR-5 whirred hopelessly on the floor she found herself standing up, walking across the worn and beaten panels, approaching the window showing the outside world. A gust of wind kicked up a stray bit of powdery snow, sending it whirling across her vision. But beyond it, stretching high, high into the air, stood the Letvia Temple of Ilsa. The same as it had been twelve years ago, incomplete and rotten and beautiful.

The moundstone walls were sparsely decorated, but once upon a time, she and a boy she had liked more than she should’ve had been caught scribbling on them with rocks, inscribing their names and their favourite animals and nothing else, because she’d been too shy to tell him. Jedi weren’t supposed to feel those things, anyways. 

And if she let her eyes trail higher, above the small round fixtures that were supposed to be bright at night and the curved pillars that used to make her feel sick, she found the window that had once been hers. Hers, and the rest of her class’. 

She imagined, looking in through that window, so very high above, that she might have been able to see herself, peeking back. Small and scared and useless.

‘Is everything okay in there? I’m sorry about… I tried to be gentle with you, but it just… I’m sorry. That… That boy isn’t d—dead, right? He’ll be fine, won’t he?’

She remembered, then, that even though home took up the majority of her vision, a striking minority was made up of a certain purple obelisk. Purple. It hadn’t appeared purple from space. More void. 

Silently, she let her vision move between the massive creature on her left, tall enough to scrape the sky, and home. 

‘Do you know what this place is?’ she asked. She didn’t have the strength to speak with conviction. Not anymore. There was a weakness in her arms and her legs and she was sure that if she weren’t holding onto the railing, she’d have fallen again, despite the ship finally having ceased its nauseating rocking. 

‘Um… Yeah? Jedi temple on Ilsa. H—how so? Is it…?’

It knew, then. Yes… It knew. Outside, she could see the countless mouths undulating, the thousands upon thousands of beady pink eyes moving restlessly between her and the temple. A beast she had never met before, whose mind was immune to her prying. One to whom the Force guided her. Who then led her here. Back to where it all began. 

…Was the Force toying with her? Demanding penance for a crime she’d regretted a million times already? If so, that only meant one thing.

She chuckled. 

‘You’ve been sent by the Force, haven’t you?’

‘What?’ The eyes ceased their wandering, honing in on her. ‘Wh—what do you…?’

‘That’s it,’ she said. She felt mad. Mad, utterly! But there was no other explanation for it. Why else would a creature like this reside in the middle of nowhere? Or, rather, why would it reside in this specific part of nowhere? Everything made sense now. They were meant to meet there, then. She couldn’t fathom how she could have made herself deserving of such an honour—literally any other Jedi would have been a greater choice—but she was not going to question the Force. It had brought her a method for ending the tyranny of the Emperor, and she was going to take it. ‘You are an instrument for good.’

‘I—I am? Well, gee, that’s… You’re not the first person to say it, so I’m not totally shocked, but I’m not sure I like the way you said it. You sound kind of manic. But I’m sure…’

Her grand thoughts were briefly derailed by a small dose of reality. Her instrument was still a nincompoop. In fact, the more she thought about it, the less she liked the idea of it. Certainly, a creature of this size could be very helpful in taking care of individual star destroyers, or perhaps as a targeted attack on a single planet, but was that all? The Emperor would not fall so easily. Not to mention that it was far too big to be brought anywhere. The whole thing was starting to give her a headache. 

‘Somehow, I am certain that you will be instrumental in bringing down the Emperor and restoring peace to the galaxy. And perhaps even to restore the Jedi Order.’

Outside the window, the leviathan abruptly froze. Over the span of several seconds, it might as well have been a fixture of Ilsa, as immovable as the ice mountains themselves. Then, it began to deflate on itself, drooping down, as well as shivering, the rocking of its body being enough to make the ground shake violently. Already weak at the knees, it took everything she had not to fall over, though the same couldn’t be said for the ship. The weak and battered panels began to fall from the walls with loud clangs, loose screws clattered down, xMR-5 was rattling against the metal floor, and outside, she could see the Jedi temple shaking as well, though soon becoming hidden behind a rising cloud of dislodged snow. 

‘STOP THAT’ she sent out, but she knew it was a weak request. Outside, the creature’s eyes were beginning to tremble, jaws clacking loudly, tentacles gripping one another and writhing into double-helix shapes like entangling snakes. 

‘U—um, I, uh, I—I hesitate to a—a—ask, b—but…’ Meek, trembling words tapered off in her head, sent by a voice that seemed so utterly frightened that she was certain it might at any time break down into sobs. The body outside the window shook, heaved, and moved away, trembling itself into a smaller shape. ‘Y—y—you don’t happen to be a—a Jedi, are you…?’

She thought over the question a bit. ‘Depends,’ she answered after a few moments.

The ground ceased to shudder and shake. 

‘I’m not technically a Jedi knight, and I’m not really a padawan either, but it’s not like I’m not a Jedi, so…’ She shrugged. ‘I guess I am a Jedi? But without the title.’ Then, after a beat, she added, with slight derision, ‘I’m certainly not a Sith…’

The creature no longer moved. Its stillness had completely ended the quaking of the world. Thousands upon thousands of eyes looked at her, looked away, and then looked no more as the creature promptly fell over, innumerable tonnes of tentacles and flesh collapsing upon itself, mouths slacking open, eyes rolling back, and wind being displaced with such intensity that it rocked the entire shuttle. Once the shock had worn off, she checked on Ruckle and Yoric. When she was assured that they hadn’t gotten actively worse, she chanced another look at the thing outside.

It was completely unmoving. 

…Was it something she’d said? Or had something else happened? Maybe she—

The scream of a siren cut through her thoughts, followed closely by several red lights blinking, which had somehow survived the ordeal they’d been through so far. 

The oxygen! Cursing beneath her breath, she decided to ignore the matter of the creature for now. They could deal with that once they were no longer dying. She cast one look about the cockpit and found that Yoric was still very much passed out, and Ruckle had done the same thing, which she didn’t fault him for. 

“Smyge!” she cried to the vents. “Smyge, get the kriff out here and—” No reply. She huffed. He’d be fine. Somehow, much like a rickleroach, he did not die. She couldn’t even recall letting him aboard the escape shuttle. Ignoring his absence, she rushed out of the cockpit and headed for the storage room down the hall. After a bit of rummaging, she was able to find three environment-suits, though she’d been certain there had been four when she checked earlier. Unfortunately, the oxygen tanks had clearly been used before. Two of them had around half capacity, while one was almost full. After some careful consideration, she donned the environment-suit with the most oxygen left, recognizing that at this moment, out of those aboard the craft, her life held the highest value. Not much competition, but had Garney still been around, things might have been different. 

She stepped into it, secured her helmet, and turned on the silencing effect strictly to be able to focus on something other than the blaring alarm. Wonderful calm returned to her with a pssshh as the atmospheric pressure balanced out.