Mirrors of the Force. Part 6

an illustration to the sixth part of the "Mirrors of the Force" story, a very unique StarWars fanfiction written by my dear and adorable friend Sebastian (to comment on the literary aspects of our collaboration - please{I MEAN P-L-E-A-S-E } leave comments under Sebastian's submission of the story itself [link] )

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Sebastian Buchner

Mirrors of the Force
Part VI

“You’re not going to tell a word of this to Jerek.”
“I told you – it’s alright. My lips are sealed, my tongue is searing fire if it tries to form what I see into words. Besides, I’m bloody curious myself. I’ve never been down here.”
Makos. He’s not the kind of guy you desperately want to have around in a fight, but he was the only one who’d come with me. I didn’t have to offer him anything and believe me I would have offered – a lot. Only he didn’t want me to. He’s in it for the adventure, he says. Jerek told me that he’s an idealist…and followed it up with one of our father’s aphorisms about how nobody’s easier to fool than an idealist. People in our corridor think that Makos is pretty strange. He makes up things, gets angry or laughs suddenly and nobody knows why. I worry a bit that, if it comes to a fight, he’d be lost somewhere in his crazy head or do something unpredictable. But the good thing is that nobody’s going to put a lot in what he says and even if he tells Jerek about it, he’ll have to be awfully convincing, because Jerek knows that he’s full of it, usually. Besides, the only condition on which he’d open the emergency hatch for me was that he’d come with me.
He’s got a very narrow and long face and looks as if he was bored all the time, but everybody in the guard looks like that. His eyes are always moving around which makes me nervous.
“Why aren’t you telling me what’s down there, Laar?”
“Because I don’t know,” I hiss. It’s dark and all I can see is the metal of the narrow chute when Makos waves the flashlight that’s on his gun. We have to crouch and I’m getting a little claustrophobic. That makes it difficult to think or I would have come up with something better to say. Anyway, if he discovers the human I can wash my hands clean in front of Makos and Jerek, but Ti will roast me alive. Maybe I can give Makos the slip and hide down there for a while. There are rations in the room where the human is.
I have never taken that route. We crawl along the narrow chute for what feels like an hour although Markos tells me it’s been no longer than fifteen minutes once we climb out. Outside I’m happy to have room to stand and walk to the side again, so I grab the railing and bend over it (we’re on a bridge, which is itself pretty narrow but broad as a hallway after the chute) thinking that I might see maybe a bit of a corridor that I don’t know or a plaza, which I know they have in some of the more central corridors. What I do see scares the hell out of me. There is no ground as far as I can see, only bridges like the one we stand on, crossing, criss-crossing, thousands of them like a strange, delirious spider web. There are slow moving blue lights in the distance and they leave ghost trails against the dark and I can’t tell what’s a bridge and what’s only light. “What is this place?”
“That? Oh, that’s the Outer Ring. Why are you looking like that? There’s the Inner Ring and all the corridors between us and it, and here’s the Outer Ring. You never figured there’d be one?”
“Sure, I did. Shut up now.”
“Yeah, sure. All those things are maintenance and wiring and structural things. That’s how the pylons are built. Each has a core, Inner Ring, Living Corridors, Outer Ring and then different kind of structures outside, depending on what it was built for.”
I don’t know if I should feel angry at him for being so smart or awed that he really seems to know much more about the ship than I do. I never guessed there would be anything like an Outer Ring or that it was so strangely pretty and breathtaking. There are hollow sounds, high sounds, almost like a song and I feel like humming. “What’s a pylon?”
He smiles, the way guys smile sometimes. He gestures to me to start walking before he says anything. “A pylon is a part of the ship’s structure. There are various pylons, almost all of them habitable – means, there are people living in all of them…or there were, at some point. This pylon here was built for education, I think. There are huge libraries in the outer structures.”
He leads me along the bridges taking turns that don’t make any sense in my head, but he keeps talking confidently so I guess he knows where he’s going. Another reason why I don’t tell him where we should go: my head is filled to the brim with images. Huge libraries. I never knew. They appear in my head, there are stairs everywhere leading to padcases as tall as five people and broken statues are everywhere on the floor.
