Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Crucible drops out of hyperspace over Ilum, nearly a week after leaving Coruscant. They spend another day in low orbit, waiting for the weather on the surface of the frozen planet to abate. Above the glaciated temple, a storm is raging: surface monitoring stations are recording winds up to two hundred klicks an hour, temperatures seventy degrees below freezing.

“You’d freeze solid in like, two seconds,” says Micah, trying on a pair of gloves that come nearly all the way up his arms and snapping the elastic against his bare skin. “Ow.”

“Not me,” laughs Lubas, hunting through the pile of cold-weather gear in the Initiates’ cabin. She’s a bothan, one of the long-furred polar subspecies sometimes mistaken for wookiees. She pauses for effect, her long yellow whiskers twitching. “Ten seconds, maybe.”

“A windchill like that would go straight through you,” Plo says, with the certainty of experience. Ilum’s powerful magnetic field prickles a little in his sensory horns. It’s been a long time since he last visited (or maybe will be a long time into the future?) but the experience is not one easily forgotten.

He pats the small pile of clothes in his lap. So far he’s got thermal underlayers, thick socks and gloves with room and reinforcing for his claws, and a little detachable hood that buttons closed at the neck. The first time he had visited Ilum, he had worn only the usual winter jacket with its puffy hood, and the cold had gotten into his sensory horns and made him thoroughly miserable after a while. This one ought to provide a little extra protection. Layering, that’s the key.

Micah snorts. “I hope we don’t have to wait too long. I can’t decide if I’m terrified or excited and either way I want to get this whole thing over with.”

“Same,” says Veeda on the other side of the pile, with feeling. She’s a rodian, not a species known for their cold-tolerance. “You know what the first thing I’m going to do with my saber is?”

“We know!” The fifth member of their group dumps a basket full of long knit scarves onto Veeda’s head, grinning without malice. Lucca is human, like Micah, though his skin is much darker and his coiled hair puffs out from his head like a black cloud. He, Veeda, and Lubas are Clan Massiff, Heliost’s next-door neighbours. “You’re gonna beat up Qui-Gon Jinn, right?”

“Right!” The pile of scarves avalanches down onto the cabin floor.

Micah, Plo and Lubas share a knowing look. Veeda and Qui have nursed a rivalry in lightsaber classes ever since it turned out they were both natural talents at Ataru. Qui-Gon has had the slightest edge in their matches ever since he came back from his own Ilum trip with a green kyber crystal thrumming in his hand. This is normal and expected; fighting with one’s own saber tends to… make physical sense, in a way that’s rare with the younglings’ practice blades. Everyone else in the Massiff and Heliost Clans has been looking forward to watching the fireworks once the field is finally equalized.

Veeda extricates herself from the scarves. “I’m gonna,” she insists. “Laserbrain thinks he’s so cool with his green saber ‘cause he’s like half a year older. I’m gonna make him cry.”

“Good luck with that,” Plo says dryly. 

Veeda jabs a finger at him. “I don’t need luck from a dropout,” she sniffs, and turns dramatically away; once they had been allies in keeping Qui-Gon humble and she hasn’t quite forgiven him for switching to Soresu. “But… maybe you could help me with some defensive moves instead.”

Plo pretends to think about it for a moment. “All right,” he says, playing reluctant, “but in return, maybe you can help me with some research I’ve been doing.”

“Don’t do it,” Micah says immediately, “save yourself!” He’s joking; the cloudy wisps of his presence in the Force have gone all sunny. 

Veeda rolls her starry indigo eyes at Micah, then turns back to Plo, suspicious nevertheless. “What sort of research?” 

Plo makes a point of picking out an insulated jacket from the pile before he answers. “It’s a… personal project of mine,” he says, carefully. “You know my vision?”

The three Massiff Clan lean in; Lubas’ ears literally perk up. “Yeah?” Veeda asks. “What about it?”

Plo has told them the barest dribs and drabs of information, enough to satisfy their curiosity without sending them off into potentially dangerous rabbitholes. It’s not that he’s forbidden from speaking of the future—more that if he succeeds in changing the things he’s set his sights on, the future he knows will never come to pass. Thus far, even the most persistent curious Initiate has lost interest after a twenty-minute ramble on the structural inequities he’s identified as the root cause of the civil war. 

He leans in toward Veeda. “You know how I said there was a lot in it that I didn’t understand? I’m making progress on that, but there’s so much background to it I’m never going to be able to read it all myself.”

Micah interjects with a lopsided smile. “So I’ve been helping him look at things like tax records and two hundred-year-old laws, and that sort of thing. It’s mostly pretty boring stuff.”

“He volunteered,” Plo informs the others, “so I’m testing how long he can put up with it before he quits.”

Laughter drowns out Micah’s scandalized response. 

“So if you have a lot of questions, does that mean they’re on all different topics?” Lubas asks. “Like… old mission records, or local laws versus Republic, that sort of thing?”

“Exactly.” Plo slips his arms into the jacket sleeves. A little bit long, but the extra length probably won’t hurt on Ilum. “Not mission records—I don’t think we have clearance yet for the things I probably need to look at—but there’s a lot of general history, trade and exploration. I would do it myself, or with Master Nawut, but there’s just so much.”

The plaintive note in his voice isn’t even an act. There really is so damn much he needs to know, and so few hours in the day.

Master Yoda helps, sometimes. He’s useful for bouncing ideas off, and working through potential threads of investigation, but the Grandmaster of the Order has his own duties to see to. Master Nawut, Ang, and Jumikel have joined in from time to time—Plo always gives Master Jumikel topics that link into Micah’s, and more than once he’s seen the two of them with their heads bent over datapads together. Tahl and Qui-Gon are less useful co-researchers (less tolerant of boredom, mainly), but even they’ve offered their time.

Veeda narrows her eyes, thoughtful. “Can I pick my own topic?”

Plo nods—he’ll have to strip some of the more incriminating questions out of his list, but there’s a reason he keeps three different versions of the thing. “Sure. I’ll show you when we get back to the Temple.”

“Oh, she gets to pick a topic, huh?” Micah tries valiantly to make huge pleading tooka eyes at Plo. Unfortunately, Micah’s face is made for mischief, so the expression comes out almost mocking. “Why are you punishing your very best friend, Plo? Why must I suffer?”

