╔════ 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐒𝐈𝐗𝐓𝐘 𝐄𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓
'𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧' ═══════╝
━━ -ˋˏ★ˎˊ- ━━
. . . GRENÉ-TSENG FARM, NABOO
𝐎𝐍𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆 became very clear very quickly: the Tseng family knew how to throw a dinner party.
As soon as Lyra stepped through the threshold to the Tseng family home, she felt it everywhere. The comforting weight of peace. It was in the gorgeous spread of food on the table, all things she only barely remembered from her childhood. It was in the smell of fresh winter flowers in the vases on the window sill. It was in the way all of Melia's kids, Lyra's cousins, rushed around the house with wild abandon until their Grandma Tseng scolded them to relax.
In this place, she was never Lyra Endellion. It was difficult to say how much of the truth each of them knew; Lyra suspected Melia had heard most of her deeds just from the questions she had asked. Sabina and Felix Tseng, the elderly parents of Sammy and Castor, had regarded her with only the slightest hint of caution. Lyra's cousins were none the wiser. Only Linus, the oldest boy, was curious about the Resistance.
When they all sat down at the table, Lyra ended up elbow to elbow with her youngest cousin, a dark haired girl with startling green eyes called Lucia. At her other side sat Linus, who was currently doing more talking than he was eating.
"So, you're Resistance?" He asked tentatively, keeping his voice low.
"No," Lyra clarified. The weight no longer sat in her chest. "I was Resistance."
He was unperturbed, genuinely interested in her life rather than regarding her as a curiosity. "Did you know Leia Organa when you were there?" He asked, but then he gave a short laugh. "That's a silly question, of course you did. She's your aunt."
"No question is silly," Lyra smiled.
Linus grinned. "I'm sorry I keep bothering you with questions, we just don't have very many direct lines to the Resistance all the way out here. All the news we get about it is second hand mentions of stories. Leia Organa, Poe Dameron, all of the big names."
When was the last time she had even heard his name said out loud? It was nearing a week since she had last seen him on Corellia, and that space only continued to widen.
"I would imagine," Lyra continued without missing a beat. "This place is like a paradise."
"Some days," Linus agreed. "Other times it becomes vastly clear that it's all just a guise. I'm nineteen, I should be out there fighting in the war, trying to get the First Order presence off of Naboo. But it'll be my job to take over the farm, so I stay here and pretend that there's a future of peace."
At this, Lucia looked up from her bowl of rice noodles. "What do you mean pretend, Linus?"
Linus went red in the cheeks. Thankfully, Melia was too engrossed with ending an argument between her other two children to have noticed the slip. "I didn't mean pretend, Lucia. There's nothing to worry about."
Skeptical but more concerned about her noodles, Lucia continued to slurp her food.
Linus sighed. "Gods, she hears everything."
"The curse of the oldest child," Lyra said with a wry smile. "You have to keep the peace but you can't let them see how you do it."
"Exactly. You didn't have siblings, did you?"
"No, but I know what it's like to be in charge. Never an easy responsibility."
After the dishes had been cleared away, they all migrated out to the back porch. It was a mild night for the dead of winter. In the distance, there was a light glowing in the window of a distant cottage. For a spare moment, Lyra glimpsed a flashing change in the light as a figure walked past.
"You're not going over there, are you?" Linus asked. She hadn't even heard him approach.
Lyra sighed. "I have to speak with her again. Don't want to, though."
"I'll go with you."
She raised a brow. "Really?"
"Really. Aunt Phoebe likes me. More than she likes the others, at least."
Lyra followed his tall, lean form through the darkness as they trekked across the lawn. He took a shortcut and hopped two fences to get through the shaak paddock. When they passed, Lyra heard the braying sound of animals shuffling around in the dark.
She let Linus push open the door to Phoebe's home. It let out an obnoxious groan on its old hinges.
"Ah, Linus," Phoebe began in a voice that could almost be considered pleased. That lasted the whole of four seconds until the woman turned and saw Lyra in the doorway. Her expression folded into a deep frown. "Close the door, you're letting out the heat, child."
"Lyra needs help getting to the World Between Worlds," Linus said, taking a seat at the table. Now that they weren't in front of the rest of their family, all formality was gone.
Lyra was floored. "How did you know about that?"
He shrugged with a mischievous grin. In an instant, Lyra realized he was only playing innocent for the sake of his younger siblings; he was indeed well informed about the galaxy at large. "You're not the only one with secrets. I've heard all about the Resistance. Leia Organa, Poe Dameron, and the Lyra Endellion that become Lyra Skywalker. I know enough to know you're one of our last hopes. Aunt Phoebe doesn't like talk about the Jedi–"
The woman interrupted him. "I do not like talk of absolutes. Jedi this, Jedi that. Those fools never learned respect for the power they wielded. They treated it like a servant, and so it revolted against them. There is no other explanation for how a galaxy can turn so dark."
