Chapter Text
Awareness returned gradually, over an unknowable amount of time. Deep, void-stained visions that slowly gave way to more human dreams, that slowly bled into a vague sense of consciousness. When the time came that he finally realized he was awake again, he was hanging in empty space, surrounded by stars.
So, he thought to himself, is this a vision of the past? Or something happening in the present?
You’ll see a dark voice answered his thoughts. His void-shadow was awake as well. Great.
He felt the presence of the Other fade with an echo of laughter. Mischievous ghost or not, his shadow never showed him things without a good reason. He took in his surroundings.
He had thought he was in empty space, but in fact he was suspended several thousand kilometers above a planet. He could not remember the name of the planet they had gone to sleep on. It must be similar to Earth at least, or sleep would have been dangerous.
As he drifted he became aware of something else: a ship was approaching. He could not distinguish what beings might have created it, but he could sense that there was something...portentous about it. This was what the shadow wanted him to see.
As the world faded into darkness once more, he considered the implications of his vision.
Someone was coming. Someone could find them. Someone could disturb their rest.
Given these facts, the situation became simple. Someone would have to awaken from the long dream and make sure that did not happen. And he would be that someone.
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She was certain that they would find something here, but she wasn’t at all sure whether that was a good thing or not.
Rey and Finn had been traveling for the last 4 months through the deep outer rim in the Millenium Falcon, looking for relics or remnants of the ancient Jedi that had been too far flung for the empire to find and destroy. They didn’t have much to go on: a handful of old records that they’d managed to acquire from Maz Kanata and a historian who had contacted them about a month after Exogal with a data archive that he’d managed to find somewhere in one of the old libraries on Coruscant. After analyzing the data, they’d made a list of potential sites of interest, and Rey and Finn had both tried to gain insight from the Force about which might be worth visiting.
In the end there were 3 within the inner rim, and 6 more beyond, in the outer rim. And then there was one more, which was little more than a hyperspace coordinate just beyond the edge of known space, in the unknown regions.
“We don’t have to go if you don’t want to, Finn. It will take us another two weeks to get there and I know you miss Poe,” she hadn’t really wanted to turn back, she was actually enjoying this trip more than she had expected to. But unlike her, Finn had reasons to want to return to the inner rim.
She knew, intellectually, that she also had reasons, that Finn’s friends were also her friends. She was being unfair, but sometimes it was hard to stay positive. She was better than she had been 8 or even 6 months ago, but she knew that she wasn't healed yet. Maybe she never would be completely.
But Finn shook his head. “No. I feel it too...there’s something important about this one. Besides, we checked all the others and found almost nothing. It would be dumb to turn back now.”
They really hadn’t found much of anything. A few holocrons from the late days of the old republic, some small settlements that might have been home to a small group of Jedi. But nothing that wasn’t already somewhere in her books. Nothing that would justify traveling all this way to find.
Besides it was just such a mystery.
Either way, they were here now, in low orbit around a cloudy blue and pale green planet. As soon as they had come out of hyperspace they had both felt it: a subtle but deep and powerful presence. If she hadn’t been looking for it, Rey didn’t think she would have noticed it, but once she did, it was impossible not to feel, like the vibrations in the hull of a star cruiser or sand being blown by the wind.
They’d brought BB-8 of course, Poe wouldn’t have let them go without bringing the small droid “to keep an eye on them” and a new droid named EVX-4 that Rey had commissioned from Rose and some of the other engineers. She loved C-3PO but he was just not designed for field work or dangerous missions.
“Evix, can you have the Falcon scan the planet, see if it’s safe for us down there?” Finn asked.
“Of course sir.” the droid replied. After a moment it indicated that it seemed safe: it was a little cool and the air was a little thin, but not dangerous.
There were no signs of habitation as they descended down towards the surface. The continent they were passing over was mostly flat grasslands, occasionally dotted with low rocky hills. It was probably one of the least interesting looking planets Rey had been to since she left Jakku.
“Sir, I’m reading a very low level power source about...15 kilometers to the northwest," EVX-4 stated. "I’ve placed a marker on your scope. Recommend manual landing.”
Finn nodded and took the controls. In the copilot seat, Rey closed her eyes and reached out with the Force.
