Embers: Sequel to Crash and Burn

It was a dry planet – not quite desert, but not quite as comfortable as some of the planets he had been on in his five years away from it. However, it was home, and every day he was thankful that he had been able to come back.

Welk depended on the Fire Island clan, and he didn’t really mind it. He had been offered a few unusual privileges, being one of the rare men who could cast spells. He rarely did, but received a little bit of training at the hands of his mother, presumably to keep him safe from the Nightsisters. He had trained under a Nightsister before, Tamith Kai, and later Lomi Plo, until finally becoming the apprentice of a Sith Master named Lumiya. All of them were dead now, and had been for fourteen or more years, and Welk was finished with the Dark Side. Still, because he still had most of his powers, he was a likely target for Nightsister raids, and knew how to protect himself if there were no witches to protect him.

One of his greatest joys, and the source of pride that was only matched by the memory that he had left Lumiya on his own, was watching his daughter grow up. Desa had gone from a girl of five to a woman of seventeen in the clan, learning spells with her grandmother and great-grandmother, and Welk knew that she would be a powerful witch some day.

“You are almost ready to be accepted into the Fire Island clan,” said Saria, the leader of the clan. “But not yet. There are still a few things that must be done, Desa Djo.”

Desa waited, feigning patience. She was a tall girl, although not quite as tall and powerful as her mother’s sister, who was in the Stellar Imperial military under Empress Shira, Lady Lumiya, until her death in the middle of the conflict. Desa had picked up some characteristics of her foreign mother’s side of the family, and stood about Welk’s height, but she was somewhat less imposing than either her mother or her aunt had been.

Or maybe Welk just felt less threatened by her.

Desa set her jaw and met Saria’s gaze. “I do not want to be called Desa Djo,” she said. “That is the family name of my father.”

“And your grandmother, and myself,” said Saria.

“It makes obvious our relations to some members of the Singing Mountain clan, and I do not wish to have so many ties to them. Furthermore, it is not my mother’s name. For good or for ill, I am my mother’s daughter.” Desa’s mother was Prille Baclaw, the Sith Lord Darth Inferna, who died at the hands of a Jedi Knight, Jacen Solo, after Inferna attempted to kill Jacen’s brother Anakin. Welk remembered that day clearly, for it was the day that he had left Lumiya’s service, seeing it the lesser of two bad choices. The other would have been to battle Jacen and Anakin himself and then hunt and kill Jaina. He had known better than to pit himself, trained for only five years, against three of the grandchildren of Lord Vader.

“In that case, what would you be called?” Saria asked.

“Desa Bo Clai.”

“You would rather be called after a Dark Lord, much like a Nightsister, than have the same name as some of the members of another clan?”

“It is what I am. I do not have to be just like her. I hardly remember her. But I am my mother’s daughter.”

Saria nodded her silver head. “Very well. I approve of your choice and had hoped that you would follow the tradition and take her name. But it was a choice you had to make on your own. However, before we can accept you as a member in your own right, you must complete your rite of passage.”

Desa waited for Saria to go on. She had already killed three Nightsisters and helped the other members stave off an attack; what else was there left to do?

“You must go out, away from the clan, and survive on your own long enough to catch a mate and bring him back to us. When you have done that, you will be given your new name and considered part of the clan as a witch and not as a trainee.”

“From any clan?”

“From any clan but ours. Or he can be from none at all. Some have escaped captivity, and occasionally a hapless explorer comes to look at the planet. They are fair game.”

“Can I buy one?”

“With what money?” Saria asked. Desa, like most other girls in the clan, had a small collection of gold pieces and stones, and little treasures salvaged from shipwrecks and other detritus of war and travel, but nothing that another would not have, and nothing with significant value.

“Perhaps I do not have enough. I will leave tonight.”

Desa left the clan hall and returned to the large tent that belonged to her father. He was allowed to have his own tent, next to that of his mother Truya, and Desa lived in both of them, although she was soon to have one of her own – if she passed the final trial. She put on her lizard skin armor and threw a cloak of furred skin over her shoulders; the nights would get cold.

She wore short brown leather boots and carried only her weapons and a pouch strapped to her back. The pouch had a full water skin in it, and she carried a few round cakes of hard bread and a chunk of roasted meat for her first few meals while in the wilderness. After that, it was up to her to find her own food, but she had gone on several long expeditions through various parts of the landscape before, and knew how to survive in the wild.

