Apocalypse (36 page)

“Thuruht, I have the feeling that you are no longer concerned about whether we became Joiners,” Raynar said.

“That is so.”

“Why?”

“Because we feel how frightened you are,”
she said.
“How determined you are to stop Abeloth. And when you understand how that must be done, we know you will be happy to join us.”

Raynar shook his head. “You shouldn’t count on that,” he said. “Our mission is to report what we learn here, so the
Jedi
can destroy Abeloth.”

An amused trill shot from the breathing spiracles in Thuruht’s thorax.
“Destroy Abeloth? Impossible.”
She passed through the next archway and stopped.
“Look.”

In these reliefs, Abeloth stood alone in the courtyard, watching the Father depart with the Son and Daughter. Her face was contorted in anger, and the air around her was whirling with fronds and jungle reptiles and lightning. In the panels that followed, she looked even more deranged. The courtyard was overrun with vegetation, and a large winged lizard was struggling to escape her grasp, its eyes wide with terror, it’s wings straining as it struggled to pull its foot out of her hand.

The third panel made Raynar’s blood run cold. It depicted a band of six-tentacled cephalopods entering the bone-littered courtyard. Wearing elaborate robes and headdresses, they were dragging a trio of huge saurian prisoners toward the Font of Power, where Abeloth stood grinning in delight.

“The first time Abeloth escaped her cage,”
Thuruht explained. The Killik led the way up the corridor, through the next archway. They
passed a series of panels depicting a massive battle between the cephalopods and the saurians.
“The war had been raging only a few centuries when Abeloth was freed. Usually, it takes much longer. Often thousands of years.”

“Wait,” Raynar said, stopping beneath the next archway. “You mean every time there is war, Abeloth is freed?”

“Not with every war. But yes, when Abeloth escapes, it is always in a time of great strife.”
Thuruht started up the corridor again, motioning for Raynar to follow.
“Sometimes, when war grows too powerful, the Bringer of Chaos is released. She shatters the old order, so a new one can rise.”

“Wait,” Raynar repeated. He did not want to get so far ahead of the others that C-3PO had trouble recording Thuruht’s words. “Are you saying that Abeloth is
part
of the Celestial plan?”

Thuruht spread her hands.
“Who can say if the Celestials are the kind of beings who have a plan?”
Ignoring Raynar’s request to stop, she continued up the corridor.
“But that is how the galaxy works. It is how the Force works.”

Raynar glanced back at his companions and motioned for them to hurry, then rushed to catch up. They were bypassing a long series of reliefs, though these seemed to be little more than a history of the war between the cephalopods and the saurians.

When he caught Thuruht, Raynar asked, “But why would Abeloth be freed
now
? The galaxy isn’t at war.”

Thuruht stopped, then cocked her head and fixed a single bulbous eye on Raynar’s face.
“Of course it is,”
she said.
“The Jedi and the Sith have been at war for five thousand years.”

Raynar went cold inside. “You’re saying that
we
set Abeloth free?”

Yes. You and the Sith. Together, you released the Bringer of Chaos
.

Thuruht started up the corridor again, and Raynar stumbled after her. He did not want to believe the Killik’s version of history, but the truth was clear. Centerpoint Station had been destroyed during the war against the Sith Lord Caedus, and its loss had launched a catastrophic chain of events. Sinkhole Station had been crippled, allowing the Lost Tribe to discover Abeloth and her planet. There could be no denying Thuruht’s claim. The war between the Jedi and the Sith had led directly to the freeing of Abeloth.

No
, Thuruht said, speaking inside Raynar’s head.
Qolaraloq’s destruction followed, but it did not cause. It was just one link snapping, in a chain full of snapping links
.

Deep within his mind, Raynar knew he should be alarmed by what was happening to him. Terrified, even. Now that he was in telepathic communication with Thuruht, his final transition to Joiner was a foregone conclusion.

But compared with the level of destruction that would soon descend on the galaxy, his own fate seemed unimportant. What mattered to him now was learning about Abeloth—and about the cause of her release, if it had not been the destruction of Centerpoint Station.