“…it would explain why there are so few people here who have any useful skills at all. We’re the heirs of scientists and thinkers, but there’s no world that we can examine and think about. I guess they split up the ship into professions or castes, which means a group of people with similar skills and status, and they sent each group into a pylon of their own.” He speaks quietly, as if he was speaking to himself. “But at some point something went wrong. The pylons must have become separated somehow or maybe there was something like a crisis, a civil war, perhaps or a terrible malfunction.”
There is a pause. “How do you know all this, Makos?”
He looks at me. “How old do you think I am, Laar?”
“I don’t know. You’re a friend of Jerek, so you’re maybe a year older than him.”
“Laar, I’m an Azad. I guess you don’t know what this means and it isn’t important. We don’t age as fast as most of the species in our pylon. The way your species counts years, I’m about eighty.”
Now I don’t know what to say. We walk on for about an hour (I’m sure it s an hour this time) and all Makos does is look at the pad where I marked the location for him – since I’m careful it’s about a mile off from the room where the human is. “What’s an Azad, Makos? I’ve always figured you were one of the mixbreeds…”
“Yes, everyone does. That is another reason why I wanted to know more about the ship. I am the only Azad in our pylon. I must have come here from another part of the ship and I’m not talking about another corridor.” Here he gives me such a sad smile that I can feel it in my stomach. Along with that mixture of condescension and friendliness it makes me really quite angry.
“Will you just tell me what an Azad is?”
“Well, I am.”
“That is not a helpful answer. You say you don’t grow old as fast as I do. What does that mean? Do you stay kids for forty years?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about my people’s traditions. For myself, I don’t make much of a difference between a child and an adult. We live and we die. The older we get the more we are being shaped by experience. I might be a child. I just lived and nobody ever told me that I was grown up now – a full and responsible member of society.” He speaks just like people do when they talk about something unimportant. He even keeps on walking while he speaks.
“Well, how do you know that you are an Azad in the first place?”
“By meeting others and seeing that none is like me.”
Whatever he is, he’s not particularly bright. “Listen, how do you know you’re an Azad and not a Chatle or a Human who’s inherited a few different genes at some point? That’s not so easy to say, always. Half of my friends don’t know what race they are – that’s why we call them mixbreed. I know they don’t always like it, but we don’t mean anything bad by it.”
“Have you never wondered about what the right course is, for you? I do not mean what trade you learn or where you work, but if you think the right way, feel the right way?”
“Yeah, alright. If you don’t want to answer me, just say it.”
“That is not what I say. Do you never feel that something, something fundamental is not right? And that you would like to change it?”
“Listen, Makos, I’m sorry if you feel that you’re a little messed up, but all I want is to get to that spot on your bloody map. That’s important now and that’s why I asked you to come along, because I thought you might be helpful. But if you keep telling me cryptic stuff maybe that last point is where I was fundamentally wrong.” I will feel sorry for that in an hour or so but I need to keep a clear head. The fact that I go to know more about the ship at a time when I can’t do anything with that new information annoys me a lot. Any other time I would have used every free minute to go and explore. For the first time the human and my mother feel a little like the same thing. Both tie me to a place, both mean some kind of duty that I’d rather not have. I hope that the human means more, means some way of escaping, but that is hope – here, right in front of me is somebody who actually knows the ship, who can get me elsewhere on the ship. Should I follow my hope or take a chance with what’s in front of me? We could leave right now. I’ll tell Makos that we can go and look for his people and…no, that will have to wait at least until the situation with mother has cleared up. I can’t just leave her here, alone.
Oh, just look at me. I’ll have to get to the human. Makos doesn’t seem like the kind of person to betray me and it’s always good if you can talk your plans over with somebody else…
“Makos. Can you show me the map once more. I think I made a mistake.”





My distress over the end of the game is less than I had believed. For a moment I thought that I had woken up, but my body was half made of metal, so I just slipped into another dream. From this dream come memories from my time on the surface of my home planet, the planet that I had left before the shuttle…vanished.