“Your crimes are numerous,” Plo tells him, straight-faced. 

“Numerous?” Micah scoffs. He peels those long gloves off his arms and tosses one at Plo. “Name one, then.”

Lucca spots an opportunity for mischief, scooting over and looping an arm around Micah’s shoulders. “Well,” he begins, drawling out the word, “you put Dantooine pepper in a stew the other week and fed it to us. Nothing tasted right for like three days after.”

“What’s wrong with Dantooine pepper?” Micah asks, scowling. “Plo ate it.”

“I wish I hadn’t,” Plo says quietly. 

“What’s wrong with Dantooine pepper?” Lubas repeats, incredulous. “It’s so stupid spicy even Sullust cooking won’t use more than like a pinch. You could kill a Hutt with it.”

"That's salt," Micah mutters, mulishly. "Well I thought it was good."

“Something’s just wrong with your tastebuds, man.” Lucca snickers, takes a deep breath. “Also, Tahl told me you and Qui got extra homework for passing notes with the Force in Master Kouro’s class. That’s a crime against intelligence, I think.”

“It is,” Veeda agrees. 

Micah sighs, unrepentant. “It was Qui-Gon’s idea, so I can’t argue with that.”

“The third crime is going along with anything Qui-Gon Jinn comes up with.” Lucca pats his shoulder, sympathetic. “Want me to keep going?”

“Please don’t.” Micah ducks out from under his arm, scooting away across the floor. He opens his mouth—and the swish of the door opening forestalls his retort.

The senior Padawan in charge of this trip—a cerean, fresh-faced and beardless—pokes his head in out of the dark hallway. “Have you all found fitting clothing?”

Plo had never had much to do with Ki-Adi-Mundi before their shared Council tenures. It’s strange to recognise him now—not for any familiar personal quality but because there is currently a grand total of one cerean in the entire Order. It feels like talking to an entirely different person.

He glances away, at Micah—who is looking at Lucca, who is looking bashfully down at the clothes piled high on the floor.

“Not yet,” Lubas admits for all of them. “Sorry.”

“I see.” Ki-Adi-Mundi’s expression turns resigned. Reddish-brown hair with the oil-slick sheen peculiar to cereans escapes his tightly-bound ponytail. “There’s no rush, I suppose. But may I suggest, you should save the gossip until after you have your things sorted.”

Plo nods along with his chastened crechemates. This sort of thing has become darkly funny over the last few months.

“Remember, Ilum is an ice world. It’s better to have layers of clothing than one or two bulky things on the outside.” Ki-Adi-Mundi glances down at their pile. “Personally, I recommend the brown thermals.”

Micah lifts one up to the light. It’s nearly translucent and covered in bobbles. “Really?” 

“As I said, layers are the key.” Ki-Adi-Mundi raises a thin eyebrow, and he smiles just faintly. “But it’s up to you. We’ll have latemeal in an hour, in the galley. Don’t be late.”

The storm dies down, eventually. Plo and the younglings watch from the windows as the Crucible comes in to land.

The Force moves slowly around Ilum. It had been a shock the first time he visited—a true Initiate then, whose only frame of reference had been Coruscant. Everything is still and quiet, as if all their senses had been muffled at once, a blanket thrown over their heads. Ilum is a snowball world, glaciated down to the tropics. The Temple lies at the 38th parallel, built into the icy flanks of one of the few mountain belts that rise above the ice caps. There’s very little of the Living Force here. 

The Crucible thrums, drifting sideways in a high-altitude gust. The ship lurches beneath their feet. Cloud surrounds them, racing past the windows in wisps. Then the ship descends a little more, and it vanishes all at once.

“Wow,” Micah whispers. He leans forward, his face nearly pressed flat against the transparisteel. “That’s amazing.”

Even having seen it before, Plo is inclined to agree. The valley beneath the Temple is broad and flat, deep enough to swallow a Venator whole. Its walls are steep, bare dark rock carved out by glaciers and fractured into sharp-edged peaks by the freeze-thaw action of ice. The Crucible skims low over the valley floor, bleeding off speed, and eventually the three knife-edge horn peaks that mark the Temple entrance come into view.

They land without ceremony. There’s a brief judder as the Crucible’s landing gear breaks through the thick crust of ice laid down by the storm, but the bedrock is close to the surface here. 

Ki-Adi-Mundi takes charge. “Jackets on, Initiates. Has everyone got their survival packs?”

There’s a chorus of yeses. Ki-Adi-Mundi had made them redo the packs twice, explaining every part of them in detail. There are reusable thermopacks, a portable water distiller, and dense ration bars to last two weeks. It’s unlikely they’ll need to use any of these—but better safe than sorry, Plo thinks.

Master Yoda joins them in the hold, nodding to his padawan. Ki-Adi-Mundi checks everyone over one last time, then takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders. “All right—door, please.”

The door cracks open. The frozen atmosphere of Ilum rushes in, so cold it burns.

The Initiates file out of the ship in silence. That had happened last time, too; all of them so shocked by the feeling of Ilum in the Force and then by the intense cold that no-one had spoken at all until they reached the Temple. 

Plo takes advantage of the moment to observe. The sky is dark and mostly clear, a layer of cloud in the south where they’d come down. More mountains rise across the valley, silhouetted against the pale glow of the rising sun in the east. The snow beneath his feet is crusted hard on top, firm enough to walk on. He reaches out through the Force—it’s about a metre deep, which is shallow for Ilum. Beneath the snow is bedrock, greywacke fractured and scraped raw. 

Yoda hikes past them, smiling—his gaze lingers on Plo—and takes his usual position at the head of the line. 

It takes fifteen minutes’ walk to reach the frozen Temple doors. There’s a shift among the younglings as they take in the sheer ice wall, confusion flickering through the air. Ki-Adi-Mundi instructs them to reach out through the Force, together.

That ice wall is not altogether natural. It’s an icefall of sorts, fed by snow and ice gathering in the high wall of the valley above the Temple, but the flow can’t be called a glacier, and the speed at which it reforms is nothing Plo has ever seen in the natural world. The ice glimmers in his mind’s eye, parting like a curtain and flowing to the sides. The Temple doors emerge.

