VERGENCE
Tracy Deonn
There have been many of them. So many that the number is not worth counting. This I know.
What I did not know, even after a millennium of their minds in mine, and mine in theirs, is why they approached me with thoughts of light and dark. These words were never enough. Why did they matter, here? Here there are the deep greens of moss, the silken silver of slow mist, the dim blue of steam rising through the ever-twilight. Inside me are the twisting gray shadows of desire and the bright crimson flare of wrath.
And yet, the dark ones called me dark, too, so dark is my color.
They used to arrive in their ships. The harsh, piercing whine of engines—that artificial, lifeless sound—jarred every living thing within my stone walls and without.
It took scores of them before I knew that I…was. That I had been. That I am. That some few of them had created stairs to make my entrance easier to manage. Before that, I existed, but did not know so. I absorbed awareness from these visitors, these Force-users, until I gained my own first understanding.
Time.
Just as the beings had a beginning and birth, so did I. Before, all had been dreadfully present. But with their awareness of life, death, growth, I saw that time moves as a stream, and there is a before for these beings, a present that they ignore, and a future toward which they are always turning, minds busy with life unlived.
They were disruptive creatures. They’d come climbing through the woods with their minds so loud that my second understanding came quickly.
Thoughts.
Some thoughts were sharp, fresh, and brandished before them like a shield. Some were worn like tumbled stone on the bottom of the bog, thoughts rolled around in a mind, then buried. Thinking themselves alone, many would broadcast their curiosity. Their needs. Their questions.
I could always feel them coming. At the edges of the swamp shore, their boots either slowed with care or quickened with pride. But when they reached the gnarltree, they’d pause at my cold and dread. Always.
This threshold is where they made a decision. Oh, certainly a decision had been made to bring the beings here. Decisions were made to avoid the dragonsnake, duck the bogwings, trek through the swamp. But lying in wait at my gnarltree are the questions of unknown sacrifice. The hesitation before shapeless risk. Am I ready? their minds asked. What will I find inside? What will I see? What if? What if? And most would proceed forward, ducking beneath the gnarltree’s roots, finding purchase on soil long since smoothed over by previous supplicants.
Once they entered my realm, they were mine. I seized upon the shields. Slithered like a vine snake around their mental barriers. Exhumed the stone. I sought their thoughts no matter how buried, how polished. No matter where their secrets hid, I’d find them. Past their hopes, I struck like a scrange to the source of their pain.
Their minds carried images and words. It took many more of them to give name to what I experienced. My third understanding:
Memories.
I consumed these memories until they flooded me, a fuel so rich as to bring a kind of life to stone and slime and rot like me. While the visitors pursued themselves within my walls, I fed from them. Full lives on other planets across the galaxy. Dry planets. Gas planets. Ice planets. Worlds teeming with species. I saw beings that looked like them. Beings that birthed them. Faces bending at the mouth, lip edges turned up or down. Written records called books. Transparent speaking records called holos. Languages that I could never utter, and yet I became fluent. Great battles. Power at their fingertips.
I fed until I became sentient, almost as alive as the bogwings, the pythons, the prowling and stomping elephoths.
Then, the fourth understanding. The one I value most of all.
Fear.
I learned how to parse through their memories (times past) their thoughts (words, names, action), and their fears. Eventually, such an assortment of visitors had landed on the surface that I could offer more than a space to gather power and strength, to meditate and plan. Instead of simply reflecting what they brought, I could manipulate.
This is when the hunger began. Every twist of their emotions, warp of their thoughts, produced more fear. Enough to sustain my evolution and enough to make me stronger. Just as there is no morning, no night in my forest, but an endless twilight, there is no waxing and waning of my ravenous hunger. And, I learned, there is no limit to what I can devour.
Terror comes in many flavors. Threaded through it most often is anger at being mistreated or wronged. There is a layer of arrogance, because if one is not lofty, then one is lowly. Many times I taste envy at being left without, then a desperate sort of doubt at what being left behind might mean of their value. But the base note of all of these emotions is raw, animalistic fear. Always fear.