They have a half-developed infrastructure. The first place you see is the Port City. The port city was no different than a thousand other port cities where you believe that at least half of the settlers who ever came there (and there was a massive influx of settlers in the outer regions, due to the turmoil in the galactic centers that my people, the Jedi, have caused) just got tired after ten minutes of exploring and allowed the city to grow where they lay down to rest. You meet all the cultural driftwood there – xenophobic attitudes, unclear understanding of their own roots, yet driven by a desire to make things better, a desire which bears dubious fruits most of the time. I met a young man who had come from the interior of the planet, which was little more than a desert dissected by a few dirt tracks where gliders went twice a week to pick up or deliver goods and parts. We were talking…I remembered a few phrases that had been passed on to me from my earliest childhood, an instinctive language that Li and I spoke in, and I had the idea to try it out. He had no translator on him – I had one, but as it is my habit, I kept it turned off so I would feel truly lost amidst the thicket of unknown languages – but he understood. Not immediately, but enough to stop and listen to me. Suddenly this strange language that I had thought to be an invention of Li and myself, came out of the mouth of a stranger. It sounded statelier, much more purposeful – I had unexpectedly found out that there was a complex adult version of my childhood toys, that the mind that Li and I had shared was not of our invention, but that it could be found out there, right where I stood at that moment. It was an uplifting feeling and I broke into laughter…
I can hear a song sung in that language of my memories. If I follow it, perhaps I will return to the place that is the foundation of all my visions, dreams and memories. It would be good if Li were there and if he were singing that song, but I know very well that I am simply trying to comfort myself with that thought. The world I need to return to is one that my brother has left.
It is pleasant, following the song. It feels like walking along a beach, my footprints behind me turning to faces, some of them pleasant and others most disturbing, whispering of memories behind my back. The waves murmur the song to me and it turns to Tach’s recitation of the dark monks’ wisdom and I know that if I reach that bend ahead of me, they will be waiting for me, to take me away from Li and from Tach. They are drawn to our world by the recitation of those words. It took me a long time to understand that. I’m afraid of reaching that bend, behind it I can hear a sound of metal and I feel my limbs grow cold and lifeless. The sky gets darker and I feel like there are walls rising from the sand and the sea, ready to enclose me. I lose control of my legs, they grow numb and the rest of my body convulses. One arm turns cold and I can feel the other one rubbing my legs, rubbing my arm as if I could return some of life’s fire into it. The song turns to the hum of machines, the stars become electronic lights. There is a smell of ozone and my teeth begin to chatter. The world is made of shadows, but there is a small cone of light, something turns and moves and I can see a girl – her race, my mind computes immediately, her race is long since dead and there are traces of three other rimworld races in her face and body – and the girl stares at me with fear and confusion.
It requires an effort of will, but I manage to still my hands. There is an obstruction in my chest and my whole body shakes when I try to take deeper breaths. When I look at the girl I try to feel calm and collected. I call out a greeting in the language of the first race that I noticed in the girl’s face and she drops the datapad that she is holding. I catch a glimpse of it and it looks like those people used hundreds of years ago. “Who are you? Have you brought me here?”
She looks down on the floor. She keeps staring at the pad that she has dropped. I try another of the languages that I see written on her face. No answer and I try another. We repeat this three times before she finally speaks in the language that I used first. “Stop saying these words…are you cursing me?”
“Cursing? Far from it.” I notice that my hand is rubbing my lifeless leg once more. “I simply tried to find out how to speak to you.”
“So there are different languages…” The words simply drop from her mouth and she suddenly blushes.