Yoda leads the way inside. The Gathering begins.

Chapter Text

Plo knows, beyond doubt, that he will not find his kyber the same way as he had in his first life. He’s no longer that person. The caves of Ilum are something beyond the normal flow of time; they will test him according to who he is now.

So he takes his time, following the flow of the world deeper into the Temple. 

It’s dark down here—but not nearly as dark as it ought to be. He takes his goggles off, stowing them in a carefully-zipped pocket. There’s a faint blue-white glow in the walls, just enough for eyes adapted to the twilight to see where he’s going. 

The Force, to the Baran Do, is dalanjjak ila, the great flow of energies through the world. It flows to an equilibrium, like the rivers to the sea, and then it begins its journey anew like clouds drifting through the sky and the fall of rain onto the land. Water can be found wherever there is life, and beyond that, in distant nebulae and in magma rising through planetary crusts. The same is true of the Force. The Jedi, and the Baran Do, are far from the only Force traditions to make the comparison.

The Force is flowing strong around him now, like a mountain stream rushing downslope. There’s something else, Plo realises, a more solid sort of energy like boulders, and the current swirls chaotically around those interruptions.

He pauses at a crossroads, listening. There’s a faint trickling of meltwater in the distance, echoing through the tunnels. 

The tumble of the current pulls left.

Plo steps gingerly into the leftmost branch. This corridor is narrower, its roof sloped in—more of a tunnel. Ice coats the walls here and there, flowing down ancient pillars and drifts building up in the corners. That glow remains, lighting the way.

The sound of water grows louder as he follows the pull of the Force deeper. The ice surrounding him turns bluer, limned with a ghostly light.

The tunnel turns into a staircase, narrow and twisting. Plo slows, testing each step as he goes.

He reaches a second intersection at the bottom of those steps. One path is a dark opening in the wall a metre or so above his head; the ice beneath it is smooth and water-sculpted. The other is not much more than a crack, but the light is brighter beyond, and the rushing whisper of a subglacial stream echoes through. Both resonate in the Force.

Plo investigates the crack. It’s just wide enough for him to fit his head and shoulders into, but it turns, and he can’t quite see what’s on the other side. 

“Sir,” says a voice at his shoulder, “the water’s rising.”

Plo sucks in a sharp breath. He turns.

A pale haze drifts down the tunnel, shapeless and formless. “Water’s coming up fast,” says that distant voice, achingly familiar. “We should get out of here.”

A crack like a cannon shot rings through the cave. The floor drops out from beneath Plo’s feet.

He throws his senses out through Force, reaching instinctively for the sides of the cave. Suddenly they’re far away, slippery like melting ice beneath his fingertips. He falls for an interminable moment, and then his back hits the surface and freezing water closes in over his head. The current takes him. Up becomes down, light and dark a whirling kaleidoscope all around him.

Something snags him by the arm, pulling him to the surface. Plo gasps for air—the light is blinding. He’s hauled up onto a sandy riverbank like a hooked fish. Disembodied hands turn him over onto his side and pat his back as he coughs.

He takes a moment to recover, staring wide-eyed into the darkness. There’s no-one else here.

“Shall we keep going, sir?” asks that ghostly voice.

Plo sits up. He aches, all over, but his clothes are somehow dry.

“Thank you,” he says, almost unthinkingly. His voice quavers. Boost, he very nearly says.

There’s no response.

All things are possible in the Force.

Plo levers himself to his feet. The river is gone—there’s just an empty cavern, high-roofed and long, and that ghostly glow of ice spreading in skeletal fingers down the walls. Buried within the ice, pinpricks of white light that can only be kyber crystals.

He closes his eyes for a moment, takes a deep breath. The Force here has gone quiet, filling the cavern like a lake; rippling here and there, but gentle and still. Plo reaches out through the water, counting the stars.

(There’s nothing here but stars and kyber. The mist is gone.)

The crystals do not call out. None of these are his.

He opens his eyes. There’s a shoreline of sorts, where the weight of the Force shallows out along the nearest wall. He picks his way along that shore, clambering here and there over boulders and more artificially-shaped debris. Perhaps this is a very old part of the Temple, he thinks, slowly succumbing to the weight of ice above. 

Soon Plo senses a faint current; the drift of water toward an outflow. He follows that current, though his heart begins to beat fast and a trembling heat collects in his fingers. Trust in the Force, goes the maxim; and so he does.

Something flickers in the distance. A gust of wind tugs at his jacket.

The cavern narrows to a high-roofed passage, a gorge. The flow of the world quickens, rushing through that gap in a whitewater torrent. 

Plo’s instincts begin to scream out. If he steps into that torrent, he will be swept away.

He shudders, grappling with his thoughts. Trust in the Force, he tells himself, and strides into the river despite his fear.

The current takes hold of him, throwing him down the passage. This time he is prepared for the violent whirl of motion; he throws his senses out through the Force, letting it take him along. A little push here and there keeps him clear of the scoured rock of the canyon walls. And then there’s a red glow ahead, the canyon opening out into a vast circular amphitheatre, and the flow of the world loses energy and the ground steadies all at once beneath Plo’s feet.

He stumbles, going to one knee and catching himself against the smooth, tiled floor. There are patterns here, like the ones on the floor of the Council Chamber, but the red light that shifts and flickers all around brings up a different kind of memory altogether. He looks up, half-expecting to see the red giant star of Abregado.

A firm hand rests for a moment against his shoulder. “Nothing so exciting, General,” says Sinker’s disembodied voice, at his side. “We’re ready if you are.”

“What?” says Plo, and turns, but the mist dissipates the moment he sets eyes on it. One long streamer reaches out, a banner snapping in the wind, and then it’s gone.

Plo looks that way, following the gentle breeze to the center of the cavern. The pinpricks of kyber in the walls here are far denser, stars clustered at the heart of a galaxy. The mosaic pattern of the floor arcs inward, toward a central pillar of ice like a great tree trunk. Here’s the source of that red light, an enormous crystal—the biggest single kyber Plo has ever seen—floating at the core of that tree of ice.

It’s not entirely red—there are patches here and there of neutral white, moving about the planes of the crystal. As he draws closer, he can feel the echo of distress, muted by the encasing ice. This is a bled crystal, then—healing, slowly, from whatever atrocity could possibly have corrupted a kyber of this size.