"Right," Linus said with a swift nod. His short dark hair glistened in the lamplight. "But I was gonna say that as much as Phoebe doesn't like the Jedi, she knows how to speak to them."
At this, Lyra turned to the woman. "Is this true?"
"It is not a difficult feat," Phoebe maintained.
Lyra wanted to roll her eyes. For something that was supposedly easy, she had been trying for months with no avail.
"I cannot speak to your missing Jedi, the one you seek in the World Between Worlds," Phoebe told her.
"I know," Lyra said cautiously. "I just need to talk to someone who knows her."
At this, Phoebe took a seat. "Linus, would you like some tea?"
"Sure," he nodded. "Do you have ginger?"
"Do not ask foolish questions, boy. Of course I have ginger," Aunt Phoebe snapped. "Lyra, I would offer you some as well but it seems you have another task to complete."
"I can't speak to the Jedi, I've tried before."
Phoebe glanced over her shoulder. "Perhaps not, but I have found that the Jedi tend to have a petulant need to bother people when they are not called."
"Always a pleasure, Phoebe," a new voice said.
"Come, Linus, let's step into the kitchen," Phoebe said, and Linus immediately stood up from his chair and followed.
Lyra felt a presence behind her. Something slightly familiar, but still vastly strange. When she turned, she recognized the man staring back.
"You," Lyra said, not intending to sound so bitter. She had been trying to reach him for weeks when she was on Ahch-to. "Obi-Wan Kenobi."
"I always feel so welcome in this house," he said with a sigh. "You Grené's certainly know how to make a person feel wanted." His ghostly blue form solidified. He was older with graying hair, but still, there was a youthfulness to his expression that never faded.
"Why are you here? Why now?"
"I've paid Phoebe Grené many visits over the years. Though she has never had much of a kind word for the Jedi, she's very in tune with the living force."
"So I've heard." Lyra narrowed her eyes at him. "I think you know what I'm looking for."
"Who, to be more exact," he agreed. "Wynn saw more than most. A gift and her greatest curse, similar to your abilities. I knew about the prophecy before you were born."
"That's why I'm looking for her. The only way to understand this is to ask her myself. I was hoping you might know more than my dad did. You knew her best, I've heard."
Obi-Wan looked like he couldn't bear the weight of his truth any longer. "When Wynn died, she didn't pass on into the Living Force. I've--I've searched for her in all the ways I could, but you are in a unique position. The dead living, I suppose you could call it."
Lyra's blood ran cold and a shiver passed through her body. Those words sounded too close to what Kylo Ren had spat at her in the forest of Starkiller base.
Don't you understand? You're the dead walking, and there is no way out.
The dead walking.
At the time, she thought he was bluffing. Big talk from her cousin who was trying to scare her. But now she saw that Ben Solo had known more than she would have believed. He was clearly aware that there was more than one dyad in existence. Still, after their fight on the roof, she knew he didn't want to exploit it for his own ends. There was something else–someone else–that was exploiting him.
"Wynn exists in the world between worlds. She is not fully dead and because of that, you are not fully alive. Your connection was always a mystery to me, and she never disclosed it with anyone out of fear for how it would alter present events. Your connection can allow you to pass from this world and into the one beyond. You are the only one left who has the capability to talk to her."
It was clear in his voice that he missed her. A long time ago, he and Wynn had watched over her father from afar. It was a relationship deep-rooted in love and loss. She saw it in his face, the clearly drawn lines that the afterlife had not eased.
"So where do I go to find her?" Lyra asked.
"Lothal," he told her. He took in the room around him like he was seeing it for the first time. "That was the strongest access point a long time ago before young Ezra Bridger saw it destroyed. Wynn went and investigated the ruins, and she was satisfied with what she found. The portal is no longer accessible to those without a connection within it. For most it is a door without a handle. For you, it is an open gate."
"You make it sound easy," Lyra gave a sad smile. Lothal was still First Order controlled territory, and there was also the fact that she had to find the temple on the vast expanse of an entire planet.
"Getting within the temple will be the easy part, I am afraid," he confirmed. "I must warn you, if you are able to reach Wynn, you will find more answers than you have bargained for. The end to this war is upon us, whether we like the outcome or not. But I suspect you knew that already, young Skywalker."
"The dead walking does have a nice ring to it," Lyra agreed.
He shifted. "I am the final guidance you will receive. You will be beyond the reach of the Jedi before you."