“Countless. As many as there are different races and more, since the same race doesn’t always use the same language. And some languages…are most peculiar.” I notice something strange and unusual about my own voice. It is surprisingly strong but it doesn’t sound like the voice I am used to and I feel an unpleasant vibration just underneath my shoulder blades when I speak. “The people of the habitable moons of Cheera, for example – now you should know that Cheera is a desperately cold planet and its moons are even colder – their language literally freezes while travelling through the air and so old conversations hang everywhere, from the eaves of houses, from tree branches, right in your way, like icicles and it is most unlikely that they’ll ever be heard…”
There is no tiredness to my mind, no numbness, it is crystal clear. Old pains that weighed on my thoughts have almost vanished. Even the thoughts of Li and Tach, after I had them so close and immediate for what I can only assume was a long time, have grown faint and barely noticeable. Instead I can see every detail in the room with absolute clarity. I see the Azad boy, hidden in shadows, his mind shrouded in meditation. Two frightening and ancient looking medical droids are on standby to either side of the metal slab I am lying on. I have a mattress, soft and thermal. Something is wrong with both of my legs and my right arm, but I cannot say what. My mind, my inside, has become dark to me. There is little pain, a little flicker of pain that actually gives me some sense of comfort, as my body feels so perfect, so…functional.
“You…you shouldn’t eat anything solid for two weeks at least…” She speaks fast, stutters a little. She is scared of me. “You shouldn’t eat anything solid for two weeks and if you do then it should be some electrolyte synthetic that’s easy to digest and there might be some troubles with mental exhaustion…I…I…well there was a reason to it, which is…erm…yes, your body won’t use up as much energy as it used to so your mind will become very tired until you get used to it and I brought you a datapad with some of the Do Ro M stories…my…my grandparents wrote them and they got rather famous in our corridor and…I don’t know what you like to read but I thought that maybe it will be boring when you wake up and I won’t be there to talk to you most of the time and I don’t know what Ti will want to do with you anyway…but they’re about this girl who has a dream friendship with a boy on a planet that their ship circles, but neither can meet the other and it tells you how they grow up and…” The girl is close to tears. She wipes her face and bends down to pick up the datapad. “I mean maybe the stories are silly to you and maybe you don’t like to read at all and maybe…”
“Calm down, please. As it happens I am very interested in the stories that people tell, although, and maybe you can understand, there are other things that I would prefer to find out first.”
“Ah, yes, of course…I am Laar, by the way, but this…”
“No, this is one of the things I want to know, Laar. I am Iason. You may not believe it, but I am very glad that you are here. “
“Yeah, well…hello. Erm…there…there might be something strange about you…the guy I asked, he said when you wake up it will be like you’re on drugs but I don’t know how that feels, because I don’t know much about drugs, so…I am sorry. You must think I’m a complete idiot. I mean I’m blabbing on and on and…” She stares at the datapad while she speaks.
“Can you give me the pad, Laar? I trust you said you brought it for me?”
“I did. I also want to help you. I do.” As she comes closer I can see her pale eyes. I am glad that there seems to be no fear in them, only nervousness. She gives me the pad. It is strange how rough it feels…the energy coursing through it actually makes it feel warm, like something that is alive. I have had this strange feeling before, entering an old ship that had crashed on a jungle moon and had turned into something not unlike a temple for the local people. I remember I was sent there to find out if worship can focus the force enough to make it palpable and present.
“How do I read the pad?”
“You just touch it and…you mean you don’t know how to read a pad? The people in your part of the ship…they have no pads?”
“Not like these…” The ship…she believes me to be from a different part of the ship…? The alphabet used on the pad is a good three-hundred years old. It is standard language, but many of the words are antiquated and some I do not know at all. I see delight in her face. Whatever she imagines me as, she seems to take great joy in it. I think it is better to find out more about who she thinks me to be before I reveal anything about myself that might dampen that joy.
“So maybe you have something like the ghost vids Jerek mentioned? He saw those once…there was nothing and then a person appeared, like a ghost, and started to speak…he went closer and tried to touch it. I told him he was silly to try, I mean maybe it’s like a current, but it vanished anyway before he could even lay a finger on it. He said it was a beautiful woman, but I don’t think he’s telling the truth…he always wants to seem important…he…erm…he’s my brother, by the way.”
“Is he with you?” My sight does not extend beyond this room. I sense everything inside with acute clarity, but the world beyond is closed to me.