A whisper at his back. “Wasn’t us, sir,” says Warthog, and laughs.

“I should hope not,” Plo replies, unable to keep the response in. 

The breeze shifts just a little, away from the giant red kyber. The ice around it has slumped a little over the millennia, laying rippled on the floor like wax from a gigantic candle. The flow of the world sharpens around Plo, and he steps up onto the ice, kneeling; where he puts his hand down, the song of a crystal reverberates through his bones.

“Is that yours, sir?”

Is it?

Plo dips his hand into the ice, and it parts like water around his fingers. The crystal drops into his palm.

It doesn’t feel like the one he’d earned on his first Gathering, all that time ago. That one had been blue, and sharp, and it had reminded him of the value of action every time he held it in his hands.

This one, when he opens his fingers, glows a vivid orange. It is heavy, a weight against his mind as much as his palm.

Something nudges at the back of Plo’s mind. He looks up.

The mist has closed in around him. It fills the entire cavern, thick and white and about his own height. Here and there are thin spots, and at the edges of those he catches glimpses of shapes within the cloud, movement.

He can’t move, can’t speak. He clutches his crystal close to his chest, his breathing harsh through his mask. 

At the front, the haze becomes thicker, denser. Something like limbs appears for a moment, and is plucked away by the breeze.

“I’m sorry,” a voice says. This one, he can’t identify; it could have been any of his men, the rasp of a voice he’s only really heard from dying men on the battlefield. A rippling shudder goes through the mist. “I didn’t mean to do it.”  

Plo stares. A black hole opens up in the pit of his stomach.  

“To do what?” he asks, his voice a harsh croak.

The mist blinks out, all at once.

“Good soldiers follow orders.”

Chapter Text

Chapter Text

The Crucible descends into a blanket of thick mist as it approaches the Temple landing field. Wisps of vapor flash past the cockpit windows, lit up by the glow of the city beneath. Plo keeps a practiced eye on the instruments as Huyang brings them in to land.

Coruscant is never quiet. The closest it gets are these late-night landings into the fog, which muffles the roar that echoes up out of the canyons between each upper-city block, and shields those below from the unceasing rumble of freighters through the atmosphere. One gets used to it, eventually.

They disembark, into the fog.

Plo’s hand closes around his kyber, deep in his pocket. The shapes of human figures flicker in and out of existence around them, a ghostly escort keeping pace as Ki-Adi-Mundi leads the Initiates off the landing pad.

Nobody else seems to notice, at first. Then Master Yoda’s ears flick, and he turns his head to the side.

The silhouette of a marching clone dissipates into the mist.

Over the next tenday, Plo’s lightsaber slowly takes shape.

The hilt is straight, oval in profile, about the length of his forearm from wrist to elbow. There’s an internal screw socket at the butt-end, to allow for further extension. (Plo’s already tossing up the idea of a polearm mod, based on the staves used by the Baran Do.) The grip is molded rubber, a little bulkier than those of his fellow Initiates—this to accommodate his long middle claw. He’s gone for a fairly simplistic design aesthetic, the pale silver of the casing and plain black rubber trimmings—the grip, and a ring between the hilt and the emitter. There are two small vents, one on each side of the grip, and two unobtrusive attachment points for a security chain or the like.

Plo activates the saber. The blade that springs from the emitter is something like a flame—yellow-white at the core, intensely bright even through his goggles, outlined in vivid orange. From emitter to the tip of the blade it is the length of his arm.

He flicks a switch hidden in a notch by his thumb. The blade smoothly retracts not quite halfway.

“Very well done,” says Huyang, stepping out from behind the workbench. “The primary blade is a little short for a Soresu weapon, but I suppose you are working with the limitations of your own stature. The secondary blade, on the other hand.” He bends to inspect the emitter. “Solid and steady. This is very well done, for your first blade.”

Plo’s tusk twitch, privately amused. “I have had a lot of practice, haven’t I?”

“So you have.” Huyang straightens, fixing him with a peculiar gaze. “You’ve made a mess of my workshop, too. You’d better tidy up after yourself, and then I believe you should go show off your handiwork to your Masters.”  

There’s no such thing as unqualified praise, with Huyang. Plo deactivates his saber and bows deeply to the ancient droid—respect is due nevertheless. “Thank you, Master,” he says. “I appreciate your guidance—and your patience.”

Droids reflect very little into the Force. Huyang, despite his great age, is no different: his inorganic metal body generates a presence more like a piece of furniture than a person, and here on Coruscant he fades into the background behind the great tides of Life. But droids like Huyang are people, and like all things the Force can be found within them too… if you know how to look.

Amusement shows up in Huyang like a narrow vein of gold through a granite slab. “You are welcome, Initiate,” he says, and bows to Plo in return. “You may feel free to make a mess in my workshop any time.”

“There’s a mag-10 solar storm headed directly your way, General. ETA about six minutes. We’re going to have to hop the system.”

“Understood.” Plo stares down at the flickering form of the Triumphant II’s comms officer, resigned. “There is no time for those of us on the surface to return to the ship. Admiral Coburn will assume interim command of the flagship while we wait for the storm to die down. Commander Wolffe and I will continue our mission down here.”

“Yes, sir.” The holo flickers, static passing across the projection. “Good luck, sir. Triumphant out.”

Plo lifts his gaze toward his commander, across the rickety camp table set up in the middle of their rather cramped temporary command tent. Wolffe is already barking orders into his own comm, checking in with the lieutenants leading the relief missions. There are nearly one hundred of the Wolfpack here on this grassy moon in the Luwandel system. They’ve been here for a tenday so far, tasked with overseeing the establishment of a refugee camp.

The storm, while inconvenient, is unlikely to throw off the mission parameters by much. The camp is the first of an intended six meant to hold the entire remaining population of Luwandel-3, an agriworld recently razed by the Separatists. One hundred Pack and thirty-seven Republic refugee specialists to look after nearly three hundred thousand refugees… it was always going to be a tough ask.

Plo stands, going to the shielded storage crate in the corner of the tent. He unlocks it, placing the comm unit and his personal datapads inside. Luwandel-3 had had orbital shields protecting its electrical infrastructure from the system’s fractious sun. The Luwandel moon has no such protection.

