Stranger Times

The Burden of Balance

Kreia's eyes had stopped working decades ago. But it didn't stop her from seeing.

Her sightless sight had lead her on a journey through months lost in hyperspace. Months spent doing little more than sitting at the controls of her shop, the Ebon Hawk, weaving through subspace corridors like a small child trying to untangle a rope tied into a mess of knots. She had traversed aimlessly, trusting the thing she hated most in the universe to lead her to this strange nexus in the Force. This conduit the force seemed to flow both from, and through.

Kreia gripped the controls, and slowly pulled a lever. The Ebon Hawk lurched, and pushed Kreia back into her seat as the world around her slowed to a crawl, and the luminous glow of hyperspace faded.

Kreia's sightless sight scanned the display of the navicomputer that her only current companion, that contemptible little astromech droid. Small, grey, and barely coming up to her waist at it's full height, the machine was oddly insistent on being sociable.

As it was right now, whistling at her.

"Put some text on the viewport, if you have anything useful to say," Kreia said, not bothering to hide her irritation. It was, after all, only a droid.

Speculative charting records suggest we are in a system called Chrelythiumn.

"Chrelythiumn? I've come across the name before. Deep in the archives, in old legends about Force Weilders," Kreia said. "Interesting."

"Now, the thing we need to see most, isn't the world itself," Kreia said, pointing out the window to something in the distance. Her sight through the force could see a strange object, a sort of monolith that looked like a pair of pyramids glued together by a haze of light.

There's nothing over there

"No, little droid. You can see nothing. It exists regardless," Kreia said, as she engaged the engines and took the Ebon Hawk towards the monolith.

The Ebon Hawk approached the monolith with unnatural speed, and it only took Kreia a moment to realize that her ship was being pulled onward. Kreia took her hand off the controls, and set her fingers on the lightsaber at her belt.

"Well," Kreia said, as the light between the pyramids grew so bright that even her sight could perceive nothing else. "Shall we see what we find?"

******

Between blinks of her sightless eyes, the light faded to the point where Kreia could see the world around her again.

And surprisingly, there was indeed a world around her. The Ebon Hawk rested on a small, grassy alcove on the side of a mountain. Kreia could see at least two moons in the sky, but the stars were utterly foreign to here.

She wasn't even sure they were stars.

Kreia got out of her seat, and made her way past the unmoving astromech droid to the controls for the ramp leading off the ship. The readings on the sensors beside the bay doors registered a breathable atmosphere, but Kreia wasn't surprised to discover that. She hit the button, and started her way down the ramp while it descended.

Her sight saw something appear at the bottom of the ramp. Some creature, tall, and surrounded in an aura of red haze and black smoke, of passion and rage. Kreia's hand twitched beside her lightsaber, and she felt the old rage begin to rise up again. But she took that rage, grasped it, and set it aside. Instead, she walked down the ramp, and decided to meet whoever it was.

The man standing at the bottom of the ramp was tall, fully a head and more taller than her. He stood at the bottom of the ramp with his arms crossed, an amused sneer on his unnaturally pale face, and his eyes held a dark red glow.