Visitors seek my offerings, perhaps even claim to desire them. But none truly desire what I show them. None hold them close when they exit. None carry them out willingly. No. They leave in a rush, already shedding what I’ve given, pressing my images down and away and pushing them out of their young minds as quickly as possible. They leave seeking the vast emptiness of space or the faces of comrades or the life that does not ask them to face the fears that I relish.
And so, for millennia, there was only one kind of entrant. Those who seek me, resist, and flee. I watched them run with my belly full.
Then one day, a new type of visitor arrived.
A small, green being. Accompanied by another whose body did not manifest—Qui-Gon, returning to Dagobah. Unusual in and of itself. I felt the green one’s arrival, but as he approached, there was silence. Nothing.
No, not nothing.
A well so deep I could not take its measure. His measure. Not until Qui-Gon guided him closer to my threshold.
Then. Then! A flood greater than any who had come before me.
Time. He’d lived hundreds of years. Not rivaling my own age, but more than any other living thing I’d encountered. Eight centuries. No, nearly nine.
Thoughts. Weighted. Curious. Measured.
Memories. So very many. More than I could ever sift through in a single visit.
Fear. At the surface, there was none for himself, but much for others. Fear only for others.
This fear tasted sweeter than any I’d fed on before. The agony of loss so rich I could barely stand it. But such fodder. Such material to work with.
For this small being who felt fear for his Order, I showed loss on a scale beyond imagining. Bright blades of blue and green. One of purple. Clashing, sparking, and thrust through flesh.
For this ancient being, whose fear held dread, I showed a hooded, faceless lord so great that I wished I had form so as to fall servant at his feet. Sidious. Sidious. Sidious.
And then he was gone.
Until he came back. He came back! No offworld visitor had ever returned to Dagobah and chosen a life in its swamps, so close to my domain. He made a home far from my reach so that I could not find his thoughts in the dark and damp, but that did not mean he intended to stay away.
No offworld visitor had ever come to me a second time. And yet this one did.
And then a third.
A fourth.
A fifth.
His name is Yoda.
He visits me once every few orbits, and our dance continues.
Today Yoda approaches slowly, and I wonder what fear he desires to see. His body is not as spry as it once was. I feel his anxiety before he reaches my tree.
He pauses. Looks up at the worn roots of my gnarltree, at the canopy that blocks the light. Then he stares into my chamber, a strange look on his wrinkled features. It has been several orbits since he last came to see me, and I am surprised at the intention I feel in his mind, even at this distance.
“A crucial visit, this will be.”
Crucial? What has changed for him? What has happened? No one has arrived. No ships have landed. And yet I sense a new purpose in his mood. Anticipation.
“Begin, shall we?” he asks, hobbling forward one small step at a time, his three-pronged foot sinking into the soil in heavy slow steps.
And so we begin.
The images in Yoda’s mind are new to me, recent to him:
A shimmering, near-translucent older human man sitting near him in his small, warm hut.
No fear. Yet.
Yoda speaking, “I am old, Master Kenobi.”
A ripple of emotion. Slight. Yoda is old. Though not as old as I.
“Master, I want you to take on a new Padawan.”
Something new, now. Not a feeling others have brought to me. The shape of this emotion is strange. I can’t place it. Yoda is always surprising me.
He gives me the word even as I grasp for it. “Pleasure, that is.”
I rankle. I’ve heard this word. A multitude of minds, thousands of years of envy all say the same thing: that pleasure is for others to wield over our heads. Mocking laughter fills the cave, regurgitated from entrants who were once hunted, berated, harmed to the tune of others’ pleasure.
Yoda frowns, shakes his head. Disappointment.
The new memory continues.
“Master, I want you to train Luke.”
Who is Luke? There are no images of this Luke.
Older memories. Flashes of a scowling, furious young man with light hair and blue—no, yellow—eyes. A woman in distress. A birthing chamber. An infant. Two. Yoda murmurs words from the then, in the now. “To Tatooine, to his family send him.”
Luke. The boy child. But what does—
To the ghostly man in Yoda’s hut, Yoda had replied. “And if I try to teach this rash, this impatient, this mindless boy the ways of the Force and fail, what then?”
There! Fear. Sour and bright and mine!
I do not let Yoda’s thoughts continue, instead I show him exactly what he fears, and why it will happen again.