She hoped. She’d never gone alone before for more than two days.

Desa looked over her weapons, making sure that her two spears had solid shafts and that she had enough sharpened arrowheads, and that the edge of her long knife was clean and also sharp. “I will be back soon,” she said.

“Do not be hasty,” said Welk. “You can take as much time as you like.”

“It will not be necessary,” she replied.

“Be careful, though, because the Nightsisters can be anywhere, and if you are traveling alone, then they might come upon you. They would want to have you join them.”

“I want nothing to do with the Nightsisters except to kill them if they come too close to me with malicious intent. Which is all of their intent,” said Desa. “There are many more powerful than me that they would seek out first, anyway.”

“But they are not going to be going through strange lands alone,” Welk pointed out.

“Your point is made. However, I will be careful.” She said goodbye to him and then set out on the back of a small rancor. She didn’t want to spend months away from the clan, as some of the others had done; she wanted a speedy end to her childhood and to take the place that was rightfully hers. She never felt completely accepted anyway, being only half Dathomiri, and her father’s side at that; she had to perform well to prove herself. And that meant not taking half of the year to find a man to bring back to the clan.

Desa hoped that she would get lucky, and find someone traveling also by himself, but Dathomir had a large area, and even the easily habitable locations were not densely populated. The odds of finding a lone traveler, an escapee from another clan or the Nightsisters, was very low, and she wasn’t entirely surprised when she didn’t sense anybody, even when she lit a small nighttime fire and spoke a few ancient words into the flames to illuminate the paths of others nearby for her inner sight. There was nobody around her for many, many kilometers.

She collected berries and leaves for food during the day, and hunted wild game with her spear. Her rancor caught its own food, and they traveled across the valley, around a nearly dormant volcano, and into a forest with rough, hilly terrain.

Desa managed to get close to the Dancing Forest clan, but not close enough. Every once in awhile, Dancing Forest sentries would ride in a circle around the clan homes, to scout for Nightsisters, and nobody ever left without being in large groups. She saw blackened trees all around and blackened trees littering the ground, evidence of a recent raid. It would not be a good idea to try to take one of the men of the Dancing Forest clan; if they wandered out alone, it would be easy, but they never traveled alone now and she didn’t want to risk someone thinking she was one of the Nightsisters. It would offend her, and it would lead them to do battle with her, and she was not yet wanting to engage several witches in a battle that was unnecessary. She probably couldn't win it.

Desa traveled for two more weeks, until she reached an open area of dry grassland, not more than a two days’ journey from the desert. By that time fatigue was beginning to set in, so she rested to regain her energy, and she dried a few pounds of berries to take with her.

When night fell and the stars overhead twinkled in the deep indigo, almost black, sky, she lit another small fire and knelt before it, then threw a handful of berries in the blaze.

Tala quisten inda tala-si! She intoned the words of the spell, from beginning to end and over again a second time, to expand her awareness, to enable her to see people who were much farther away from her than her eyes and ears could detect. The wind began to kick up, and it battered the fire and nearly blew it out, but she stood still at the fireside with her cloak blowing straight to her side, only connected to her by a leather strap at her neck and another one across her chest.

The dim landscape and fire in front of her suddenly froze and shattered into a thousand pieces that blew away from her, like opaque glass being smashed out to reveal a picture beyond. That picture, like the first one, also froze and shattered in less than a second, but she was able to view it and commit most of it to memory before it disappeared. She recognized some kind of screen, the kind that offworlders occasionally brought with them – the kind that she had seen in her father’s ship when she was a very small girl.

Desa ended the spell and took up her spear. She looked up at the sky, trying to see if any of the stars looked like something other than stars. One of them seemed to grow and brighten, and it drifted slightly to the east. “Come on!” she shouted, and climbed up onto the back of her rancor, heading toward the place where the ship was likely to touch down.

Almost there, thought Anakin. He was in the Dathomir system now, and approaching the planet quickly. He couldn’t remember exactly where the Singing Mountain clan was, but a flyover should help him find them – right? He was able to pick up on the subtle Force energies of clusters of Force-sensitive beings, but there were too many of them for him to easily pick Allana out of the crowd.