Wolffe joins him, disconnecting his primary comm from his wrist and tucking it into the crate beside Plo’s things. “What a pain,” he sighs. “You know, General, the trainers on Kamino taught us all about fighting in hostile environments, but they didn’t mention hostile suns.”

Plo’s tusks twitch within his mask. “Luwandel is one of the more volatile stars known, as habitable systems go. I suspect it is one of the reasons it never gained sovereignty in its own right.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me, sir.” Wolffe pauses, visibly deliberating, then removes his helmet and rearranges the contents of the crate around it. “Just in case,” he says, giving Plo an extremely jaded sidelong look.

“Just in case,” agrees Plo. They’ve both long learned to prepare for the worst.

Saber classes become much more satisfying, with his own blade thrumming in his hand. It’s also just that little bit harder to throttle his reactions and reflexes, keeping himself to the level of an Initiate.

Now, nearly a year and a half after his apparent trip back in time, Plo has settled firmly into the shape and limitations of his new-old body. It’s not exactly the same as being sixteen for real. The first thing he’d done, after switching his saber specialization to Soresu, had been to incorporate some of his old Baran Do training into his daily routine. Sage postulants climbed mountains; Plo scrambled up and down staircases, and ran laps of the abandoned basement levels of the Temple. His scrawny little body remained scrawny, but eventually he could comfortably outlast every other student in the class.

When Master Tyvokka surprises him in the salles, he finds himself jumping at the chance to test himself against a high-level opponent. 
In the process, he gives away more of himself than is perhaps wise.

The thing is—Plo can trust Master Tyvokka. He knows him. He’s spent nine years following in his footsteps, learning at his heels, and a dozen more in equal friendship. They’ve shared too many meals to count. It’s easy to fall into that same pattern of trust and reliance once more. Too easy, perhaps.

His old Master’s fighting style is exactly as he remembers. Few species can match the power and stamina of a wookiee. Tyvokka has had four centuries to capitalise upon his advantage. His lightsaber is a longsword-type, the blade nearly as long as Plo is tall and the hilt—inlaid with sacred black wroshyr—making up the difference and then some.

Small as Plo is, there’s absolutely no point in meeting him strike for strike.

In his first lifetime, he’d leaned hard on Ataru.

This time, he knows better.

He flings himself toward his old Master, reaching out through the Force. Tyvokka’s long blade sweeps toward him, angling down. Plo catches it on his own saber, the thud of impact rippling down through his arms—for a moment he feels like a fly on the wrong end of a swatter.

There’s a common misconception regarding Niman, among the Order’s younger members. It’s barely worthy of being called a lightsaber form, they say; all you have to do is step back and throw things at your opponent. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Orange meets green. Blade slides against blade.

The guiding principle of Niman is that the whole of one’s environment comes together in a fight, and therefore can be used. This includes one’s opponent.

Plo matches the momentum of Tyvokka’s saber in a split second, using that point of contact as leverage. He goes flipping over his old Master’s shoulder, and if this were a real battle that’s where it would end: with his blade in Tyvokka’s spine.

When Tyvokka turns to face him, there’s a horrified recognition in his golden eyes. 

Outside, it’s about an hour after sunset, and the sky is still fading in the west. It’s been a hot day, a dry foehn wind tumbling down across the grassy plains from the spine of high mountains a hundred klicks to the east, and the bare dirt beneath their boots still radiates a faint warmth. Plo turns his face upward, toward the stars twinkling in the velvet darkness.

The moon’s magnetic field arcs through the dusk, a colorless shimmer in his mind’s eye. A ripple flashes across the sky, and Plo feels it as the first waves of the solar storm reach them, a discordant jangle and a sensation like static in his sensory horns. He breathes deep, exhaling, as the first aurorae begin to stream across the night.

Wolffe appears at his shoulder. “Nyakhoi me,” he grumbles, his new favourite bit of keldeorinyaa. It means, roughly, same shit as always. “The landers aren’t rated for this, sir. We might be stuck a while.”

“Indeed,” says Plo. Their landing craft, at least, are the most vulnerable things in this piecemeal refugee camp. The refugees themselves have already lost all their electronics to the Separatists’ planet-clearing EMPs. The Wolfpack had brought datapads and a long-range comm station, only the latter of which is adequately shielded.  

Streamers of light hiss across the sky, green and pink and red and bright, so bright. Raised voices float along in the wind, shouts of awe from across the camp. The twisting banners in the sky converge on a violet point and explode outward like fireworks, radiating from horizon to horizon. Some piece of equipment goes pop in the tent behind them.

“It’d be beautiful, if it wasn’t such a direct pain in my shebs.” Wolffe folds his arms, his greaves clacking together. “Our armor’s rated for general EMP resistance, but I have no idea how it’ll go against this sort of thing.”

Plo nods, distracted and well aware of it. The shimmer of aurorae is spectacular on its own, but the moon’s magnetic field is ringing like a chorus of temple bells and the Force itself dances about the magnetosphere, echoing the luminous streamers that stretch from horizon to horizon. It’s an incredible display of power in four different senses, and it is beautiful, in a hypnotic sort of way. Plo has seen solar storms before, but nothing so strong as this.

The camp, when he pulls his gaze away from the display, is lit up brightly and yet nothing like daylight, shadows flickering around the forest of tents as the aurorae wander across the sky, bright pink and purple and sudden shifts of green.

“I’m going to run a headcount,” Wolffe announces. “Will you join me, General?”

Plo tears his attention away from the spectacle with a pang of regret. Duty beckons.

The sun rises in the east next dawn, and the dance of aurorae across the sky fades, but only in comparison.

Wolffe’s headcount had come up one short. Warthog—of course.

It takes five hours to track the missing pilot down: one and a half hours to scour the tent city looking for him, and three and a half to break into one of their own landing craft when it turned out that he had gone for a nap in the cockpit and gotten locked in by the storm. The work is slowed considerably by the fact that half the engineers’ usual tools throw sparks and zap them when picked up.

As the sun clears the horizon, Plo gathers up a squad of freshly-rested Pack, and heads out to run a perimeter patrol. Nobody’s comms or positioning units are working, so Wolffe has decreed that nobody is to go out of sight of the camp for safety’s sake. Plo is the one exception; his sense of direction is biological, and his telepathic range is large enough to reach the crew on the Triumphant II, lurking out past the distant debris cloud at the edge of the system.