Around the old Master swells the black mist of memory and the spoiled green of regret.
I create Dooku, his former Padawan, face twisted in corrupt passion. Yoda’s failure to steer him away from the dark.
I generate near-identical men in white armor, flowing in waves upon waves away from Yoda, under his feet. Marching to follow Yoda’s orders. Yoda failing them as living beings, the lives he claimed to so honor.
The young one rises from the dirt floor in a swirl of orange smoke and blue and white. Ahsoka. Turning away from the Council that Yoda led with arrogance. Yoda’s failure to her bright light in the galaxy, ego and overconfidence leading the way.
The now familiar shape of Anakin swells up from fire and smoke. His anger brewing for years and growing under Sidious. Yoda’s failure to stop his training before it started, failure to detect his corruption as it happened. Yoda’s failure to save him before he rose as a specter even the old Master had not faced.
Yoda’s breath comes in short pants and he leans heavily on his cane. With an outstretched hand, he walks through my apparitions until he reaches the other entrance tucked between long roots. Behind him, the phantoms of his past roar as one, rising up into a whirlwind. Where he goes, I will follow, I will send his ghosts—
He turns abruptly. Smiling.
“Old fears are these. Stubborn. But see them, I must.” Yoda stands against his tormentors, nodding not at them but at me. “My thanks, you have.”
And then the old Master leaves my shadows.
I am still angry when Luke arrives. No one thanks me. I am in no one’s service.
He is young and rash, just as Yoda had predicted. Against his Master’s warning, he takes his weapons within my walls, the fool. A blaster and a lightsaber are no match against the phantoms from this boy’s mind.
Luke’s fear produces a black specter. The boy gives him shape and sound. A menacing cape, darkness embodied. Mechanical breaths like the many starships that have landed on my surface. Luke’s mind supplies a name:
Vader.
This Vader is walking death.
If I could laugh, I would. The boy makes it easy. I do not need to amplify the fear that this lord instills. Luke’s doubt overwhelms even me, but I use it, expand it until the light in him has grown small. Smaller. So that his own terrifying visions can grow.
The boy brought his lightsaber, didn’t he? And now he creates a reason to use it.
Luke floods his Vader with all of the prowess that he fears the real one possesses. Calls into existence the red weapon of those who call themselves dark against the blue of those who claim the light. One blow. A second. A third.
I press his dread down, and shape it into panic. Luke swings.
Nothing feeds me better than the ones who think they know their true fear.
The black specter’s helmet rolls—and reveals the boy’s own face.
The disgust and horror that spill out of him is enough to feed me for a year.
Later, when Luke readies his ship, even I can hear Yoda’s protests. The boy wishes to leave and face Vader, his fear in both flesh and machinery. Let him.
Then: “The cave. Remember your failure at the cave!”
The cave is me. Yoda means me. Luke’s failure?
But I am not a test. I am not a lesson. I am mist sweeping aside to show weakness. The trap beneath the leaves of blackvine. I am a mirror. A revelation.
Luke shouts back, “But I’ve learned so much since then!”
And the shimmering man speaks, too. The three of them argue about Luke hurrying to face Vader, caution him against temptation toward the dark.
But on my side of the swamps, smoke spins within me and without as I search for answers. How? How have I shown Luke a future he could learn from? How have I provided a warning against danger that, paired with Yoda’s teachings, could prevent that future from coming to pass?
As Luke’s ship powers up and the droid trills and beeps, I answer my own question.
I remember Yoda’s willingness to pass my threshold, these many years, and grow denser and colder with realization.
Over time, we had both sought dark apparitions, had we not? Yoda always worked to confront his inner darkness, while I always worked to show it…because we both desire the manifestation of fear. Different methods, for the same ends. Alongside, not against.
A dance. A push and pull.
And Yoda knew all of this when Luke came to me. He knew his teachings and he knew my methods. He’d relied on my darkness. I had been alone, but with the old Master—
As Luke’s ship rises and he rushes to his friends, a fifth understanding dawns in the light. A word that is both emotion and fact. One that acknowledges the past, the future, and the present. One that means hope and sacrifice. This word, this understanding, is one I cannot mimic or shape into terror, no matter how hard I try. It is…
Alliance.