Reeves-Stevens
by Judith and Garfield
Reeves-Stevens
Instants after the jump from lightspeed, the situation became as simple as the balance between predator and prey. Despite the secrets bought with Bothan blood, the half-finished Death Star above the forest moon of Endor was ready for what was supposed to have been an unexpected assault. The Rebel fleet was doomed.
Sivrak punched the controls of his X-wing fighter even as Admiral Ackbar gave the order for evasive maneuvers. But that would buy only a few moments of life. The Imperial fleet already advanced from Sector 47—Star Destroyers, Cruisers, waves of TIE fighters—and Sivrak knew it was a trap. It had always been a trap.
The fur rose on his face and his fangs flashed in the reflexive grimace of attack. In the common tongue of the Alliance, Sivrak was a Shistavanen Wolfman, and he faced his death with all the primal rage that evolution and unknown genetic engineers had encoded in his cells.
The TIE fighters surged ahead of their fleet, as if the Star Destroyers were not needed in this final battle. Already space blossomed with deadly flowers of exploding spacecraft. Sivrak heard his orders through the static of Imperial interference and the cries of the dying: Protect the fleet no matter what the risk.
Sivrak howled at the challenge. He had nothing more to risk. All that had given his life meaning was now ash scattered across the icy wastes of Hoth.
His lips glistened with anticipation of the hunt as he switched his weapons to manual and wrenched his craft onto a collision course with a trio of TIE fighters. Over his helmet communicator, he heard the medical frigate was under attack. But it was too late to alter his trajectory. His course was as set now as it had been the day he had first met her.
Endor’s moon spiraled before Sivrak. The three TIE fighters converged as they changed course to meet him. His weapons carved space like blazing gouts of blood released by the stab of his fangs. The Imperial ships fired back, closing faster than even a perfect hunter’s eye could track.
But Sivrak throttled forward, faster still, and his fighter’s engines shrieked behind him. His full-throated voice joined theirs as he shouted out her name as his battle cry. The all-encompassing roar swept to a thundering crescendo as charged particles from the Imperial fighters resonated against his own fighter’s canopy. Space distorted, wrapping him in red destruction. He embraced the end of his existence, the begin-rung of nothingness. Yet somewhere inside that senseless maelstrom, Sivrak heard faint strains of music. Music he had heard before. Long ago. The day he had first—
—walked into the Mos Eisley Cantina, boots heavy with the dust of Tatooine, burning with the heat of streets scorched by two blazing suns. He wiped a paw against his mouth, feeling the scrape of grit and sand against his fangs, letting his eyes adjust to the dimmer light.
For a moment, he experienced a slight wave of vertigo, as if his body had not expected to be back in a natural gravity well so soon after … after … he couldn’t remember what. He closed his eyes and a green world spun before him. Something about a deflector shield. Something about a … Death Star? He shook his head to dispel his confusion, then walked down the stairs by the droid detector, heading for the bar.
Without prompting, the bartender served Sivrak his regular order—a mug of crushed Gilden, organ tendrils still writhing, attesting to their freshness. Sivrak lapped at it, trying to remember how this drink could be his regular when he had never been in this cantina before. He was a rim scout, or had been, until the Empire had closed off the Outer Rim Territories to new exploration. Now he was just another displaced being, on the run from the Empire and all political entanglements. And Mos Eisley had too many Imperial stormtroopers for his liking. He knew he’d leave as soon as he had the necessary credits. He … moved to the side an instant before a Jawa scuttled past him, rushing up the stairs for the door.
Sivrak felt a shock of recognition. He had expected the Jawa to run past him. He had known what the Jawa would do. Exactly what the Jawa had done that first time he had stepped in here and met …
Sivrak stared past the bar, into the gloom on the side of the cantina opposite the band.
And he saw her again. Just as he had seen her that first time.
