Another passage-shaking, rock-dislodging vocalization ignored the fact we were thousands of feet underwater. The enormous monstrosity making its roaring heard as clearly as if its outburst had been made in the open air.
...
A roar that was followed by a wave of frustrated fury so intense, I could have cut it with my lightsaber, washed over us like a whirlwind of psychic razorblades. For me, it was distinctly uncomfortable, as some part of that unholy rage still managed to penetrate my formidable layers of psychic shields.
Ahsoka's drawn out screech of pain announced the experience was a good deal more intense than "uncomfortable" from her perspective. As if I wouldn't have noticed, when she slumped forward in her seat and the control-yoke slipped from her grasp.
Focusing on keeping my wanting-to-double vision a blurry-but-singular field of view, I reached over and slapped the actuator that transferred primary control to the co-pilot's control yoke, then spun the sub back the other way before I'd even settled back into my seat.
Pushing hard to the right on the yoke, I forced it all the way forward, just in time to dive-slalom the spinning submersible into a side-tunnel perhaps half a meter wider than the bongo's "wingtips."
Metal ground alarmingly against stone first on the starboard side of the sub, then the roof, but I was too busy with the blaring proximity warning, caused by the "Unknown object of indeterminate mass and dimensions" we'd just dodged by threading the needle, however haphazardly, into this narrow passage.
"Any-, anyone catch the model of the speeder that just hit me?" Ahsoka blearily questioned from the seat to my left. I opened my mouth to respond, but the sudden grinding of enormous amounts of rock collapsing and smashing into the floor of the tunnel we'd just left caught and held my attention, as I urged the submersible to comply with the Force's initial suggestion concerning this trip.
Go. Faster.
Watching the speedometer readout climb past two hundred Kph, without the still-angry horror on our six appearing to lose any ground, I glanced at the readings from the aft sensors.
It was chilling to see the stone of the tunnel appearing to simply dissolve as the creature reached it, before tons of now unstable rock above the disintegrated portions collapsed in the constantly fluxing Thing's wake.
For all its unthinkably vast size, and immeasurable destructive potential, it was impossible to determine even a vague outline of the Thing's body. Constantly shifting from a serpentine shape to a vast writhing sphere, absolutely nothing appeared to be an impeding factor in its pursuit of us, because everything in the shapeless monster's way simply ceased to be, the moment it became an inconvenience for the Thing.
I hadn't noticed at first, the discordance in well, everything around us, having begun so softly, yet not even the Force's connection to all this matter seemed proof against this unspeakable dissolution.
When the crystal, stone, coral, what have you went away? So did whatever strains of the Force which resonated within them. At least that's what it felt like was happening, though I did allow for the possibility the Thing was simply such an intense Dark Side locus, it contaminated anything it touched so quickly, that those things seemed to disappear from my perspective.
Skewing the bongo into another tunnel even narrower than the first, my next move was to plunge into a purely vertical shaft some two hundred meters on with a frightening scrape of the canopy protecting this compartment across the roof of the shaft. Trying to lose the thing by moving from what had been an X-and-Y-axis chase into a (hopefully) unanticipated plunge along the z-axis seemed worth a try.
Grimly studying the readings, I digested the revelation that the Thing's ability to unmake intervening matter seemed appallingly profound. The only thing that had seemed to even slow it had been that first incandescent flash I'd created via my neophyte fumbling-about with altering a substantial volume of lake water into something markedly more combustible.
There was a hint of something momentous on the edges of how I perceived the Force, now, though. Something about the way that one sort of energy could be transmuted into another, and how energy could be redirected for a variety of purposes.
Unfortunately, I was simply too swamped to pursue that tantalizing revelation, coming up with desperate piloting-tricks. Anything to keep us ahead of a monster that flowed as the hawkbat flew through anything and everything.
My heart felt like I'd just run thirty kilometers while using the Force to speed my movements the entire way, and the pressure in my head felt as if someone was using a grav-press to compress the matter my brain was made of into a hyper-dense fissile material, but I'd finally found the "bow wave" of the Thing's non-presence in the Force.
A sudden flash of useful memory clicked into place without warning, as an even more useful bit of unlooked-for revelation began to demand my attention.
Finding the non-presence wasn't a thing of precision, but it was just accurate enough to suggest when the part of the nameless horror that was making these sudden changes in direction to pursue us would be less than a few dozen meters aft.
WHUMP! The ten-meter-wide zone where all the energy in the water behind us for a good distance was shunted finally did as I'd hoped it would. The temperature within the bubble suddenly rising by one order of magnitude, and then another.