Lieutenant Sinker sticks to Plo’s side as they head out of camp, into the sea of knee-high grass. Unlike Wolffe, he is wearing his helmet, but Wolffe had been right: the EMP-resistant circuits in their armor hadn’t held up to the power of the storm. The soldiers on shift last night had spent a solid chunk of time removing the HUD and much of the forward section of their helmets, so they could see where they were going and wouldn’t have to yell to be heard clearly. Plo had helped Sinker’s squad fit pieces of scrap transparisteel into the holes, so that they had at least a little protection in the event of a skirmish.

“I don’t think it’s likely, General,” chuckles Sinker, as the camp disappears into the morning haze behind them. “We’ve seen no sign of droids, and even if we had I’d be very surprised if they survived the storm.”

This is true. The Confederacy’s own EMP blasts not infrequently take out their own troops.

“No,” agrees Plo, “but droids are not the only potential danger out here.”

They skirt a group of grazing ungulathes, the remnants of the enormous herds that had once roamed Luwandel-3’s open plains. Sinker eyes the creatures suspiciously. “Not those, sir?”

“Not as long as you keep a respectful distance. Your armor will protect you, but ungulathes can and do kick when they feel the need to defend themselves.” Plo scans the group; there are no calves among them, at least not to his inexpert eye. “Avoid startling them if you can.”

“Got it.” Sinker drops back to pass the message along.

The patrol goes uneventfully, if slower than the Pack is used to. They’d had maps of the site chosen for the refugee camp… on datachips and HUDs. In hindsight, at least one copy on flimsi would have been a sensible investment, but, to be fair, the Republic's hastily-assembled Displaced Persons Management Administration is drowning under the weight of now more than ten billion refugees. They're lucky to get barely-adequate, these days.

Plo leads them in a wide circle around a distant perimeter of the camp, keeping the bright lights of the refugees as a marker on his left. The site the Republic had chosen for the camp is a vast flat coastal plain; the camp itself sits on a tongue of higher ground between the confluences of two enormous rivers. Under his feet is gravel, gravel, gravel, washed down out of the distant mountains by those great rivers. There’s water too, an untouched aquifer that will give the refugees as much water as they could ever use. He can feel it, trickling down through the pore spaces beneath his feet.

It’s not particularly comfortable, actually. The gravel is near-uniformly hard grey sandstone, which glitters and shimmers in the Force like a handful of wet beach sand in the sun, and the sensation of groundwater blurs it out just enough to be bothersome. The overall effect is a little like straining to hear through a badly-tuned radio.

Plo confers with Sinker, and calls a midday halt on the bank of the great northern river. The men draw straws (lengths of dry grass plucked from a nearby clump) for the lookout. The loser, Boost, heaves a sigh and goes to find a post. The rest of them pry off their helmets and flop down onto the gravel. The rustle of ration bar wrappers momentarily drowns out the song of insects in the grass.

Sinker appears at Plo’s side. He leans in, lowering his voice, and points east toward the distant mountains. “What do you make of that, sir?” he asks.

Plo looks east.

Behind the blue shadow of the mountains, white clouds rise high into the sky.

Chapter Text

Far beneath the Jedi Temple, its foundations meet the buried earth of Coruscant.

Getting down that far would be impossible short of launching a multi-day expedition. Plo knows, because he’d tried once, a couple decades from now. Between the Underworld predators and the millennia-old substructures, the journey requires equipment that he hadn’t had then and certainly hasn’t got now.

The boundaries of the Temple plot extend all the way down to the long-buried planetary crust. Six thousand-odd years ago, the ancients had built their first Temple here, placing it in one of the few islands of natural landscape that then remained on Coruscant. There may have been something that preceded that Temple—a ruined shrine, a vergence in the Force or something along those lines. Between long-ago wars and data corruption the Archives have only a few oblique references to what lays below. (Much to their regret.)

Two thousand years later, refugees fleeing the destruction of the Temple on Ossus arrived. A single holo in the Archives documents the sight they would have seen: a small collection of dormitories and outbuildings surrounding a modest central hall. The Temple grounds had died by then; surrounded on all sides by skyscrapers, the sun only reached the ground for half an hour at midday, and every time it rained, contaminated floodwaters reached halfway up the then-abandoned first floor of the dormitories. Coruscant had changed around them, and the Order had no choice but to adapt.

The Temple Guards keep a vigilant watch over the twenty or so largely-unused levels immediately below the Living Temple. Plo manages to avoid discovery by squeezing through service tunnels and shimmying down an unused elevator shaft. Layers of dust muffle his steps.

Perhaps it’s a trick of the empty, echoing halls, but a second set of footsteps follows him all the way down. He glances over his shoulder, and sees nothing.

Plo rests a hand on his lightsaber, hanging at his side. The steady hum of the crystal within helps settle his thoughts. He reaches out through the Force, scouting through the dark. There are no living minds close by; further out, none more complex than a clan of rats in a long-abandoned cabinet. The closest patrolling Temple Guard is two levels up.

This is as good a place as any.

Plo runs through a set of stretches to cool down, then lays back on the dusty poured-crete floor and closes his eyes.

The floor beneath him reverberates with an infrasonic hum. Nowhere on Coruscant can ever be truly silent. Sinking into deep meditation is easy despite it—he’s been needing this. Still water opens up beneath him. He sinks down into the endless sea, lights whirling in the depths around him.

It’s not the lights he’s looking for. Nor is it the glimpses of infinity between them.

Plo had asked once, in his first life, what was the difference between a vision and a prophecy.

Master Tyvokka had looked at him, and his face had twisted into a grimace beneath the shaggy fur, disgust clouding his presence like tannins in a forest-floor puddle. “The difference,” he had said, “is that visions are vague glimpses of partial futures seen from often limited viewpoints within an invariably undefinable scope. And prophecies are worse in every conceivable way, chiefly in that people believe in them—that they become not just logically convinced but emotionally invested in their outcome.”

Plo had taken this answer with a sage nod. And when he next crossed paths with Qui-Gon Jinn, he had dutifully repeated his master’s answer word for word.