Two of the clusters made him feel uneasy; one was alive with the power of the Dark Side, and the other brought a fear that he couldn’t place. It was a primal dread, something more akin to premonition than a concrete reason for feeling danger. Before he could stop himself, he had pulled on two levers to take him farther away from those sites, and he headed for an empty place to touch down.

For a moment, his limbs were locked into place, and he couldn’t move. He felt as though he was bound with synthetic leather straps and metal rings around his wrists and ankles, with the cold metal of an operating table chilling his chest and stomach. A knife twisted in side, and he threw his head back to scream, and then he looked into the laughing eyes of a Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Inferna, smirking at his agony. The younger Lord Welk stood next to her with another instrument of torture, ready to hand it over to his Mistress to amplify Anakin’s pain.

The flashback faded in a second, but he still smarted with remembered pain and his hands shook as he gripped the controls once more. I should have waited for Jacen, he thought.

There was no turning back now, though. The first order of business was to find Allana, and Anakin wasn’t a boy of barely eighteen anymore. Darth Inferna had been dead for fourteen years, and Welk was nearly powerless without her and Lumiya. If he was still alive, he couldn’t harm Anakin anymore.

Anakin set the ship down on the nearest clear place he could find and waited for a few minutes, bringing down his heart rate and slowing his breathing so he didn’t hyperventilate. Jedi calm washed over him and he slowly stood, then powered down the ship and climbed out.

His eyes needed a few seconds to adjust to the change in lighting. It was much darker on the night side of Dathomir than on his ship, and slowly he picked out the outlines of mountains in the distance, and he saw a tiny spark that must have been a fire a few kilometers away. Something danced against the shadows, much closer, and from its shape he guessed that it was a rancor. There was also a humanoid figure, wrapped in a hooded cloak, about a hundred meters away. It approached him, and when he reached out towards it in the Force, he detected very little; there was no sense of extreme danger, but the figure did not seem benevolent, either, so he checked to make sure that he had his lightsaber at hand, and waited.

“Greetings,” he said when he came closer.

A garbled message came to him, splashing up against his mental shields and dissipating before it reached him. He continued: “I apologize, but I don’t like people speaking into my mind. Can you speak Basic?”

“Little bit, yes,” she said hesitantly, with a heavy accent that reminded him of Teneniel Djo. The person was human, and female, and as near as Anakin could tell, young – fully grown, but just barely.

“Your Basic is better than my Dathomiri,” said Anakin. “I am looking for my niece.”

“Not her,” the woman said.

“I know that. She probably arrived yesterday, and is going to the Singing Mountain clan. But she needs to come home.”

“Take a person, no, I do not do that,” she replied. “Daughter, have you? Mother, have you?”

“I have no daughter, but my niece is like a daughter to me. It’s a long story,” said Anakin. He didn’t want to relate the intimate details of his life to a stranger, especially not one who was even less likely to understand than others he met on a daily basis. “My mother is Princess Leia of Alderaan – Princess Leia Organa-Solo. She was once a member of the Singing Mountain clan, also, but only for a little while.”

“Not from Singing Mountain. From Fire Island. We changed, to two clans we changed.”

“Why? Are you enemies now?”

“Not enemies, but not to work together. Mother of mother of father is sister to clan leader, clan leader of Singing Mountain. Same mother, not same father. Clan broke after Nightsisters came. They take some away, they take the Singing Mountain slaves. So we break and join others, make new clan, Fire Island. Before I came.”

“Before you came? Weren’t you born here?”

“No. Born far away. That why I speak your language. From when a child. My father, witch’s son. You, not witch’s son.”

“Yes, I am,” Anakin protested. “I told you that Princess Leia was part of a clan for a little while. And the girl that I’m looking for, her grandmother is Teneniel Djo.”

“Teneniel daughter, not name of Leia,” the girl said. “Her, Tenel Ka.”

“Tenel Ka is dead,” said Anakin, struggling to break through the language barrier and the girl’s stubbornness. “I’m looking for Allana, her daughter.”

“Not know Allana.” She shook her head. “But you, you come to Fire Island, with me.”

“Would someone there help me find Allana?” he asked.

She took a menacing step towards him. “No. Not to look for her, see? Her free, but you, you slave!”

