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In the waters of Mandalore, Ahsoka swam amongst dead kings. Her balance had almost returned, though she needed support close by; she did not feel she could save herself if her strength began to fail. Gone were the days of diving deep with Prince Lee-Char on his aquatic planet, resolute, righteous, a Jedi aiding a war-torn world. She wondered, briefly, if her friendly prince had survived the end of the Clone Wars—if he had lived when so many had not.
She surfaced, gasping. Her montrals seemed wet with something denser than water. On the banks of the black lake, a golden Mandalorian stood watching her.
‘What did you see?’ asked the Armourer.
Ahsoka fought her way to shore and rested her one remaining arm on volcanic rock, then her face on her arm. She still had no sensation in her right side, where Anakin had cut and cut till her montral fell with her lightsaber arm. She did not want the memory. But they were beneath ruined Keldabe, where Ahsoka had last seen Bo-Katan fighting to unite a dishonoured people; they were in Mandalore’s living waters, which contained nothing but memories. Submerged, she had been cocooned by the darkness. She had felt her limbs move in slow, sluggish warmth, repelling each drop of moisture. Yet she had been so, so cold.
‘I saw…’
Ahsoka could not finish. Her bare feet kicked helplessly within bottomless depths. Overhead, the mine ceilings glittered with no light but the light of a thousand insects, carapaces bright as kyber crystals, mineral-cold. Slow-dripping stalactites dampened the air. In this ageless world below worlds, Ahsoka could not see at all. She had no knowledge, no intuition. The Force was a body and she was its severed limb.
‘I didn’t see anything.’ She wanted to weep.
With condensation glistening on her cold helmet, the Armourer moved forward. She took one step towards Ahsoka, then another. Her voice, remote and calm, gave no babyish platitudes; yet Ahsoka felt its comfort.
‘What did you feel?’
‘I can’t.’ Ahsoka struggled to rise from the water, where she was still floating waist-deep. The Armourer walked closer. ‘I can’t feel… I have lost the Force. I have lost everything.’
And the Armourer’s boot came down upon her hand. Ahsoka yelped in surprise and pain, and flung off the sudden weight. She danced backwards, treading water furiously. ‘What the kriff was that for?’
‘If you can feel that,’ answered the Armourer, ‘you can feel anything.’ She was as sweet and serene as the unseen stars. ‘Rise, Ahsoka Tano. You’re not dead yet.’
Ahsoka lifted her face to view the Armourer’s golden visage. Its sheen seemed blessed, its moulded coldness divine. The Armourer’s measured step had brought no crunch of bone, and hardly any pain. She did not use pain to press her lessons. Like a dancer, she modulated her every movement. She bent now into a half-kneeling position, and offered her hand to help Ahsoka up.
‘Do not be gentle with me,’ Ahsoka said. ‘Do not mock me with softness. I am a soldier; I have borne worse than this.’
The Armourer replied with a blink Ahsoka could hear, ‘Do not mistake my compassion for pity.’
‘I have not earned your compassion.’
The Armourer inclined her head. Her horns, like Maul’s, were small and decorative, too blunt to do any damage. She did not need them to cause harm. But there was no intent of harm in her almond-shaped gaze, in her low voice, in her posture as gracious and graceful as the sweep of a convor’s wing.
‘You have it nonetheless.’ Again, she extended the right arm which Ahsoka lacked. ‘Take my hand.’
Ahsoka took it and pulled. The Armourer gasped as she skidded, and Ahsoka drank in this one dear sound of mortal surprise. With a hefty splash, she landed in the black water. For a frightening moment the Armourer sank; then her legs kicked and steadied, and she began treading water opposite Ahsoka, her visor oil-slick and opaque.
When she spoke again, there was a distinct note of annoyance. ‘What was that for?’
Ahsoka said with deep satisfaction: ‘Now we’re at eye level.’
She shifted her arm to encircle the Armourer’s waist. In the secret, crystalline darkness, Ahsoka and the Armourer looked at each other and knew they were alone.
‘Bones,’ Ahsoka said. ‘I saw bones.’
The Armourer inhaled in a hushed, shocked sound, but said nothing.
‘I feel the bones of a great creature beneath us.’ Ahsoka heard her voice drop to an almost obscene whisper. ‘At the bottom of the lake, I saw it. I feel it still. A horned skull, and a long, many-plated spine…’ She shivered to recall the heart-stopping scale of it. ‘I saw tusks thicker than the width of a Devaronian, and four enormous legs.’
‘The mythosaur,’ breathed the Armourer in reverence. ‘Our progenitors tamed and rode it. Songs of aeons past say it was the size of a city, larger than Keldabe, larger than Sundari…’
Ahsoka had heard the Armourer say songs of aeons past many times by now, and wondered if she had any other catchphrases. ‘I say it’s ugly as shit.’
The Armourer’s laugh was delicate, bell-like. Ahsoka did not know how to go on after witnessing it. She could feel the heat of the Armourer’s body diffusing into the cold, cold lake; she imagined warm breath against the inside of that helmet, fogging up the visor. Treading water, they held each other’s elbows with a frantic kind of solidarity, hardly daring to acknowledge it.
The Armourer tipped her head back, and Ahsoka saw the slim line of her well-protected throat. She tried to speak once, then cleared her throat and began again. Rivulets of water ran down and down her chestplate.
‘Did it live?’ she asked Ahsoka, hallowed urgency in every syllable. ‘Did you feel it… breathe?’
