THE WIND IS AT GALE SPEED. Even if you knew which direction to go, you couldn’t do it. The wind throws you this way and that, like you’re a newspaper in a hurricane. Behind you, your trudge marks trace a crazy zigzag pattern in the mounting snow.

Your legs are shaking with strain. Your lungs are burning. Your sweaty hair is literally frozen.

You fall.

You lie, half buried in the snow. You try to rise. You fail. Your eyes close. The snow feels warm, compared to the whipping wind above. If you could just sleep for a moment or two…Just a little sleep…

(This is, of course, how you die in a snowstorm. Did you know that? Well, now you do. Never fall asleep in a snowstorm.) (See! Look at all the important things I’m teaching you!)

The minutes drift by like dreams….The cold seeps through your thick thermal clothes, creeps into your skin, and then crawls along your veins, slowly freezing them. It is coming, like an undertaker, for your heart.

“Luke…”

You hear it faintly. A voice. Someone you recognize. Go away, you think. I’m sleeping.

“Luke…”

The voice is nearby. Maybe you should raise your head to see who’s there. But you’re so tired. The cold is building a snow fortress around your heart, slowing it down.

“Luke…”

You decide just to go back to sleep. The cold is so gentle, and your heartbeat seems, now, so superfluous.

“Luke…”

The voice sounds like Old Ben’s. But that’s not possible. Old Ben is dead.

Unless you’re dead, too…

And then you realize that you are dying.

Wake up! you shout at yourself. But your eyes won’t open. You cannot raise your head. You are going to die.

The voice is speaking. “Luke…Go to the Dagobah system.” It sounds like Ben. “Find my old teacher, Master Yoda…”

“Ben!” you cry, or try to. “Ben!” Why isn’t he helping you? Where is he? You try to stay conscious, but you are failing, falling, failing, and the cold is laughing its quiet, sinister laugh….

“LUKE!”

You thrust your eyes open, shattering the ice that has formed a crust over your eyelids.

Han Solo is standing above you.

“Luke, don’t give up on me, kid.” He is pulling you from the snow. You are hanging limply in his arms. You are trying to help him, but you literally cannot move. You’ve heard that Jedi can stay conscious after death, existing in the fabric of the Force. Maybe you’re doing that right now. You certainly feel dead.

You suddenly become aware of a tauntaun. Good! A tauntaun is good. A tauntaun can carry you somewhere. Maybe somewhere warm, where you will be buried, because you are dead. “Han!” you say, “put me on the tauntaun.” But no sound is coming out of your mouth.

And then Han’s tauntaun rears back, roars to the black, snow-speckled sky, and keels over.

“Oh, great,” Han mutters. He reaches over and places his gloved fingers on the beast’s broad neck. He curses. The tauntaun’s heart has stopped. Now it cannot carry you to the warm place so you can be buried. You have never felt sadder in your life. You wonder if you are not a little bit loopy right now.

The scruffy space pirate looks back and forth between the lizard beast and you. Finally, he reaches over you and unhooks your lightsaber from your belt. He ignites it and looks at the tauntaun. “Sorry, old buddy,” he murmurs. Then he slits the tauntaun’s belly with the glowing blade. Gooey, steaming innards slide out onto the snow. “Ugh,” he mutters. “And I thought they smelled bad on the outside…” Han lifts you from the snow and slides you into the beast’s stinking belly. It feels warm and soft and smells worse than anything you have ever smelled. He is burying you! What a good friend Han is! “This isn’t going to be pretty, kid,” he murmurs. “But it’ll keep you alive until I can get the portable shelter up.”

Alive? you think. But I’m not…

And then you black out. Thankfully.

The sun rises the next morning on two snowspeeders. Their pilots scan the blinding snow with shaded eyes. “Captain Solo?” they call into their transmitters. “Commander Skywalker? Do you copy? Do you copy?”

The planet is wide, bright, and empty before them.

And then it isn’t.

Their transmitters crackle to life. “Good morning!” they hear. “So nice of you to drop by!” It’s Han Solo.

The pilots smile. “Echo Base, this is Rogue Two. We found them. Repeat. We found them….”