Anakin closed his hand over his lightsaber. “I will look for Allana, and I am not a slave. I am free, and I will fight you if I have to.”

The young woman started to laugh. “Silly, silly, fight a witch? You a Jedi?”

“As a matter of fact, I am a Jedi. A Jedi Knight.” Anakin activated his lightsaber, and held the purple glowing beam out in front of him.

“You, good to catch,” she said. “Strong in magic. Daughters strong in magic.”

“I already have a partner,” Anakin snapped. “And we’re raising Allana as our daughter, even though she is not mine.”

The woman threw off her cloak in a rage and took another step towards him. Now the light from his lightsaber illuminated far enough to light up her face, and he saw remembered features – Welk’s green eye, duplicated on each side, and the feral toothed grin of Darth Inferna.

“You’re not real!” Anakin shouted, and he pulled the Force into him, in a frantic attempt to dissipate the vision.

Her arm swung around, holding a thick spear, and it hit him on the side of his head. Pain exploded through his skull and he hit the ground, but he crawled up to the ship’s open hatch, kicking at the figure. He reached backwards with his lightsaber, but she began chanting foreign words behind him, and the lightsaber flew out of his hand. Another blow to the head made him sink to the ground, falling into blackness and losing all sensation in his body.

Desa stumbled into the Fire Island camp a week later, looking exhausted and ragged. She climbed down from the back of her rancor and pulled a bound, unconscious figure with her.

Saria and Truya came over, and Desa said, “I have done as you requested. I captured a slave and brought him back with me. He struggles, very hard, but he will come to realize our power in time.”

“He is strong in the witches’ magic,” said Saria. “You have done well, child. He will give you strong daughters that will bring honor to the clan.”

“Not yet,” Desa grumbled. “He shows no interest, even with my spells. I have to keep him asleep or he will try to run away, and he is difficult to catch again. He has said that he is one of the Jedi.”

Welk left his tent when he heard his daughter’s voice, and he found her standing with his mother and grandmother in the center of the camp. A man lay at her feet, bound with several lengths of whuffa hide, and he did not move, except for the slow rise and fall of his chest.

For a moment, Welk couldn’t quite place where he had seen the man before, except that he knew he had. Then he remembered.

“Desa!” he cried. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

“I caught a Jedi,” she said proudly.

“That’s no ordinary Jedi,” said Welk, and he covered his face with his hands. “That’s Anakin Solo, the son of Princess Leia!”

“Ah, good, so he was telling the truth,” said Desa. “He said that his mother was a princess, but I did not believe him.”

“He was one of the Jedi in my care on G0-CVII,” Welk went on. “He and his brother Jacen, we caught them both.”

“We?”

“Your mother and I,” said Welk. “This was during the Stellar Imperial War. Their sister Jaina was the one who killed Empress Shira, my overlord, with another Jedi named Zekk.”

Desa balled her fists and looked down at Anakin. “This... this is the man who killed her?” She looked as though she were about to crush his soft organs with her hands. “The one who killed my mother?”

“No, no, Anakin didn’t kill her,” Welk said quickly. “His brother did. I ran from them and took you away from a foster family on Coruscant, and then brought you back here.”

“It does not matter,” said Truya, and she waved her hand dismissively at her son. “She caught him fairly, and he belongs to her.”

“He’s a Jedi Knight,” Welk repeated.

“He will not hurt you,” said Desa. “I will keep him bound until he submits to me.”

“You will need a lot of luck,” he warned.

“You need to keep your mouth closed, and not talk out of turn.”

Truya backed Desa up. “If you have nothing but foolishness to say, then go to your own tent and stay there,” she said. “You have more freedom than you should have, and if you continue to act this way then you can be sold. Do not forget that I do own you.”

Welk shook his head and slinked back to his own home. Saria put her withered hands on Desa’s shoulders. “You are now one of us,” she said. “You are Desa Bo Clai, a member of the Fire Island clan, and you will protect the clan and your own property. This young man is your property, as well, and you must keep him safe from other clans and from the Nightsisters.”

Desa nodded. “I will,” she said.

“Good. Now you may build your own tent.”

Desa dragged Anakin over to an empty space within the circle of wooden pegs marking the outer ring of the clan grounds, then tied him to a set of her own pegs driven into the ground, before beginning to erect the structure.