Yes, they were definitely heading towards the source of the presence she’d sensed from orbit, but…
“Finn,” she said, “tell me what you can sense with the force.”
Finn raised one eyebrow doubtfully, but closed his eyes for a moment anyway. “....I do sense something. But...it feels like...it’s sort of muffled somehow” He opened his eyes again and frowned in thought, “could it be underground?”
Rey nodded. Finn's impression matched her own. “Maybe this power source is the top of some sort of underground structure?”
“I sure hope so. If it’s buried under miles and miles of rock, there’s no way we can dig it up with just the equipment we have here on the Falcon” and there was no way they were going to be able to justify sending an excavation mission all the way out here if there wasn’t anything on the surface.
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The power sourced turned out to be a large flat structure in the midst of a low range of hills: not quite tall enough to be proper mountains but rocky enough to be impossible to land on. The design was nothing Rey recognized (for what that was worth) but she could tell that it was beautiful: it was white and gold and covered in organic and geometric designs. Even if its design wasn't familiar its function was obvious: it was a platform for landing a small to medium sized ship.
Finn put the ship down and after a final scan of the atmosphere by EVX-4, they were ready to head out.
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As they descended the ramp of the Falcon, Rey kept her senses in the force alert. Other than a vague feeling of apprehension, however, she didn't sense anything new. The subtle power still pulsed below them, apparently unaffected by their arrival. There were a few small creatures that scampered out of view into crevices in the rocks as they walked past, but she couldn't sense any other life forms.
After searching the area around the landing pad they found a path leading away into the hills paved with the same strange white stone and gold organic filigree. It lead them down into a narrow trench that seemed to have been cut out of the rocks by machinery, but erosion and weathering had broken down what must have been smooth rock walls at some point in time. At the end of the trench, there was a design in gold metal on a flat rock wall, a short, squat stone pillar similarly decorated…and nothing else.
BB-8 turned his dome back and forth between Rey and Finn and gave a confused little warble.
“Evix,” Finn said, speaking into the comm. “Is the power source you found...directly in front of us right now?”
“I’m afraid so, Sir. Whatever it is, it’s inside that hill.”
Rey frowned at the door and scratched her chin in thought. Some of the places they’d visited had trapped doors or special trick locks to keep anyone who wasn’t a force user out. She ran a hand over the door examining it. There was one line of short, looped curves that ran down the center of the door, and she couldn’t help but think they looked like some sort of writing.
“Evix” she said “Do you have visual? Take a look at this” She held her pad up so EVX-4 could scan the writing.
“It appears to be some sort of inscription, Mistress. Let me see if I can get a translation for you”
Finn meanwhile examined the small stone pillar next to the wall. “It’s almost like some kind of control panel, if control panels were designed by someone from Canto Bight.” He looked around and seemed to shrink into himself a little, “I dunno Rey...the longer we stay here the creepier this place seems. I’m starting to get a bad feeling about all of this.”
Rey had to admit that he had a point. The sun was setting and stars were appearing in the sky, and the wind had started blowing over the rocks around them, making unnerving ghostly sounds. “We just have to figure out the trick, Finn. This looks too much like a door for there to be no way to open it.”
The comm beeped again and Rey thumbed it on to see what EVX-4 might have found.
“I’m sorry to tell you, Mistress, that there is no record of this language in any database that I have access too. The closest I could find was an incredibly old inscription from a slab of stone that was discovered drifting in an asteroid belt, but that inscription also remains untranslated. The rock it was written on was estimated to be more than 10 thousand years old.
Rey and Finn both looked at each other.
“Ten thousand years?” Finn repeated, “are you saying this thing could have been here since before the old republic even existed?”
“That’s from before the ancient Sith empire even!” Rey said, looking at the door with new appreciation.
There was absolutely no way she was going to leave this planet without finding a way inside.
“I’m sure there is way to open it,” Finn said, running a hand over the mysterious inscription, “but it could be something we just can’t do. What if it’s a genetic lock and you have to be from the same people who built it?”
“There is a force presence here, Finn. Maybe that’s the key?” Rey backed up a few meters from the door and lifted her hand. “Step back, I’m going to try something.”