Who knew a fondness for watching nature documentaries in another galaxy would one day inspire a long-shot attempt at stymieing a nameless Horror of the Deep on a supposed-to-be-paradise world?
"An-, Knight Skywalker, what was that teeth-jarring blast of sound, and why was it followed by what I'm sure would have been a blindness-inducing flash of light, if it hadn't occurred directly aft of us?" Padme's question was shockingly germane, given that many people would have been more preoccupied with unanswerable questions concerning the pursuing horror, but then, the ex-queen's mind always did focus on solutions rather than problems.
"Noth-, nothing to be alarmed about. I-, I'm just, juuust using my grasp of physics and an admittedly incom-, incomplete understanding of one p-, part of the Force. What was it I was saying again? Oh yes, I'm persuading the Force to move a lot of energy from all around, into one itty-bitty spot. That's why the water behind us keeps freezing. Hope that was enough plasma," My explanation was perfectly comprehensible, so why did Padme feel so alarmed?
Frowning, I noticed my tunic was so wet, it seemed as if I'd just taken a swim outside. "I wonder when that happened?" I mused in a fuzzy, lackadaisical manner.
Well-honed reflex was all that forced the control yoke forward and right, before I finally hauled back on the yoke and leveled the sub off in a truly strange tunnel. One made entirely of a blue crystal that bounced the light of my creation back at me, like terrible radiant spears that stabbed my eyes.
The sounds caused by unthinkably large chunks of stone collapsing over a not-insignificant fraction of the tunnel we'd just been in abruptly caught up to us.
They were a weirdly delayed sequence of prolonged rumbles and groans. These were followed by what sounded for all the galaxy like the rolling of thunder, as superheated rock cracked, fell, or fell beneath heavier deposits above in rapid succession. The bongo wouldn't stop fighting the yoke, as it shook, shook, and shook some more, yet all of that suddenly felt so very far away.
Faintly, I heard someone say, "He did something with the Force, trying to drive that Thing off. I can't be sure, but if I'm reading this right, I think he just created quite a lot of plasma.
The aftereffects of doing so have brought down almost a kilometer of tunnel behind us, but I think my Master has overdone it. We should have been vaporized outright, but, how would he say this? He persuaded the Force to protect us, by shunting most all the consequences of the blast back that Thing's way."
Padme's voice came to me, then, as if she were yelling down the far end of a long tunnel to me at the other end, "Is something like that even possible? Jedi can do amazing things, certainly, but create and control the stuff from which the stars are made? I've never heard a story like that, Ahsoka."
Pausing for a moment, as if deciding whether or not she should say more, I heard my Padawan continue through ears that persisted in ringing ever more maddeningly, "I, that is, a friend of mine, she showed me some stories about events like this.
Times where a trained Force Sensitive did something that seemed impossible. The histories said it can happen when a powerful Force Adept knew they were fighting for their life, when they were protecting others from being killed, or while they were facing a massive disaster."
The Padawan's voice sounded impossibly distant, despite my straining to hear every word, but I did manage to hear what she said when she continued a moment later, "The Jedi who recorded the stories thought the process likely had something to do with the Force Sensitive being pushed to the absolute limits of their abilities. Whatever the trigger, the result was the same.
The Jedi or Sith experienced a sudden leap forward in their understanding of some aspect of the Force. In the stories that I read, it was always something that would allow the Jedi or Adept to overcome the impossible situation they found themselves in. It's all ancient history, though. The most recent story I was told about came from the time of the Great Galactic War, if that gives you any idea how old those stories are."
"Did I really do that?" I asked myself confusedly. Finally getting an inkling that something wasn't right. I would have loved to hear more about these ancient accounts, but a dull, distant impact suggested my head might have just hit something.
Trying to figure out if my head had just hit something, my awareness was suddenly and painfully hurled into a frozen-treacle-thick frustration, then thrust into the hot-coppery fury, and-frozen-old-rot hate of the Nameless Thing. It was throwing a tantrum of literally earthshaking proportions at having lost its prey. I knew that much like I knew my name.
Far hazier was the faint impression that said prey had nothing to do with the sub, and everything to do with me.
I was Dim no longer, after all.
That was the thought that dogged me, down into the warm, waiting oblivion.
==========================
Hey guys! I just wanted to let you know that I've started a new Star Wars fanfic. It would mean the world to me if you checked it out! This is more of a fun project for me, and I'd be thrilled if you enjoyed it too.
Name :
Star Wars : New Jedi
Since the story is still new, I've got a little challenge — if it gets 10 reviews by tomorrow, I'll release another chapter both here and in the new fanfic. Thanks so much for your support!