He stood by her table, savoring the unmistakable pheromones that identified her as female, admiring the sinuous twists of the muscular coils she draped over her chair, all the more sensual for the strength they contained, able to squeeze the skull from a bantha. She turned to him, her loose-hinged coral jaws revealing rings of glittering fangs, with the outermost the length of Sivrak’s claws. Her light sensors bristled as they shifted toward him, seeing in wavelengths beyond those even the Wolfman’s glowing eyes could perceive.
Sivrak had heard of such beings before—Florn lamproids—the sole intelligence born on a world of such dangers it meant instant death to any who set foot on it without hyperaccelerated nerve implants.
“Buy you a drink?” the lamproid hissed seductively. Her inflection of the predator’s tongue was intensely personal, as if they had hunted and shared blood a thousand times.
Sivrak felt the temperature of the cantina increase and he shrugged off his jacket and sat down across from her just as he had the first time.
But this was the first time, wasn’t it? How could two beings meet for the first time except for the first time?
“Lak Sivrak,” she breathed, and Sivrak growled to acknowledge that somehow, incredibly, she knew even his litter name.
“Dice Ibegon,” he replied, disturbed that he knew her name in turn, the moment he spoke it aloud, as if he had always known it.
“You are troubled,” Dice said.
“We’ve met before.” Sivrak had said those words in a hundred other cantinas on a dozen other worlds, but this time he meant them. Though how could he, a perfect hunter, forget having met such a perfect killer?
“Are you certain?” the lamproid asked. She trailed the exquisite tip of her lethal tail through the shimmering translucence of a snifter of clarified bantha blood. The reflective surface of the liquid made Sivrak think of force-field emanations. Wasn’t there something else he should be doing? Someplace else he was supposed to be?
“At the bar, I knew a Jawa was going to bump into me,” he said.
“Jawas often do.”
Sivrak concentrated. A new memory came to him. “A golden droid will enter soon.”
Dice brought a single drop of bantha blood to Sivrak’s muzzle. The liquid trembled on the tip of her tail. “Their kind is not served here,” she said. Her voice was inviting, distracting.
Sivrak drew a single, razor-sharp claw against the cool pink flesh of Dice’s tail tip, transfixed by her light sensors and her scarlet mouth and its endless rings of needle teeth. “The farm boy with the droid will talk to it.”
Dice’s voice dropped in tone, sharing secrets. “And the golden droid will leave.”
Sivrak’s rough-rasped tongue flicked out and captured the teardrop of blood from the lamproid’s tail. His claws tightened around the sweet, boneless flesh, feeling the steel cords of her muscles flex in response.
“Tell me what is happening,” Sivrak said.
“Only that which has happened,” the lamproid answered. A single light sensor shifted to the left. Sivrak glanced in that direction and saw a horned Devaronian sitting against the wall, nodding dreamily in time to the music of the cantina’s band as he watched the main entrance.
Sivrak looked over to the entrance to see what the Devaronian saw—an old man in desert robes, a farm boy, an Artoo unit.
And the golden droid.
The old man hurried ahead to the bar. Without knowing how, Sivrak was aware of what lay hidden beneath the old man’s robes—an antique lightsaber. There was an Aqualish pirate at the bar who would soon be short an arm.
Sivrak released the lamproid’s tail and began to rise from his chair. But Dice’s coils snaked out to bind him tight, keeping him in his place across from her.
“Hey! We don’t serve their kind here!” the bartender shouted.
“Tell me,” Sivrak demanded.
“What you already know?” Dice replied.
The farm boy spoke to the golden droid. The golden droid and the Artoo unit left. The farm boy joined the old man by the bar. Sivrak struggled—not against the lamproid, but against hidden knowledge that was somewhere inside him.
There could be only one answer, yet it made no sense.
“Is it the Force that binds us to this place?”
“The Force binds all, if you would believe in it.”
“I believe only in the hunt”
The lamproid’s teeth shifted in amusement—the Florn equivalent of a smile. “That’s not what you said when we first met here. You were most eloquent then, my romantic Wolf man.”