Finn hastily got out of the way. Rey focused on the inscription on the door, and reached out with the force. Then she curled her hand into a fist, and pushed.
A few stones dislodged from the ledge above and clattered to the ground, but otherwise nothing happened.
Finn frowned, looking between the door and the pillar next to it. “Maybe we have the right key but the wrong lock. Here Evix, have a look at the symbols on this post.” he held out his pad and scanned the gold decorations.
“There does appear to be more writing in the same language as the inscription on the door, Sir.” the droid replied after a moment “Although...hm. The symbol in the middle does look a bit like a symbol that appears in some very old Jedi texts. The database indicates it is a glyph associated with “lightning.”
Finn looked sharply at Rey and she frowned, looking away. Of course this would have to happen. Even out here, in actual literal unknown space, something would find a way to remind her.
“Rey,” Finn started, and she hated hearing that tone in his voice, “we can just go. Look, whatever is down there, if this is how you get in…maybe it’s something better left alone.” He didn't really think that, he was just trying to give her a way out if she needed it. She appreciated Finn's friendship, especially now that she knew he was also force-sensitive, but this overly attentive side of him drove her crazy sometimes.
“No.” she said, squaring her shoulders. She wouldn’t let it control her. It didn’t matter where the power came from, she would be it’s master. “I won’t give up.”
No need to push it, though. She stepped up to the pillar and rested her hand on top of it. Closing her eyes, she tried to recapture the same feeling of energy. But only a tiny bit, she thought, focusing hard on creating just a small spark: only enough to activate the door but not enough to do anything else.
She strained for a long moment, and just when she thought that she wasn’t going to be able to do it there was an audible pop, a flash of light, and suddenly small blue lights sprang to life across the pillar and the door.
Slowly, the stone wall slid out of the way.
The two Jedi looked at each other and nodded. There was no turning back now.
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Beyond the door there was a round room that contained an array of mechanical equipment of no clear purpose, arranged roughly in a semi-circle around a large round opening in the floor that seemed to be a shaft leading down into the planet. EVX-4 had brought a portable scanner down from the ship, but he could only determine that most of the equipment was powered down to absolute minimal energy. There was an abundance of strange, faintly pulsing cables leading down into the floor, which did not register on the scanner at all. However, Rey could easily feel the power they pulsed with through the force. The feeling they gave her was not exactly a good one.
“It’s not the dark side,” she said, tapping one of the strands and discovering that it had a hard, glassy texture. “I suppose it doesn’t really feel like anything. They aren’t alive, but they aren’t quite dead either.” If she was being honest, she found this all fascinating. She supposed there was a part of her that still relished finding lost and disused equipment and scavenging it.
“Have you ever heard of using something force sensitive to power a machine? It sounds pretty crazy.” Finn said, walking over to the center of the room and looking down into the hole. There were small platforms spaced regularly every 30 meters or so down the sides of the shaft, but no sign of an elevator or ladder of any kind.
Rey joined him, squatting down to look down the shaft. “I haven’t. But that doesn’t mean anything.” She couldn’t see the bottom, it was lost in darkness and fog. “There’s so much of the Jedi that has been lost, who knows what the ancients could do?”
Standing back up, she took a few steps back from the edge, and sat down cross-legged on the floor. Finn sat down next to her. “So are we going down there?”
“I think it’s the only way to go, but I want to try something first. Here, give me your hand,” she said, holding hers out to him. Finn took it. They had tried this a few times before based on a theory Rey had that two force users working together could sometimes do more than just one. Originally, she had planned to test it with more than just two...but now it seemed like that chance was a long way in the future.
She put such thoughts out of her head and cleared her mind, reaching out first to Finn, forming a link between his presence in the force and hers. She could feel that he was apprehensive, but as he sensed her emotions as well, he seemed to catch some of her conviction. They fell into a comfortable trance together.
Next, they reached out to the world around them. The strange machines were all around, but their force sense was just a weak echo, noted but easily passed over. The power they had sensed from space was directly below them now, and somehow less muffled. Rey knew, although she did not know how she knew, that opening the door had also opened something that was helping to hide it.
But...it wasn’t exactly an it. As the force signature came into clearer focus, her amazement broke her concentration and she lost both her sense of it and her connection to Finn.
