Chapter Text
The planet doesn’t have a name, just a numerical designation in the star charts Luke found in a forgotten corner of the Imperial Archives. But if his research, the extensive cross-referencing and distillation of fact from the vapors of nuance is correct, this should be one of the places to which Jedi would make Kyber pilgrimages.
And where there were Jedi pilgrimages, there might still be Jedi artifacts or information left behind. Clues to their methods and their way of life, subtleties that might have been missed by inexpert Imperial pillagers.
Luke brings the modified shuttle down through the atmosphere, letting the Force guide his hands to steer the craft through the unpredictable ionic storms that lash the rocky surface of the planet. From the seat next to him, Grogu makes a cooing noise, clearly delighted by the brilliant display of lightning through which they pass unharmed.
An occasional stray bolt impacts the shields in a brilliant blue-white eruption, but the energy barriers hold easily. Grogu gets less excited and more scared when one of them ricochets off the shielding right in front of the viewscreen, but Luke smiles and sends a wave of calm through the Force. “I know what I’m doing,” he reassures the child. Mollified, Grogu settles back into his seat and begins meditating, a behavior Luke has been encouraging.
Luke doesn’t have anything like a surface map or chart, so he has no idea where the Jedi might have come on this planet. But he allows the Force to guide him, and he feels a tugging coming from the northeast. So he follows the tugging, and after an hour’s overland flight they arrive at a looming mountain range. At the top of the highest peak Luke can just barely make out what looks like a tiny black dot.
He steers the shuttle toward it, and the black dot expands with proximity into an enormous cavern opening, one that could be natural but is just regular enough that Luke feels the chances are better it was made artificially. It is big enough to let a bulk freighter alight within; it dwarfs his shuttle many times over.
Putting down in the center, Luke sets the shuttle to standby mode. “Wait here for me,” he says. “I’ll be back, okay?”
Grogu makes a negative noise, and the image of his floating cradle appears in Luke’s mind. “I don’t know if it’s going to be dangerous,” he says. “You’ll be safer in the ship.”
Again, the negative noise, and again, the image of the cradle. With a smile, Luke says, “All right. You’ve convinced me.”
A few minutes later they are following a winding tunnel that heads deeper into the mountain, Luke on foot, Grogu in his cradle. He can feel the Force signature of the Kybers calling him deeper into the mountain. He doesn’t know how much deeper they are, but he can tell there isn’t any other life on this planet. They’re free to take their time.
The journey into the heart of the mountain takes most of an hour. The results are less than Luke had hoped, but more than he had feared. He finds a rich Kyber vein, many crystals protruding from the living rock of the mountain, singing softly in the Force. At one end of the heart cavern is a crude workbench, shaped by stacking large stone slabs on top of one another with the Force. A set of tools lie at one end, untouched by sentient hands for a very long time but protected from rust or deterioration by good craftsmanship and excellent materials.
But there is no decoration, no writings, no remembrances of the Jedi who came here in search of their crystals. The Kyber veins themselves show no sign of having been harvested in at least a century. Luke concludes, regretfully, that while the Jedi definitely did use this place, they had abandoned it in favor of Ilum, which was both closer to Coruscant and had a much higher concentration of Kyber crystals.
“Nothing important here,” he says at last to Grogu. “Although, while we’re here…” He hoists Grogu out of his cradle and sets him down on the stone floor of the cavern. “See if one of them calls to you.”
Grogu looks up at Luke and coos, not completely understanding.
“Reach out with your feelings,” Luke tells him. “Touch the crystals. If one of them is yours, it’ll resonate with you.”
Grogu looks at Master Yoda’s lightsaber, still on Luke’s belt where he is holding it for safekeeping. “Yes, this one is already yours,” Luke says with a smile. “But part of becoming a Jedi is eventually constructing your own lightsaber. This is part of that journey.”
Cocking his head, clearly confused but not wanting to disappoint Luke, Grogu closes his eyes and reaches out his little tridactyl hands. Luke can feel him sweep the veins with the Force, and when his signature lands on one particular crystal at the far end of the cavern there is an audible chime and a visible gleam as it resonates with Grogu, singing to him. He opens his eyes and squeals in delight, waving his stubby arms at Luke in excitement.