“No, thanks to the gods, he isn’t!” She screws up her face and makes a strange and ritualistic gesture on her chest. “Trust me, you wouldn’t enjoy it if he were here…”
“I give him the benefit of doubt. Tell me one thing, Laar. Where am I?”
She wonders how much she should tell me. I can see that on her face. So I am not the only one who has to be careful. “You’re in…oh, gods…I don’t even know how to tell you. See, I thought I knew the ship, but just an hour ago I realized that I don’t even know what a pylon is or that we’re in one. I mean, I guess you’re one of the people who run this ship and maybe I shouldn’t even tell you that I guess it because there is so damn much on my mind that I can’t think straight and besides all that you’re here and just look at you…how did she ever expect me to explain all of this to you?”
“Once again…calm down.” The girl clearly is in it way past her depth. I can see no advantage in lying to her. “Laar…I am going to tell you something. Please do not be alarmed. I mean you no harm. I am not from this ship. Before you said it I did not even know that we were on a ship. I was on a ship, another ship, together with the boy. Something happened – an accident or an attack, I cannot say for certain. I fell unconscious and I revived here. This is all I know and I need someone to help me make sense of this. Will you do this for me?”
“What…you mean you’re from another ship? Like this one?”
“I do not know what this ship is like and until I do I cannot answer your question. I can see traces of the Mar and the races of the Seven Suns in your face, but we are so far away from their star systems and they haven’t recovered from their holocaust, at least not far enough to send ships into deep space. Your presence here is as much of a riddle to me as mine will be to you.”
“The Seven Suns…I…I am a mixbreed. I have never been anything else…”
“If you consent to show me around here, I will get to know everything and then I will be able to answer all of your questions as well as I can. But first of all I need to answer mine – please, Laar, help me do this.”
Something outside…a noise. I look towards the corner where the boy sat and he is gone. The girl looks alarmed. There are shots and screams.
“Makos,” she whispers. Then louder, to me, “We’re in danger. We have to run.”














I’m not sure if I can tell what happened. I’m not sure if I actually saw it all or understood it all. There are a few things that I know and understand. Basic things. Some of them horrible, others unexpected. I’ll speak about the horrid things as well as I can, but don’t blame me if I leave something out.
Let’s start with where we are. We are in one of the last rooms of the gigantic libraries Makos told me about. The others tell me that we’re close to the exit of our pylon. They want to reach the exit before our enemies do. Before today I didn’t know what it feels like to have enemies. Let me tell you it feels both awful and ridiculous.
We…who are we? Well, there’s me for starters. I know it’s not polite to start with oneself but I have to say I’m so glad that I am still here that I just have to. I always thought I knew pretty well how fast emotions can change, but once you go from being scared to die to absolute elation and joy and back within minutes …well, let’s just say I think different now. There’s Iason, who is the most wanted man on this ship right now, or so it seems to me. Everybody is either trying to talk to him or talking to others that he’s going to try and talk to him. I can’t figure it out. He’s been so calm ever since he woke up and had to calm down this nervous wrack of a girl that people call Laar. There was one thing that seemed to scare him for a moment, but even after that was dealt with he was calm as a child again. Ti and Ro are here. Some people from the guard and other people from our corridor and all of them have weapons. Jerek is here, but he hasn’t so much as looked at me yet.
Who isn’t here?
Makos isn’t here. He isn’t here at all. He is dead.
The ghost boy is lost, we saw him once or twice and there were colors playing on his face whenever a blaster fired or a discharge exploded on a wall. I remember how disinterested and far away he looked. He was looking for something and when he found it, he just walked away, down a corridor, as if he was just checking on a sleeping child or something. Once I had taken cover behind a duct and I hadn’t noticed that there was a black hole right behind me. Pitch black, black as endless night. I was scared half to death already, from all the blaster fire that whizzed above my head, and then I looked up and I screamed because I thought I had seen death standing in front of me. Because the boy stood right on top of me like some prophet of doom and looked at me with those cold eyes. Then he turned and vanished in the dark.