She blinked back to her physical body and stared at Finn. His shocked expression was probably a mirror of her own.
“Not one force signature…” she said, “But a whole multitude!”
“I couldn’t count but there must be at least a hundred down there!” Finn said, looking down into the opening again. “They’re so quiet...they must be in some kind of stasis.”
They both took a moment to process this new information. “How could this be possible, though? A whole city of people who have been sleeping for ten thousand years?” Rey shook her head “Maybe it’s some kind of illusion.”
Finn shrugged. “Well, there’s only one way to find out.”
Rey nodded and stepped up to the edge of the shaft, judging the distance to the nearest platform. It would be a stretch but…she gathered the force around her and jumped down. Her feel landed solidly, and she looked up at Finn. “Look Finn! A great opportunity to practice your force-jumping skills!”
“Great.” he replied, although he didn’t sound very excited.
It took them nearly an hour to get to the bottom of the shaft. By the time they were most of the way down the multitude of force signatures had become unmistakable. Rey couldn’t be sure how many people were down here but it was a lot more than a hundred. Were they all force users? Their signatures were a quiet, dreamy hum: Finn’s guess that they were in some kind of stasis or hibernation seemed more and more likely. Oddly, she did not get any sense of the dark or light side from them. Perhaps they themselves weren’t force users, but were being kept alive by some force-fueled machine similar to the devices at the entrance. This entire situation was too strange.
When they finally reached the bottom the air was cooler, and there was a thick, heavy silence that seemed to crush in on them from all sides. Before them, there was a hall more grand than anything Rey had ever seen. The white stone from the landing pad covered the walls and the floor was solid gold. Ornate filigree decorated every surface, and here and there were more inscriptions in the strange, flowing script. At the end of the hall was an archway at least 50 meters high with more gold filigree flowing up along its interior. Rey and Finn walked through silently: Rey was sure they could both feel the force gathering around them. Something significant was about to happen, but weather for good or ill was still uncertain, in flux. Rey moved her lightsaber staff into her hand, and Finn unclipped the strap on his holster.
Beyond the hall was a smaller room with less decoration. In the center was a large pool of water, with more of the strange not-quite-alive glowing strands hanging down from a fixture in the ceiling. Sitting in the pool, submerged part way, were four identical objects. Like everything here they were white and gold, arranged like the petals of a flower. Rey stopped short as she sensed them through the force: these were not just mechanical devices. She could sense that three of the pods contained beings who were unquestionably alive, but they were in some kind of deep hibernation. Their theory, however insane it seemed, was correct.
She slowly approached and ran her hand along the side of one of them: its surface felt warm, almost alive. As she moved to the center of the formation, she noticed that the fourth pod seemed to be empty: there was no sense of a living creature inside of it. Rey stepped forward to examine it.
She felt the warning in the force seconds before Finn cried out in alarm, and Rey had just a split second to throw herself out of the way as a small, sharp knife skimmed past her ear and embedded itself in a pillar.
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It had taken more time than he thought it would to truly awaken, but once his mind was clear he found everything was as they had left it. After choosing a frame and moving himself from his pod in the Reservoir to his vessel, he had considered awakening the other three, but then he sensed the presence of the intruders inside the shaft. The others would be weak and disoriented, not understanding why they were being awakened. They’d be safer if they stayed sleeping inside their pods for now: there was no reason the intruders would suspect what they contained. If he was lucky, they would just be treasure hunters looking for things small enough to carry off and would dismiss this entire room as some kind of elaborate fountain.
So he leapt up to a ledge near the ceiling, adjusted his coloration to match the walls, and waited.
He had to admit that they did not look particularly threatening. A young man and woman, with a small and relatively harmless looking proxy companion of some sort. However, there was a certain something about them...they weren’t Tenno, but there was still a faint sense of affinity, especially from the woman. Could they also be survivors of extended exposure? They had managed to open the door and get down here somehow.
He grew more concerned as the woman stepped forward and touched his sister’s pod. He reached down into the Void inside of himself and channeled it through his frame, veiling it with void energy and allowing it to vanish from any visual or auditory sensor. He drew a throwing knife and leapt down from the ledge in complete silence, landing behind the man, who had hung back. He had some manner of rifle at his waist but did not seem to have any other weapons or armor. The woman was moving towards the center of the cluster now and he couldn’t stand for this...indecent intrusion any more.