“That’s the one for you!” Luke congratulates him. “Let’s go get it.”
Grogu waddles quickly and determinedly over to the corner of the cavern where his crystal projects from the rock wall. It glows a soft green, the luminance rising and falling like a heartbeat, or breath. Looking up at Luke, Grogu sends the impression of a question.
“Use the Force,” Luke tells him. “Call it to you.”
Squaring his tiny jaw, Grogu plants his feet firmly and reaches out with his hand. Luke feels him vise the Force around the crystal and pull with all his strength, but it refuses to budge.
“Not that way,” Luke corrects him gently. “That’s pulling. We don’t pull the Kybers out of their homes. We call to them.”
Grogu considers this, then tries again. Luke feels his grip soften and become an invitation rather than a command. With another audible chime, the Kyber crystal breaks free of its home in the rock and floats into Grogu’s outstretched hand. He coos and squeals as he hefts his prize, displaying it proudly to Luke.
Luke gives him a big grin and pats him on the head. “Great job! When you’re ready to construct a lightsaber, that will be your focusing crystal.” He floats Grogu back up into his cradle. “Nothing here that tells us much about the Jedi, but I still think this trip was worthwhile,” he declares. “Let’s get back to the ship.”
The journey back is just as uneventful, and the Force remains quiet and unperturbed. Which makes it even more surprising when Luke and Grogu round the last bend in the tunnel and see they are no longer alone.
Resting on either side of Luke’s shuttle are a pair of large ships; on the sides of their fuselages, which are dagger-shaped, are broad, vicious-looking wings which flare out at the aft and narrow sharply to needle points at the fore. Luke has heard of these, but never seen them – Gauntlet fighters, he tentatively identifies them. They are Mandalorian ships.
The Mandalorians who piloted them are arrayed in a loose encirclement formation around the tunnel mouth from which Luke and Grogu have emerged. There are perhaps a dozen of them, all of them armored, their faces hidden behind the distinctive T-visors.
Luke can’t feel them in the Force.
He can’t feel anything in the Force starting from about three meters from where he currently stands. It is like there is a blank wall. He notices something, then: every third Mandalorian is wearing a large apparatus on their back, a kind of framework on top of which rests a small, furry creature. He doesn’t recognize the creatures, but his intuition tells him that anything which requires an obviously cumbersome framework like these Mandalorians are carrying to support it is important.
Luke relaxes into a neutral stance, ready to pull his lightsaber from his belt in a quicksilver motion the moment any of the Mandalorians draws a weapon. He isn’t certain how this odd Force-blindness will affect his ability to deflect bolts, but he doesn’t see much of a choice in the matter but to try it. A fighting retreat back into the tunnel will probably be the best way – force them to follow him into the narrow space where their numbers will be a hindrance rather than an asset.
One of them, a bulky man in blood-red armor, steps forward. On the left shoulder pauldron of his armor, etched in black, is a sigil – a rounded rectangle enclosed within a larger one, the larger with diagonal slashes instead of sharp corners. He doesn’t recognize this sigil, either, but files it away for later.
“Give us the child,” the Mandalorian says. His voice is filtered and unfamiliar.
“No,” Luke replies.
The Mandalorian shakes his head. “Then we do this the hard way.”
Grogu, sensing the danger approaching, snaps his cradle shut, sealing himself off from the outside world. Luke drops his hand to his saber.
There is a beeping noise, and then the ceiling above them explodes. The Force screams a warning to Luke and he manages to turn the initial brunt of the blast aside with a shield, but thousands of kilos of rock come pouring down far too fast for him to stop. Even as the stones slam down on him like the fist of a vengeful deity, he hears the whine of a powerful electromagnet and sees Grogu’s cradle being yanked forcefully toward one of the Mandalorians.
Then everything goes black.
Luke isn’t sure how long he’s out. It’s probably only a few minutes, but when he comes back to his senses he is totally buried in stones. Anyone else would have been crushed to death, but even unconscious he realizes he was able to project a Force shield, keeping him from being killed.
Still, while the shield is holding for now, his strength isn’t unlimited, and he is entombed. He has to act quickly to save himself.