I mentioned that Makos is dead, did I? Yes. We found him right after we heard the blaster fire. He had been hit, three severe burns on his chest, just blackness and burned flesh. He was still alive at that point and firing back at whoever it was that attacked us. At that point I thought Iason had turned insane. He stepped right between me and the blaster fire and I thought all selfish, great that he’s noble, but if he’s dead they’ll still shoot me. He raised his hand, just as if he was about to greet somebody and he caught one of the blaster beams right in the air. I couldn’t believe it. He didn’t flinch or cry out because his hand was burned, he just started moving his hands around so fast that my eyes couldn’t follow and all I heard was a sizzling noise and the air smelled of electric smoke.
At that point I was too stunned to feel anything at all. I remember I was watching Makos and I kept thinking that he’s going to die, he’s going to die. It went through my head again and again. I didn’t feel sad or scared, my head was filled with the overpowering smell of electric smoke and burned clothing. Makos stopped firing his blaster and looked at me. His face was so peaceful, as if he didn’t mind his death at all. Suddenly the room was filled with something else, some sort of presence that I couldn’t possibly describe. I knew he was dying right then and I watched his breast heave one last time and I saw, I really saw that he was pressing something from his body…and then he was gone and with him all that peace that I still saw on his face, but before he had been a living being and now he was something more like a sculpture. Somebody took my arm. I looked up and it was Iason.
“They will not retreat. We have to find a way out of here. Take his gun.”
I took the gun and wanted to give it to Iason, but he ignored me, kept looking over his shoulder. “I don’t use those. Did you take my lightsaber? If yes it would be highly advisable to tell me where it is.”
And that shocked me. I had read about lightsabers. I knew that only Jedi were allowed to have them. I got goose bumps all over my body and my knees almost buckled underneath me. Iason was a Jedi. I had taken care of a Jedi. There was a Jedi standing right in front of me. At that point I think I realized that I had left the datapad in the room we just left. I didn’t think, I just ran back to go and get it. There were all my stories on it, all my transmissions. If I think about it now it was a deeply stupid thing to do. We were in danger, there was something living, something I had read about thousand times and more right in front of me, but I ran off and wanted to get all those stories back. I heard Iason shout something right behind me, but I kept on running until I had reached the room with the medical bed and the two deactivated droids. It was quiet in this room, I felt peaceful again, as if everything outside, all the noise and the smells, was nothing more than a bad dream. I stopped to catch my breath and I watched the pleasant light that was shining from the corners of the bed. After a while I saw my pad and I grabbed it and put it in my pocket.
After another few moments Iason was standing behind me. I looked at him and I was scared. He was wearing nothing except for some undershirt and short trousers and I could see where his flesh turned into metal. There were drops of sweat that ran down his thighs and I watched them run over the tiny cut where the metal part of his leg began and down his leg. His hair and beard were wild and tangled and there were wisps of smoke rising from his hands, but his hands had not a single scar on them.
“Laar. It is normal to be frightened. Please, try to think clearly. Do you know where my lightsaber is?”
I must have been shaking my head. I can’t remember what I did. I have little memory of what happened then. There are some images, like of me lying behind a bit of scrap metal, above me the dark hole where I saw the ghost boy. I remember that we jumped across an abyss that we couldn’t possibly have jumped across. I was clinging to Iason. I don’t know if I can trust those memories. I really don’t. It was all becoming less and less real to me. There was blaster fire and people were chasing us, but I didn’t know who those people were or why they were chasing us.
At some point we came out of the tunnels and we were close to the Inner Ring and I felt a little bit of reality returning to me. I knew this place. The guard would protect us. Everything would slowly become normal again.
But as we stepped out of the tunnels and I could see the door to our corridor everything around me started to spin. The door was destroyed. There must have been some explosion, because everywhere there was metal that was bent and molten. There were bodies on the floor. There were people fighting…and in the middle of them I could see Ti and in her hands she held a sword made of light, red and glowing.
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part I [link]
part II [link]
part III [link]
part IV [link]
part V [link]
part VII [link]
PartVIII [link]
Part IX [link]
Part X [link]