You know
, Thuruht replied.
Abeloth was freed the same way she is
always
freed. The Current was turned
.

The current of time
? Raynar asked. He thought of Jacen Solo and his flow-walking. Tahiri had told the Masters that she was convinced that Jacen fell to the dark side trying to prevent some tragic event that he had seen in the future, and that he had been fond of using flow-walking to look at both directions in time.
Or do you mean the Force current?

Is there a difference? It is the Force that guides the future
.

After hurrying through two more archways, Thuruht finally stopped before a set of panels depicting three devastated worlds. In the first, an entire city lay in ruins. There were fungi rising from the rubble, and a drove of three-eyed bipeds could be seen fleeing a horde of tentacled felines. The second relief showed scores of dazed woodland creatures struggling through a blast-flattened forest, many fighting in vain to escape the fangvines wrapped around their legs. The third scene was the most gruesome of all. It was an ocean world with flocks of seabirds hovering over floating islands of moldy flesh. Hanging in the sky of each world was a female face with a gaping, fang-filled smile that stretched from one ear to another.

And when the Current turns
, Thuruht said,
it is the Force that suffers
.

Raynar felt sick. He and Jacen had become close friends at the first Jedi academy on Yavin 4. In fact, Jacen had been among those who helped Raynar and his father protect a lost arsenal of bioweapons from an anti-human terror group. And when Raynar’s father died,
Jacen had been one of the friends who comforted him. So when Jacen fell to the dark side and became Darth Caedus, it had been hard for Raynar to accept. At first, he had refused to believe the betrayal was sincere, and then he had blamed it on the torture Jacen had suffered as a prisoner of the Yuuzhan Vong. But as the Second Civil War had raged on, Caedus’s actions had grown steadily more ruthless, and Raynar had finally understood that his old friend had become one of the most murderous of all Sith Lords. Now it seemed even
that
condemnation was not terrible enough. In his drive to change the vision he had seen, Darth Caedus had unleashed Destruction herself.

Chaos, not Destruction
, Thuruht corrected.
Chaos brings destruction, but she also brings new energy and change
.

As Lowbacca and the others joined them, Raynar began to speak aloud, both so his companions would understand, and so C-3PO could record him.

“Thuruht believes that a change in the Current caused Abeloth’s release,” Raynar said, summarizing for his companions. He turned back to Thuruht. “But the Jedi believe the future is always in motion. So I have trouble seeing why a change in the Current would release Abeloth.”

“Is a river current not in motion?”
Thuruht replied, also speaking aloud.
“And will it not carry a boat to many different places, depending on how the riders paddle?”

“Yes, that’s true,” Raynar said, with some impatience. “But wherever they land, they do not usually free Abeloth.”

“They do not ever free her, because they have not changed the Current,”
Thuruht replied.
“They have only ridden it to one of many different destinations. But if they wish to go where the Current cannot carry them, the current must be turned.”

“And to do that, the river itself must be altered,” Raynar finished.

“Yes,”
Thuruht replied.
“The Force guides the Current. It is impossible to turn the Current without also changing the Force.”

“And
that
is what frees Abeloth,” Raynar clarified.

“Yes,”
Thuruht agreed.
“The Force is in the dominion of the Celestials. When their power is usurped, the Bringer of Chaos comes.”

Raynar waited while C-3PO translated the exchange for his companions.
He was about to recap his suspicions regarding Jacen when Tekli arrived at the same conclusion.

“Then
Jacen
freed Abeloth?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“By changing what he saw in his Force vision?” Tekli clarified.

Thuruht clacked her mandibles in a Killik shrug.
“We do not know what Jacen saw in his Force vision.”

Tekli’s ears flattened in frustration. She looked to Lowbacca, who let out a sad groan and replied that even Tahiri had not known for certain. She believed the vision had to do with a dark man who ruled the galaxy, and that Jacen had been so disturbed by what he saw that he had turned to the dark side to prevent it.

