A Bringing Of Forces

Prologue

The air was filled with must and rot; life and death balanced perfectly. An animal or plant died only to decay or be consumed into a source of fuel for the rest of the planet. And the cycle would go on. Forever into eternity.

The trees towered above the marshy surface, blotting sunlight and trapping the thick fog below. Vines tumbled from the treetops, reaching for the ground they would never touch. The entire swamp pulsated with a powerful life force energy, filling the old master's mind in tranquility that had eluded him for so long.

Years of peace had preluded those of war, and now, after so much pain had filled the galaxies, even more was sure to come. Things would only get worse before they could start to heal. The old master had been taught that many times over. More times than he cared to recall.

But when the new era of peace was to come, he could not see. It would be a powerful Jedi, but who. . . They would come to him one day and he would be ready.

The Jedi had held peace for so long, but once the Clone Wars had begun, even before the battle on Geonosis, he had felt it -true peace, not the illusion so many governments tried to place- slipping. It was slow at first, no more than a slight tugging at his consciousness, but as the years progressed, the galaxy began to show signs. Master Qui-Gon had been the turning point in his mind, even if the events between his death and start of the Wars had been distanced over near ten years, it was no more than a blip in time. A fraction of his life; a fraction of time the universe had allotted to their galaxy. It wasn't much more than a breath, but in that breath the Jedi had turned blind -no, they already had gone blind- and allowed evil to conquer the lands they were sworn to protect.

The lives they had sworn to save.

The destruction that now ravaged the planets, already weakened by the three consecutive years of war, fell directly upon the fault of the Jedi Order and their council. On him for not opening his eyes.

So shadowed the future had been, impossible to see more than a haze of grey and black. Any attempts to see past had led only in the same direction -fire, pain, death, darkness: the Dark Side. When he had first sensed those things, they had not been clear to him. Then again, when he had first sensed those things he had been no more than a child, not even three hundred years of age, and already a part of the Jedi Council. He had not known what the visions had foreshadowed at the time, but now it pained him to recall.

The Council had shifted as all things did, new Jedi coming to replace the old and so forth, but he had stayed the same. The ever present force to oversee generation after generations of Jedi be trained, live, and then as all things must: die. His master had lived only several decades after he became part of the Council. Because of his lengthy life span and high midichlorian count, the council at his time had paired him with what his position had been centuries back.

Now, that time seemed so long ago. A time filled with peace, when Coruscant still had hints of greenery and natural life. When so many well known systems had been no more than hidden dots on a map as they developed the technology which would allow them to reach beyond their own private existence. Such things had changed in the course of several years, and yet as the old master reflected back, it seemed only the matter of the universe. It would bend and flow to its own song, silent to all other ears. It would stop for no one, merely continue on with the path laid at the beginning of time. When all that made up the universe was the midichlorians that inhabited life, floating and bonding and dispersing and combining and exploding until they came together to form the galaxies that supplied the universe. It seemed ridiculous the amount of war that plagued the planets.

Peace. Peace would come soon. Maybe in one year. Maybe in ten. It did not matter to the old master. Time was merely an illusion crafted to track the passing of one's life. No more and no less. Time was endless and infinite. And he would wait for the task that had been allotted to him those many eons ago. And once he completed that task, he would be ready to finally sleep.