Sivrak’s eyes narrowed. Was she teasing him? “Is there a price to be paid?” he asked stiffly. An altercation began at the bar. “To understand why everything is familiar yet new at the same time?”
“Poor Wolfman,” Dice said. “You still don’t understand the promise I made you. So for now the price of your understanding is the same price it was the first time we met here.”
Sivrak searched his memory for events yet to happen. He cast back to predict what he had already seen. On the other side of the bar the farm boy was thrown into a table. Despite Dice’s hold on him, Sivrak leaned forward threateningly. “You’re a member of the Alliance, aren’t you?”
A lightsaber thrummed into life. The Aqualish pirate screamed. Sivrak’s nostrils flared at the scent of fresh blood exploding through the smoke-filled air. The lamproid’s tail tip fluttered as she scented it, too. A severed arm fell to the floor of the cantina.
“I am a member of the Alliance,” she said. “Just as you chose to be, that first time.”
But the heady wash of the blood scent pushed Sivrak beyond understanding, and Dice swiftly released the pheromones that would guide the Wolfman to the one state he could achieve without endangering bystanders.
Sivrak arched in her deadly grip, and with a powerful undulation, Dice uncoiled the rest of her body and slithered across the table toward him. Then perfect killer met perfect hunter as their fangs clashed, then locked in the lethal kiss of predators. Sivrak’s senses were overwhelmed. He felt the floor of the cantina shift beneath him, gaining momentum as it spun faster and faster, just as if he rode an—
—X-wing fighter spinning through space. A storm of debris rattled against his fighter’s skin as Sivrak fought to stabilize the craft. His tactical display showed that two of the TIE fighters had survived his headlong strike. The third was a vapor of incandescent particles dispersing in vacuum. He turned to Dice to make certain she was safe and growled when he saw only the reflection of his own glowing eyes in the canopy. The cantina had been a hallucination, a dream of what had been … what might have been … he couldn’t be sure.
A second sun flared over Endor’s moon and Sivrak was torn from his memories by a lance of unthinkable energy that burst from the Death Star to claim a Rebel frigate. The communicator channels were flooded with transmissions of shock and confusion. The Death Star was operational.
Admiral Ackbar ordered a retreat—all fighters were to return to base. General Calrissian countermanded the retreat—all fighters were to engage the Star Destroyers at point-blank range. And every other Rebel voice asked about General Solo’s strike team on the moon’s surface. Would they destroy the force-field generator? Had they already tried and failed?
Sivrak pulled back on the controls to bring his X-wing on course to the nearest Star Destroyer. There were many ways to die in space. He would find one soon enough, he knew.
The X-wing did not respond.
Sivrak activated the diagnostics, rechanneled auxiliary power, and closed his wings for increased etheric stability.
But the X-wing continued its fall toward the forest moon, and nothing he could do would change its course.
One thought and one thought alone flooded through him: He was going to live.
Once in the moon’s atmosphere, Sivrak knew he could use the fighter’s control surfaces—useless in vacuum—to bring his craft to a soft landing. A whole forest world waited for him. The Alliance and the Empire would fall from his consciousness as he stalked its prey and returned to what he knew and understood—the hunt. Perhaps, in time, he might even forget Dice Ibegon, and things would be as they had always been. Simple. Balanced. The pure equation of life and death, free of the pain of love and duty.
The raging space battle receded behind him. He watched it diminish in a cockpit display. It appeared his damaged X-wing was no longer a target worthy of the Empire.
He focused on the forest moon, closing fast, bringing him a new life. Another life.
As if any life could have meaning without her.
Rebel craft exploded on the battle display. Sivrak knew that meant the force-field generator on the moon’s surface still protected the Death Star. Perhaps his battle wasn’t over yet.
He touched the atmospheric controls of his fighter, searching for the first sign of resistance from the wispy upper reaches of the atmosphere he plunged into. To change course one way was to land in safety. The other way, Rebel tacticians had set the odds of a successful atmospheric attack on the generator at a million to one. Standard Imperial ground defenses were too strong.