Ahsoka did not find this odd. She no longer found any question too absurd. Not in a galaxy where Anakin Skywalker had been capable of betrayal.
‘No,’ she answered.
‘One day,’ the Armourer whispered, and now her voice trembled with unmistakable devotion, ‘the mythosaur will rise from these depths, and a Mand’alor—a true Mand’alor—will lead Mandalorians into a better future. The Empire will not last forever.’ Her bare right hand, with its strong, fine bones and its clammy flesh, cupped the nape of Ahsoka’s neck. ‘All this will come to pass as the poets foretold. We have been melted down, but we shall be reforged. The fires above us are the smith’s furnace, and these waters are the quenching tub.’
Ahsoka breathed in, hard. She could not comprehend the honour that the Armourer had done her by imparting this knowledge. This prophecy, this poetic truth. In the devout burning heart of the Armourer, stories became sacred; and her faith was so earth-bound and strong that it made Ahsoka believe.
Ahsoka had not lost faith. In the Jedi Council, yes—because they had failed her. But not in the Force. She was one with the Force, and the Force was with her. In the Armourer’s priestly presence, Ahsoka felt her own faith resurge, and she knew the Force thrummed in her veins and her breath and her phantom limb.
The sensation warmed her.
‘What else can you tell me?’ she whispered.
The Armourer was silent for a few seconds, contemplating. Despite or because of the helmet which hid her features, she was very, very expressive.
‘This is a place of rebirth,’ said the Armourer at last. ‘It is the only place where we may remove our helmets and remain Mandalorian. In the living waters beneath the mines of Mandalore, we are at peace with the oyu’baat; we join the manda; we return to the Creed.’
Ahsoka thought of the invisible dead she had sensed underwater, imagining that they stood in untold millions behind her and the Armourer. She pictured them rising from the surface—heads, shoulders, chests—silent and indomitable as the grave.
‘You can’t remove your helmet anywhere else?’
‘No,’ said the Armourer. ‘Revealing our faces is not the Way. But this is a sacred place, and the rules of the external do not apply.’
The Armourer had brought Ahsoka to the holiest place she knew. Ahsoka’s eyes stung, then grew liquid.
‘Elsewhere, we must hide our faces.’ The Armourer held Ahsoka around the waist, her grip both firm and gentle. There was a timelessness to her gaze, as old and eternal as those calcified bones embedded in the lake bed, and Ahsoka drew strength from it. ‘Our Creed is strict. Do you consider us a cult?’
‘No,’ Ahsoka replied. The Armourer waited patiently, so she went on. She could feel the Armourer’s heavy gaze trailing down her face. ‘You took me in without proselytising. You healed me, without holding me in your debt.’ With a fierce pang of unspoken love she remembered the little boy in her bedchamber, with his quiet words and serious brown eyes. ‘You permit your members to befriend outsiders. What cult would do such a thing?’
With a huff of a not-quite chuckle, the Armourer nodded.
‘You encourage debate. You do not fear dissent. You draw strength from your rules…’ Ahsoka felt the Armourer’s palm creep to her tear-wet cheek, and she turned her face into the touch. ‘Like your smithing tools, the rules of your covert shape rather than destroy. I have not seen you cast anyone out. I cannot imagine you doing so.’
A thumb swept beneath her eyelids, unbearably tender. Smoothing away the tears she had shed. Why bother? Ahsoka wondered. Water was just water.
She rubbed the back of her hand over her eyes, upset at herself. She missed the Jedi—missed them, missed them, missed them. But they were all gone, and in their place was a well of implacable grief so vast and stark that she could never hope to see its end.
The Armourer said with soft, lightless wonder, ‘How have you learned our ways so quickly?’
Ahsoka shrugged one shoulder. The Armourer cupped her cheek.
‘Are all Jedi like you?’
The well of grief lay open. The bones of the old Order were scattered across the galaxy. The universe as she had known it was dead.
Too tired for bitterness, Ahsoka reminded her, ‘I am no longer a Jedi.’
And the Armourer lifted her hands to her helmet. Shocked, Ahsoka saw her press its release seal and heard the hiss of escaping air. She eased it off; her eyebrows were dark and straight, her steady gaze unsmiling. She had seen and felt a pain so inconsolable that it could not be met with words, only gestures. This, too, she had given Ahsoka: the greatest gesture of all.
‘Then I,’ said the Armourer, ‘am no longer a Mandalorian.’
They kissed desperately. Within the watery cradle of their grief, they clutched each other tight. Ahsoka gave a single, muffled sob, and then could make no sound.
With their arms around each other they sank; sank deep and deeper still, foreheads together, bodies pressed close. The Armourer’s eyes were squeezed shut, but Ahsoka looked into the blackness of that cold, cold water—and for just an instant, she fancied she saw the mythosaur skeleton twitch.
They surfaced with a shared gasp. They kissed the water off each other’s mouths and noses, and paddled breathlessly to shore. Sodden, shivering in the sudden chill, Ahsoka held the Armourer’s helmet with worshipful respect, and lowered it back onto her head. Reborn Mandalorian, the Armourer stood.
Ahsoka stumbled, staggered, and fell. Her strength had left her. On the banks of the living waters, she was on her knees, desolate. But the Armourer was with her; and Ahsoka gazed up at the Armourer like a soul raised from the depths of torment, blessed by the touch of a hand, blinded by her glow.
The Armourer said, ‘Get up, Ahsoka Tano.’
And Ahsoka got up.