One of his daggers embedded itself in the wall as the woman leapt out of its way with an admittedly impressive agility. Had he felt a flash of void energy?
He channeled more of his power into the frame and focused on the woman. He didn’t want to kill normal humans if he could help it, especially if they were also survivors of void exposure, but they could not be here. Reaching out through the void, he bent the space between them and switched positions with her. She stumbled in shock as she appeared where he had been standing behind her companion. He leapt to stand between the two humans and the cluster and decided to change tactics a bit. He let the veil keeping him invisible dissipate, drawing out his rifle at the same time. He leveled it at a point slightly to the right of the man’s shoulder, and made sure that they could hear it when he slid a cartridge of rounds into the chamber.
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Rey stood rooted to the spot. The initial attack had caught her entirely off guard, and then suddenly being hit by a metaphorical tidal wave of the Force and finding herself on the other side of the room had nearly knocked her off her feet. Finn was less disoriented but she could feel his fear radiating in waves.
The figure that stood before them clicked it’s weapon loudly, making a point of aiming it at Finn, she thought.
It was a truly alien creature. It appeared to be a humanoid covered in some sort of armor plating, dull white and adorned with gold filigree and more of that flowing script. It had curved, blunt-ended horns on its head and extending from both elbows, and was at least 2 meters tall.
Its sense in the force was even more perplexing. It definitely had a force signature, but it was strangely muted. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought it was a force projection, but the dagger it had nearly thrown through her head was still embedded in the wall.
“Finn...it's some kind of guardian," she whispered, "I don’t think it’s actually alive.”
As she spoke it turned it’s blank faceplate towards her and cocked its head to one side. Then it raised one clawed hand, and very deliberately pointed at her. Then it pointed at Finn. Then it pointed at the door.
“Whatever it is, I think it’s telling us to leave.” Finn said.
“But Finn, what about the people in those pods? And there are still more down below, can’t you feel them?” She must have gestured down at the floor because she suddenly felt the creature’s full attention focused on her, and for the first time she sensed danger from it.
She could sense that the situation was getting close to a tipping point. Could she and Finn kill this creature? It had definitely used the force but it didn’t seem to have a lightsaber. Was it alive or not and if not could it be killed? What had happened to the occupant of the fourth pod?
There were too many mysteries here, there was some key piece of information they were missing. Was there a way to reason with this guardian? Why didn't it kill them when they were invisible. Rey desperately tried to think as the creature took a step forward and swung it's rifle towards her.
It wanted them to leave, maybe it didn’t want to hurt them, but it would if it thought it had to. That seemed like a line of reasoning that a sentient being would follow, but there was no way they could communicate with someone who was ten thousand years old and spoke a language no one remembered. So Rey decided to take a risky move.
She reached out through the force, and she tried to touch its mind.
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An empty shell, like a machine made of flesh, with a silver cord of Force wrapped around a bolt stabbed through it’s skin and piercing its still and withered heart.
She flowed like water down towards the source of the projection, and found him at the end of it, a luminous, human-shaped form of condensed power wreathed in light. And behind him, like a shadow, an echo darker than the void between stars.
She heard a voice and she knew it was something from him, maybe a memory. “A demon standing at the shadow’s edge. Once human...but no longer.”
Then a flash of incandescent golden eyes and a streak of shocked surprise, and she found herself thrown violently back into her body.
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Rey came back to herself gasping for breath. She gradually became aware of Finn hovering above her, and also the warframe.
Wait. What was a warframe?
How did you do that? I thought only we could connect that way.
She stared up at the frame’s blank eyeless face, seeing in her mind again a pair of glowing golden eyes as she felt his voice echo in her mind.
She gathered together her scattered wits, and reached out again, finding a strand of his awareness that she realized he had intentionally stretched out to receive her response.
I used the force, I didn’t know you weren’t...I didn’t realize that wasn’t your real body.
He cocked his head to the side again, canting his horns to a curious angle, and asked the last question Rey expected.
What is “the force”?
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A/N: So what do you think? I have more chapters written but I'd love to hear people's thoughts. Are you intrigued?