Sivrak’s claws tapped the control yoke as he considered his choice. One way or another. And then his fighter yawed violently as an Imperial particle beam sliced through a rear stabilizer. His tactical display showed two TIE fighters closing behind him, hiding in his propulsion wake—the same two he had faced before. For whatever reason, perhaps to avenge the death of their wingman, Sivrak was still at least a worthy target to them.
The Wolfman felt relieved the choice had been taken from him. There was now no need to plan, no need to decide. There was only the fight. The balance. The reassuring enormity of now.
Unable to change his fighter’s course in space, he threw it into a spiraling roll, releasing all his decoys and mines in an expanding cloud of sensor-opaque, carbon-fiber chaff. Then he locked his rear sights onto the cloud’s dark center, daring one or both of the TIE fighters to survive the cloud’s perils. Sivrak calculated he would have time for at least two shots before the Imperial pilots could target him. Perhaps those shots would be enough. Perhaps they wouldn’t. Sivrak did not care either way.
He glanced ahead at the rushing disk of the moon, colors smearing as he wildly spun. At last, he felt the first tremors of atmospheric resistance fight his craft’s roll. With fierce satisfaction, he pictured his X-wing tearing itself into pieces, raining down on the moon like a comet come to die. It was a good image. A fitting image. A hunter’s death.
The tactical display flashed as the mines he had deployed erupted behind him. At least one of the fighters had vanished. But then the display glowed as a piercing beam of brilliant energy shot from the defensive carbon cloud, blinding his rear sensors with a wash of static-filled white that enveloped Sivrak like a smothering snowdrift—
—carved by the icy winds of Hoth.
Sivrak dove for the trench before him as an energy bolt from an Imperial walker obliterated a nearby gun emplacement. Echo Station—the Rebel base’s lone outpost on the north ridge—was a charnel house. The awkward dead lay all around him as he pushed himself to his feet and shook the snow and ice from his matted fur. It was so achingly cold he could not even scent the blood of the dying. But then he caught the scent of her.
The ground shook with the thunder of approaching walkers and the constant firing of the ion cannon as desperate Rebels tried to clear the way for the retreating transports. But Sivrak was aware of only one sensation—she was close.
He ran to her, dodging the other troops in the slippery, ice-lined trench, his brilliant orange flight suit startling amongst their white Hoth camouflage. The main communicator channel crackled with the call to evacuate all ground crew. The command center had been hit. All troops in Sector 12 were to report to the south post to protect the fighters. But Sivrak was beyond the reach of orders now. He collapsed in the snow at Dice’s side.
It was stained with the rich purple of her blood.
Sivrak spoke her name and touched her face, afraid to disturb the ragged shard of metal that had sliced through her insulated suit and cut deeply into her upper thorax. Purple drops of frozen blood shone there, as if, for her, time had stopped.
Her eye sensors trembled and stiffened and she looked up at him.
“Go,” she said.
“How can I?” he answered. “I have sworn allegiance to the Princess and the return of the Republic.”
The lamproid’s teeth shifted in amusement, even as her gasp of pain formed mist in the icy air.
“You never meant to wear the uniform of a Rebel. That day in the cantina, when we first met, you only accepted my offer to join the Alliance as a way to wrap yourself in my coils.”
She was right, of course. The first time in the cantina—the real first time—he had made much of his Rebel sympathies, sensing it might make him a more acceptable companion to her. But in time, he had come to believe in what the Alliance stood for. He had become a proud and willing warrior in its cause. But now Dice was dying and the past no longer mattered.
“What is the past?” Dice asked, reading his mind again.
Sivrak tore the med-kit from his belt, somehow knowing that another battle was being fought above a world of forests. He stared blankly at the contents of the kit. Most of its salves and ointments were for his species. He had no idea how they would react with Florn biology. But he had to do something.