Qui had given him a look nearly as disgusted. “You and Master Tyvokka are perfect for each other,” he had declared. “Neither of you have a single ounce of mysticism or romance anywhere in your bodies.”

Forty-odd years later, he had brought Anakin Skywalker home.

The usual tests for a Force-sensitive child were a mere formality. Anyone passing within a ten-metre radius could have felt the dormant potential within the little boy with his mop of sunbleached hair. Anakin Skywalker was a vergence in the Force in the guise of a human child. He was not the first, in either respect, and he probably would not be the last. Power swirled around him like sand caught in a desert whirlwind. He stood in the eye of the storm, becalmed and as yet unaware of the way the flow of the Force became a whirling torrent around him. 

The prophecy of the Chosen One did not have much to do with the child standing in the middle of the Council Chamber, reading out a succession of images on a datapad he could not see. Anakin was too old. He was afraid, and lonely, and he missed his mother, who was also the source of much of his anxiety judging by how it flared when he spoke of her. His fear reverberated through the chamber like a gong struck with a hammer. Unmistakable, and entirely understandable.

Anakin denied this, of course. He was a child who had only ever known the rule of the strong over the weak. He was a child who loved his mother with all his heart, who knew that this also made her something an enemy could use against him. And so he lied to a room full of people who could tell that he had lied, because it was the only way he knew of protecting her.

“He is the Chosen One,” Qui-Gon insisted, after the Council agreed unanimously that Anakin should not be trained as a Jedi. “There’s something momentous growing about him, Plo. I can’t just leave him to get snapped up by some other group who may or may not have his best interests in mind.”

“The Chosen One is a myth at best, and Anakin has had too long to grow attached to his mother. He will find it extremely hard to decouple his love from his actions, let alone his fear.” Plo had shaken his head, firm in his decision. “He is clearly traumatised from his time enslaved and until we can free his mother he will always have that fear eating at him. He does not have to become a Jedi to lead a fulfilling life.” 

Two weeks later, Qui-Gon was dead, and Anakin wore a stubby Padawan’s braid behind his ear.

Plo was one of nine Councillors to change his vote. His opinion of Anakin himself had not changed—the difference was that, after Naboo, Anakin had lost his anonymity. He had, in a single stroke, broken the Trade Federation’s invasion entirely… and thus painted a target on his own back. In a world where the Sith provably stalked the shadows, this put him at incredible risk.

Naboo was a small world, rightly preoccupied with their own recovery. They could not offer Anakin the protection he needed. 

Obi-Wan’s devotion to Anakin laid the final nail in the decision. If the Order would not accept the child, he insisted, then Obi-Wan would leave with him. And the Order could not have that. 

Plo has wondered many times since then if they had truly made the right choice.

What was a vergence in the Force?

As with air, as with atmospheres, as with water and stars and stars and life, the Force was not spread equally across the universe. There were places where its energy thinned, and there were hot spots, places where it gathered in knots. Sometimes a physical location, a mountain or a building, a whole planet, or even one specific rock in a field of rocks. Sometimes, a person. Some vergences could be correlated or even causatively linked to a momentous event occurring in the past. Others seemed to spring to life unheralded, and often unnoticed.

They were not rare, galactically speaking. There were six on Coruscant. There had been seven—but one, centered around a random warehouse in an otherwise unremarkable industrial district, had faded suddenly about six hundred years ago. This was also not an unprecedented phenomenon. Of the six-thousand-odd in the Archives’ databases, one or two were lost each century. Their lifespans varied—those focused around people clustering at the shorter end, for obvious reasons. 

Plo himself had probably been something like a vergence, for those nine days he lay in the Halls of Healing, a fifteen-year-old body integrating a seventy-five year-old mind. Nobody had said the words yet, but their descriptions implied it. 

Ilum was a vergence with its own little sub-vergences—a whole planet where the Force was strong, and yet in some places became more concentrated still. Was it any wonder that Plo’s experience this time had been stranger than usual?

Good soldiers follow orders.

Plo emphatically does not agree. Not all orders are created equal, and an order which is counterproductive or morally unjustified should not be followed—by good or bad soldiers.

The 104th had been, largely, good soldiers. A handful had been bad soldiers, in that they were ill-suited to their roles despite their extensive training. Plo, with Wolffe's help, had found better—less combat-focused, mostly—roles for them.

Good soldiers follow orders.

Plo had never once heard this phrase from any of his men. They had simply followed orders, when given—and once they had become familiar with Plo, they had freely asked for clarification, and suggested alternate courses of action where appropriate.

Plo also knows that, in the beginning, they had gotten a little creative about interpreting certain orders. Wolffe had admitted it one night on surface leave, courtesy of a truly heroic amount of alcohol. That the Jedi, as capable and skilled as they were in their own fields of expertise, were not and never had been soldiers, and sometimes the orders they gave made that very clear. Then it had dawned upon him through his drunken haze that he had just admitted insubordination to his General, and a not quite equally-intoxicated Plo had had to talk him down from the resultant doom-spiral of anxiety. This had dampened the humor of the moment somewhat.

Good soldiers follow orders.

It has the cadence of a maxim, a principal learned by rote.

Or perhaps, scriven deep into the brain by a neural augmentation chip.

Good soldiers follow orders.

Good soldiers follow orders.

Good soldiers follow orders.

Tup had been euthanised.

Fives had been shot dead.

Two men, out of an army numbering in the millions.

It's not a particularly convincing amount of evidence, but then Plo thinks of the sight of GAR weaponry in his peripheral vision, laserfire streaking by inches from his cockpit.

Tup had shaken his head. His hands had gone white-knuckled, said eyewitnesses, and his lips had moved in an inaudible sentence before he raised his gun and shot Master Tiplar in the face.

Comms technicians had recovered the previous half-hour of battle chatter and mic input. Thirty minutes prior to the killing, Tup had been in top form—his speech was sharp and fluent, his response time immediate. Eighteen minutes prior, he had been struck a glancing blow by heavy shrapnel, and had fallen hard, his helmeted head bouncing off the ground. The helmet did its job, and Tup got up immediately with all his faculties seemingly intact—but ten minutes later he had complained of a sharp headache. And his reaction times got slower, and his speech a little distracted.