His arms are totally pinned, but he had his hand on his lightsaber when the rock fell. He carefully frees it from its belt clip, angles the blade as far away from himself as he can in these close quarters, and presses the ignition stud. The green blade comes to life with the familiar snap-hiss, instantly slicing through the surrounding rock and beginning to superheat what stones it hasn’t cut through. Luke swallows, now confronted with the additional possibility of cooking himself alive in here, and fights down his sudden bout of claustrophobia. There is no emotion; there is peace.
Luke begins orbiting the blade in narrow arcs, slicing through rock and widening the range of motion available to the weapon. As it carves glowing furrows through the silica surrounding him, he feels the mass shift and begin to loosen, redistributing its weight in response to the changes in pressure points. It starts to get quite warm, but he manages to carve the rock enough that his arm regains its full range of motion while encased in his Force shield.
From there, it is a simple, though not easy, matter of orbiting the saber all around himself, changing his situation from buried in many small rocks to being buried in so many small rocks that they begin to take on the properties of an extremely viscous and chunky fluid. His Force shield saves him from larger rocks settling hard onto him as he does this. He continues carving, now in an upward direction, until at last he emerges gasping, bruised, bleeding, and singed into the uneven light of the cavern.
The uneven light is caused, he sees, by the flickering flames of what is left of his shuttle. The Mandalorians, not content with burying him in thousands of kilos of rock, destroyed his ship as they left, stranding him on this nameless planet hundreds of parsecs from any inhabited world.
On the ground in front of the ship is Grogu’s cradle, its power shut off. Grogu’s Kyber crystal lies in the dust, glowing faintly.
Luke collapses to his knees and picks the crystal up, clutching it tightly and closing his eyes. He lets himself take a few minutes to just sit there, defeated. Then he rallies himself, gets to his feet, and formulates a plan.
As he suspected, the Mandalorians shot his ship in its engines on their way out. A single blast detonated the drives and their reactor, destroying the ship beyond any hope of recovery, but the fore end of it is relatively intact. That includes much of the bridge instrumentation, the subspace antenna, the transceiver, and several kilometers of wiring.
It is the work of about eight hours to retrieve the set of ancient tools from the mountain heart, then use them to salvage these key components from the ship and reassemble them into a jerry-rigged independent comm system. His personal commlink sits at the heart of it. To energize the whole array of scraped-together machinery and give it the range necessary to get a distress call out, he pulls the power cell out of his lightsaber.
When Luke finally makes contact with a New Republic rescue ship, they tell him that it will be at least three days before they can reach him, and a week after that before they can take him to a base where he can requisition a new ship.
The three days he spends in a Jedi hibernation trance, conserving his body’s energy against hunger and thirst. The rescue ship is an old Sienar assault transport, captured who knows how long ago from the Emipre and repurposed by the New Republic to rescue stranded personnel. He does not technically have any standing within the New Republic government or military since he resigned his commission, but being a former war hero and the brother of a prominent senator does have its perks.
The pilot is a Sullustan who shakes Luke’s hand vigorously, clearly excited to meet him. When he asks where Luke wants to go, Luke realizes there’s only one answer.
“Nevarro,” he says. “I have a friend there who can help me. Or, if he’s not there, the local magistrate will know where to find him.”
“That’s closer than a New Republic base that’ll have a new ship for you, but there’s no guarantees about what kind of reception you’ll get,” the Sullustan warns him. “We nominally control it, but the bounty hunters’ guild is really in charge. There’s probably at least one price on your head, Master Skywalker.”
“Despite what happened here, I can usually handle myself,” Luke tells him, smiling wanly. “I appreciate the warning, though.”
With a shrug, the Sullustan turns back around in his seat and begins keying in the course into the navicomputer. “Four days, then,” he says. “There’s a medkit in the back – might want to clean up those scrapes. Some of them look infected.”
“I will, thank you.” Luke turns and heads to the aft of the transport.
Four days, he thinks. He has four days to figure out what he’s going to say to Din Djarin. Four days to decide on how best to tell him that Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master, completely and utterly failed to protect his charge.
The time passes all too quickly.