“You have done something,” Dice said soothingly. Her voice was calm, almost peaceful. She fixed her light sensors on the clear blue sky.
“We are alike,” she continued, “as you have always known. The hunter and the killer know the sick and diseased must be culled from the herd—and the Empire is rotten with corruption. That is why you must leave me, to continue our fight until its end.”
The vials and tubes from the med-kit spilled into the snow from Sivrak’s rigid paws. “Dice, no. I can’t.”
“I know you can’t. In time, I know you won’t. But for now, my love, you must. Alliance and Empire. Predator and prey.”
Sivrak’s communicator sounded the evacuation code sound. A terse voice announced that Imperial troops had entered the base.
“I will die with you here,” Sivrak said.
He cradled her head close against his warm body.
“What is death compared to love?” Dice asked, her voice fading.
Sivrak could not move. He was losing her.
“What you must do,” she whispered, “is believe in the Force.”
“If you wish me to,” Sivrak said thickly, unwilling to argue with the old religion if that is what brought her peace at this time. He felt the mourning cry rise in his chest.
“Not because I wish you to, but because there is no other choice you can make.”
Before Sivrak could answer, the lamproid’s body shivered, then quietened. He stared down at Dice as one by one her light sensors drooped, losing focus, losing contact. And then, amid the sounds of battle light-years removed from the moment that they shared, Dice blessed him with the Force, willing it to remain with him, forever.
Sivrak held her body until a walker destroyed the main generator and the fall-back lines finally fell. Energy beams cut through the air like falling stars. Sivrak’s communicator relayed a final evacuation alert. The roar of departing transports, now launching two at a time, was continuous.
But as if he were on a different world, one that knew no war or conflict, Sivrak arose and moved with a slowness and surety that set him apart from the chaos around him.
He heard no explosions as he laid Dice upon the snow, sheltering her in an alcove of the trench. He felt no walker’s footfall as he arranged her fur-trimmed hood around her serene, unmoving face, and caressed her ringed teeth that were never again to know the bliss of shredded flesh.
A human Rebel slipped to a near halt in the trench and pulled on Sivrak’s arm to urge him to the evacuation point. But Sivrak’s snarl sent the human on alone.
Then Sivrak stood over his beloved and took his blaster from his holster. He had heard the stories of what the Imperial biogeneticists did with the bodies of the Rebel dead. How parts could be cloned and kept alive for unspeakable research, or Imperial sport. He set the blaster for full immolation.
“May your Force be with you,” he said in the most intimate inflection of the predator’s tongue, and his breath swirled into the frozen air to join with hers.
He would make it to the evacuation point or he would not. There was no reason to hurry.
Sivrak activated the blaster.
Dice’s body shimmered with the disassociative energy of the beam. She became fiery, incandescent, and somehow, Sivrak thought, she might have appreciated that transformation. And then the fire that consumed her reached out for Sivrak, engulfing him too as—
—a single TIE fighter emerged from the carbon cloud with all weapons firing blindly. Blinking with surprise, Sivrak felt the chill of Hoth still pulsing through him as he instinctively switched from his etheric rudder to full atmospheric controls, and dodged the killing strands of the TIE fighter’s beams until his rear sights locked and he fired.
The TIE fighter flew apart as Sivrak’s beam tore open its skin and the moon of Endor’s atmosphere instantly ripped the Imperial craft to dust-sized fragments. The hunt was over.
But now the Endor moon filled his canopy. Sivrak slammed at the atmospheric controls, fighting to reduce the X-wing’s roll. The navigation display showed his two possible courses. One to safety. One to the generator. The rear display showed the Death Star firing at will. The X-wing shook as it tore through the thickening atmosphere. Sivrak’s claws dug into the yoke. He was less than thirty heartbeats from the point of no return. Again, he had to decide. He couldn’t decide. The atmosphere sang to him. Like music. Like music from—
—the cantina. Sivrak leaned against the wall inside the doorway, trying to understand what he heard outside on the streets of Mos Eisley. Fighting. Rioting. Speeders rushing. Detonations from the direction of the spaceport.