"What?" he had said, four minutes before the killing, without activing his comms. "What orders?" Then he had tested the helmet filters, which were running at full capacity, and taken it off. In the middle of an active combat situation.

Twenty seconds before the killing, his comms had recorded one final sentence.

Good soldiers follow orders.

Sifo-Dyas' prophecy of an army clad all in white, and of the destruction of the Jedi Order.

The vode and their plastoid armor, discovered just in time to fight a war for the unprepared Republic.

One Jedi, killed by one rogue clone, whose autopsy report claims anomalous corruption, possibly cancerous, of the stress-reducing biochip attributed to a viral infection endemic to Ringo Vinda.

Another rogue clone, an ARC with no medical experience beyond emergency field dressings, claiming that the biochips served a hidden secondary purpose.

Another Jedi, killed by a group of rogue clones.

Many more Jedi, killed.

Plo really, really does not want to draw the conclusion he's drawing.

The rain comes down on the Luwandel moon that evening, a gentle drizzle out of clouds that glow the many colors of the aurora. 

It does not stay gentle for long.

The command tent flap opens with the distinctive shwoop of wet synth-canvas, and Commander Wolffe stomps in. He’s wearing a waterproof half-tarp over his head as a replacement for his helmet, and as he undoes the makeshift fastening keeping it fixed to his collar, rainwater goes down his neck. There’s a muttered string of multilingual curses.

“No luck?” asks Captain Flint.

Wolffe shakes his head. “Three hundred thousand people from an agriworld, you’d think there ought to be some among them that know a bit about the weather.”

“Unfortunately, that doesn’t surprise me,” mutters the refugee resettlement team’s project manager. She brushes her curly moss-green hair out of her face and massages her temples with a sigh. “If I were a betting woman, I’d put money on Luwandel Corp only going Republic because all their buyers are solidly Republic. They pay their ag-sci managers well, and anyone on-world who had money is long gone.” 

This tracks with Plo’s understanding of the local economy. Agriworlds can be a mixed bag. On the one hand there are the old, established farming collectives like Ketaris, where those who work the land are their own primary shareholders and sales revenue by charter stays with the farms. On the other, there is Luwandel Corp and its ilk, owned by massive interplanetary holding companies, where exploitation of labor is rife and only the bare minimum of the enormous profits goes back to the farmers themselves.

Hardly any of the refugees out there in the camp are Luwandelese. They’re other human ethnic groups, and galactically widespread species like twi’leks, bothans, duros. Never a good sign, Plo thinks, when there’s such a marked divide between the owners and the workers.

He caps his pen and stows it back into the deep pocket on the side of his tunic, and shakes out his aching fingers with a wince behind his goggles. Wolffe approaches to inspect his work.

“I thought you said you couldn’t draw, General.” Wolffe’s eyebrows lift out of their customary frown. “We can definitely work with this.”

“Cartography specifically is a required skill for a Sage postulant,” Plo says mildly. There’s an unsurprising lack of flimsi in this camp, and so he’d resorted to drawing directly onto the plastoid tabletop. Captain Flint and two of his artistically-inclined squadmembers are carefully painting over his pen lines in 104th grey.

The map is a 2D projection of the section of the continent on which the refugee camp sits. Plo had had to get creative to fit the relevant parts onto the very rectangular table. He retrieves a pebble from his pocket, one of the rounded blue-grey river rocks the tent pegs keep hitting, and places it approximately where the camp lies, on the vast apron of sediment between the mountainous spine of the continent and the shallow epicontinental sea to the west. At this scale, it appears to nestle right at the confluence of two great braided rivers—in fact, that confluence is nearly seventy klicks to the southwest.

“I believe this is what the Sages call ranjjaziko dalao,” Plo begins. “An atmospheric river, in Basic. Above us, there is a broad current funneling warm wet air down from the tropics. As it travels southward, the atmosphere cools, and the moisture condenses into a band of heavy rain.”

“And whoever’s under it gets wet,” says Wolffe, rolling his shoulders like a man trying and failing to ignore the rainwater trickling down his back.

“Indeed,” says Plo. “Very wet, in our case, because unfortunately the air current in question seems to have stopped moving. There is a roadblock to the south, in the form of a stationary high pressure system. I cannot tell what is beyond that, whether it may move away and allow the rain to pass before we find ourselves swimming.”

The manager leans back in her chair, arms folded across her chest. The mass-produced plastoid creaks. “Do we need to be worried about flooding?”

“Probably not.” The camp surveyor shuffles closer, inspecting Plo’s map. “Although if the rain sticks around for long enough we may be at risk for water contamination and all sorts of diseases.” She tugs a stub of a wooden pencil out of her lekku-wrap and rolls it between her fingers, considering. “We chose this location for favourable climate and soil, meaning we were able to establish food production on-planet relatively quickly. The downside is, this whole area—” she jabs her pencil at the map, gesture encompassing the entirety of the plains— “is technically a floodplain. A braidplain, if you want to be specific. Eight major braided rivers, carrying very high sediment loads, about four dozen minor channels, and significant subsurface flow. The camp itself occupies the highest-elevation surface and is most likely safe, but our crops are not.”

“Worst-case scenario?” asks Wolffe.

“We lose most of our crops to flooding.” The manager grimaces. “We have flood-tolerant species in the riverside fields, but how tolerant they are depends on how much sediment gets dumped on top of them.” She turns to Plo. “We’ve had twelve hours of heavy rain. Is it likely to continue much longer?”

Plo has always hated to be the bearer of bad news. “Unfortunately, yes. I cannot say how long, but several days seems likely."

A collective sigh goes around the table.

"We've managed to reinforce the EMP shielding on the main comms array," Wolffe puts in. "Assuming it works, we might be able to get an SOS out early—if it comes to that."

The camp manager's frown loosens. "If we do need help, sooner will be better for sure." She turns to Plo. "I hate to ask this of you and your men in this weather, but if we can identify potential break points in the riverbank that will give us somewhere to start with flood protection measures."

"Certainly," says Plo. He pushes his chair back, gets to his feet and turns, perhaps optimistically, to Wolffe. "Commander, where may I find myself a raincoat?"

Wolffe snorts, and goes to open the tentflap for him. "No such thing as a raincoat for a storm like this, General."