After C-3PO had translated Lowbacca’s explanation, Thuruht curled her antennae in the Killik equivalent of a nod.

“Then, yes,”
Thuruht replied.
“If the dark man was the future Jacen wished to prevent, then it must be the future he changed.”

With that, Thuruht turned and led the way up the corridor to the next set of reliefs—and Raynar saw why Thuruht was so confident he would remain to help the hive.

The first panel showed a long, tubular space station still under construction. The skeletal structure was teeming with Killiks, all wearing thin suits and bubble helmets. And that was all. There were no jetpacks, no space cranes, not even any tether cables—just millions of Killiks, floating together in banks the size of small asteroids. In front of them, enormous durasteel girders appeared to be drifting into position with no visible means of propulsion.

Raynar understood what he was seeing. Thuruht had used the Force not only to assemble the station itself—which certainly had the shape of Centerpoint—but also to move
themselves
about in space.

When we build, we use the Force for all things
, Thuruht confirmed.

She directed Raynar’s attention to the next panel. It showed a band of Killiks using Force blasts to extract ore from a stony asteroid. They also seemed to be using telekinesis to move the ore into a smelting furnace, which appeared to be powered by another swarm using a ball form of Force lightning.

To mine, to move, to smelt
.

Raynar understood why Thuruht needed to harness the Force. But
even if he knew how to share it, he was not strong enough to share it with so
many
beings at once.

Thuruht was amused by his confusion.
By the time we are ready to build, you will be no more
, she said.
The Architects will be the Ones who give us the Force then
.

“The Architects?” Raynar asked aloud. They were once again drifting into an area of conversation the Masters would need to hear. “Who are the Architects, exactly?”

The Brother and the Sister
, Thuruht explained, still speaking inside Raynar’s head.
Abeloth is the only thing capable of bringing them together. It angers them to see her destroy civilizations they have spent millennia cultivating
.

The Killik stepped to the next panel, where a pair of insects stood looming over a small swarm of Killiks who seemed to be assembling some sort of oversized fusion core. The first overseer was a luminous butterfly with large oval eyes and gossamer wings. Her companion was a powerful-looking beetle with heavy wings and a craggy head adorned by two raised stripes.

Soon, the Architects will form a pact and emerge from hiding
, Thuruht continued.
And when they do, the hive must be ready to answer their call
.

“These are the Architects?” Raynar asked. He stepped closer to the panel and pointed at the two supervising insects. “You’re saying that the Brother and the Sister are
insects
?”

Thuruht spread her four hands.
They are to us
.

“Ah … of course.” As Raynar spoke, a torrent of memories flooded into his mind, of the Architects joining with Thuruht and dozens of other hives, of suddenly just
knowing
how to build wonders like the World Puller and Still Curtain and the Chasm of Forever, and he knew that Raynar Thul was no more. He nodded. “Now we understand.”

When he turned away from the panel, he found Tekli and Lowbacca looking not at the crucial scene, but at him. Lowbacca’s muzzle was hanging half open, baring his fangs less in menace than in shock, and Tekli’s eyes had gone wide with alarm.

“Raynar,” she said, “it’s time to leave.”

That cannot be
, Thuruht said, her words coming in a flash almost
before Tekli had finished speaking.
The hive must be ready when the Ones call—

—and for that to happen, the hive needs a Jedi to help it grow
. The agreement was reached in the time it took a thought to flash from one mind to another, and when Raynar turned to address Tekli, it was so quickly she did not even seem to realize that another, unheard conversation had taken place.

“We agree,” he said. “The time has come to report what we have discovered to the Jedi Council.” He pointed at the two insects in the panel. “Tell the Masters that the Ones do not look like this to all beings. They take a form that suits their servants.”

Lowbacca roared that
he
wasn’t going to tell the Masters
anything
, that Raynar was going to be the one doing the talking. He raised a furry claw, reaching for an arm, but stopped when his friend used the Force to gently push it down.

“We are sorry, my friend, but we must stay,” ThurThul said. “And you must go. Raynar Thul is no more.”