He stumbled down the stairs to the bar, breathless, feeling the panic of time running out.
It was night. The cantina was deserted. The music was recorded. Something was wrong.
Sivrak slumped against the bar, feeling it shudder as if it coursed through atmosphere.
“Jabba is dead,” Dice said.
Sivrak looked up from the bar to find the lamproid close beside him, studying the reflections in her snifter of clarified blood.
“How …?” Sivrak rasped. His question took in everything that had happened but Dice heard it in only one way.
“Strangled on his sand ship,” Dice said. “A human slave girl, of all things. Used her own chains.”
From somewhere outside, there was an explosion, much closer than the spaceport. The bottles and glasses stacked up behind the bar rattled.
Dice picked up her snifter. “Mos Eisley is in flames. No one knows who is in control.” She unrolled her drinking tongue into the blood and ingested.
Sivrak smoothed the fur around his muzzle in agitation. He knew there was something he had to do, but he couldn’t work it out. He had to discover what was out of place here.
“If Jabba is dead,” he began uncertainly, “then Hoth … Hoth has already been evacuated.”
Dice put the snifter back on the bartop. “That’s right,” she said.
Sivrak felt the fur lift along his spine. “But then,” he said, “you’re dead.”
Dice slid the tip of her tail across Sivrak’s forearm. “Do I feel dead?” she asked.
The Wolfman closed his claws over the tail tip, focusing only on the magic of her improbable presence. He heard other sounds now. Shuffling. Voices. Boots grinding sand into the floor. He looked up at Dice. They were sitting at the table in the corner, the horned Devaronian nodding to the music behind them. Now the cantina was full, bustling. As it had been, long ago.
“The golden droid will come in soon,” Sivrak said. He wasn’t sure how, but he was beginning to understand what was happening, the choice he must make. “And then the golden droid will leave again.”
Dice’s light sensors were unfathomable, as deep as a gravity well. “And what of you, this time?” she asked, as if she had read his mind. “Will you choose to leave as well?”
“The Force,” Sivrak said with wonder as understanding finally welled within him. “The Force is with me, isn’t it?”
Dice smiled, an irksome habit in those who knew the Force so well. “The Force is within everything,” she said.
“But here and now, in this cantina”—Sivrak’s voice rose as all that had happened, all that would happen, all that might happen, converged on him at once—“in the trenches of Hoth, or falling toward some nameless moon of Endor—the Force binds it all.”
His pulse hammered, his lungs strained for air. A flicker of light by the entrance showed that someone had entered the cantina. The Devaronian glanced over to see who it was.
“Of course,” Dice said, as if she had heard every word he had spoken uncounted lifetimes ago.
The farm boy appeared on the stairs as the old man hurried ahead. The Artoo unit and the golden droid followed behind.
“This time, when the golden droid leaves, I can leave too, can’t I?” Sivrak asked.
“That choice was yours when we first met,” Dice said. “Nothing has changed.”
Sivrak felt the worldlines converge, then pull apart, not on this one place and time, but on this one feeling, this one experience that transcended all else.
He now knew that through some trick of the Force, he could follow the golden droid back onto the streets of Mos Eisley, and all would be as it had been before he had met Dice Ibegon.
The same choice but a second chance.
In love, Dice had given him this way out.
“Hey,” the bartender growled from behind the bar. “We don’t serve their kind here.”
Sivrak watched intently. The farm boy talked with his droids. Only heartbeats remained. The time between one decision and another. One direction or the other.
“I don’t want to leave you,” Sivrak said to Dice.
“Knowing all that you know?” she asked. “Knowing with certainty what lies ahead?”
Sivrak didn’t answer. He simply reached out to her, to gather her coils close around him for one timeless moment that would last, had lasted, forever.
The golden droid left the cantina. The music played. Sivrak waited for the hum of the old man’s lightsaber to drown out all other noise.
“Sometimes choice is an illusion,” Sivrak said, at last knowing that all choices were the same choice, and had been from the instant he had set foot into this cantina and seen Dice Ibegon, waiting as she had always waited to join him.
He forced his eyes shut, knowing all that would happen. The old man reached into his cloak and pulled out his antique lightsaber. The glow of its beam sparkled from the glasses on the bar. The Aqualish pirate screamed. The cantina shuddered—
—under the withering assault of the Endor moon’s atmosphere.
Sivrak bayed at that moon as he lifted the nose of the X-wing to make it skip through the turbulence, riding his own sonic compression wave, shedding just enough speed to bring his velocity below the X-wing’s critical stress load. This time he reached the point of no return and knew at once he had always lived his life precisely at this moment. The enormity of now. His movements were instinctual, no thought required, no decision possible. He pulled on the control yoke to bring his course around to intersect with the ground generator’s coordinates.
His X-wing screamed through the atmosphere, the forward deflector shields blazing red like a dying star. His tactical display remained silent—no Imperial ground defenses tracked him. Standard defenses were unbreachable, but perhaps, with the space battle in progress above, these weren’t standard times.
The navigation display confirmed his trajectory. Over-the-horizon scanners locked him onto the generator’s transmission antenna. The X-wing bucked like a crazed tauntaun. Everything Sivrak saw blurred before him, blending in with the cacophony of his communicator: a burst of static, then Ackbar’s exultant voice—“The shield is down! Commence attack on the Death Star’s main reactor!”
The moon’s forest streaked below Sivrak’s X-wing as he saw a plume of smoke and fire rush for him, the remains of the transmission antenna already destroyed. Solo’s strike team had succeeded after all.
General Calrissian’s voice broke up with static. “We’re on our way!” Raw cheering voices. Human and Bothan. Mon Calamari and Bith. Even a droid who announced it had always wanted to do this.
It was the frenzy of a successful hunt, Sivrak knew, even as he understood that no power in the universe could stay the streaking course of his fighter, because it had already been set by the strongest power.
The flaming ruins of the Imperial base came at him with the speed of destiny. Calmly, Sivrak took his claws from the controls—
—and walked the forest of Endor’s moon.
It was night. The breeze was cool. His nostrils were aflame with the scents of a multitude of prey and smoky woodfires. The fires’ distant crackling was punctuated by rhythmic drumbeats and excited voices lifted in triumphant song.
Sivrak drew in the clean air, flushing the last stale traces of recycled fighter oxygen from his lungs. This time, he did not try to remember what had happened. He knew, in time, all answers would come.
“Those are the Ewoks singing,” Dice said behind him, as he knew she must.
He turned to face her, gasping at the ethereal wonder of her lamproid form as she glowed with the inner light she had always carried. The dark trees of the forest basked in her radiance.
“They celebrate the death of the Emperor,” she said.
“Then the battle of Endor’s moon …?” Sivrak began.
“Has been won. Our fight is at its end.”
Sivrak lifted his paw to touch her, and was not surprised when he saw that his own arm shone as did Dice’s body.
She wound her tail tip around his paw. “We are luminous beings,” she said, “and always have been. True love can never be denied.”
For long moments, Sivrak stood silent in that forest, united at last in such a way that he knew he would never be alone again—a balance even simpler than that between predator and prey, the joining of all things in the Force. But blended in the Ewoks’ chorus, he heard the strains of a different music, from a different time.
“The cantina,” Dice explained without him having to ask.
“I know,” Sivrak said. “But there is no need to return there.”
“There never was,” she said.
And then, tail in paw, their hearts and souls entwined forever, Dice led Sivrak through the forest of Endor’s moon, to a special place near an Ewok village where three friends waited, as they had always waited, as they always would wait, for all who would join them, bound by the Force.
And behind them in the forest, the music from the cantina softly faded, and was never heard again.