"I'm not a Jedi," she told him. It had become an automatic response, a way to protect herself and her pride.
Lyra finally looked up to meet his gaze, mouth falling open with the question still unsaid. In regard to her temperament, her fall from grace. I am abhorrent, I am the harbinger. I am what they say I am.
Obi-Wan laughed, and for a moment, she saw how he might have looked when he was younger. Carefree, a little less cautious, and alive with possibility. "I knew someone else who said the same thing. She might not have considered herself one, but the essence of the light still remained. The Jedi could have stood to learn something from Phoebe; there are no absolutes in the living Force, Lyra Jai."
With that he faded away into nothing, leaving only the light that shone through the crack of the open door. The room was darker, emptier now that she was the only one in it. She heard Linus in the kitchen talking in low tones with Aunt Phoebe, the quiet sounds of a quiet life. There was a tug in her heart, an uneasiness. It was time to go.
Lyra walked back down the hill in the darkness alone. She had planned on leaving without saying goodbye, but how could she? Now, when they had welcomed her back home without any hesitation? Tears welled and the world blurred. For this precious moment she allowed herself to imagine that her hard edges had been softened, that Naboo was a place she called home for different reasons.
Melia was waiting for her.
"You're leaving, aren't you." Not a question, just a statement of fact.
"I spoke to Phoebe, I have what I need," Lyra sighed, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. At a point in her life she would have seen this display of grief a weakness. She had seen enough now to know a life was too short to keep everything concealed. "Could you tell them all I said goodbye?" Her voice broke. "I can't. I don't want to."
"Oh Lyra." She pulled her into her chest. "You are always welcome here," Melia said, voice quiet in the night breeze.
After the war was over, she would have loved to live a life like this.
"I'm so glad I got to meet you," Lyra whispered.
Melia knew more about the Grené curse than she let on; they both knew that Lyra would not be coming back.
-ˋˏ★ˎˊ-
...LOTHAL, OUTER RIM TERRITORIES
𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐏𝐀𝐒𝐒𝐀𝐆𝐄 to Lothal was a long, arduous one. The transports were small and cramped. Lyra slept through most of it. Her caution was gone now; the only thing that mattered was finding Wynn, and she had faith that it would occur in due time. Nothing would come between them anymore.
Leave it to Obi-Wan Kenobi to give her an entire planet to search without any directions. This was the third town she had wandered through, and the life of a tourist had never suited her well.
In the gray heat of the midday sun, Lyra sat on a stone bench covered by a mechanical awning. A little ways up sat a row of vendor stalls peddling fruit and simple wares. Lothal had a simple kind of peace to it, but it was a First Order controlled world. The shipping lanes in and out were jammed with dreadnoughts, and even the swiftest blockade runner wouldn't be enough to get past it. For the time, the people lived well enough.
Lyra wiped the sweat off her face and onto her green tank top. This was going about as well as she expected it to.
As she walked past one of the fruit stalls, she grabbed up a Jogan fruit that had fallen onto the dusty ground. It wouldn't be missed and was heavily bruised, but in her state, she would eat anything.
The juice ran down her chin as she chewed. Her first mistake had been assuming no one would miss the fruit, but her second was standing there out in the open and eating it. An old woman with wrinkled, grubby skin jabbing a bony finger in her direction, muttering something to a man next to her. He was an officer dressed in tan fatigues with a rifle across his chest. He caught sight of the perpetrator, and then turned and began to make his way towards Lyra. The woman was behind a stall piled high with the purple Jogan fruits identical to the bruised one in Lyra's hand.
Lyra just stood there like a shaak in headlights. A long time ago, she would have pulled some stunt worthy of the name Lyra Endellion. But that was gone. Not knowing what else to do, Lyra ran.
The day was dead for the sellers in the market. With no one around purchasing and haggling for goods, the authorities in their vicinity had nothing better to do than chase a street rat thief out of the village.
Lyra ducked under a clothes line that ran between houses. She fought off a laugh, remembering the time something similar had happened on Kaddak. Time had not changed her completely after all. Always the scrappy thief, always the girl on the run.
Shouting could be heard from inside the house nearest her. A loud thud and the slamming of a door, and then footsteps were thundering toward the her.
Lyra glanced once over her shoulder and all of her morals lost the fight. At the last moment, she hopped onto the seat of a speeder, extending her hands and revving the engine. The mechanical roar echoed in her bones.
As she made her flight away from the village, the tension in Lyra's chest loosened. The controls shuddered to their mechanical limits. Dust and dry leaves flew behind her in clouds, and soon there was nothing around but a wide open prairie covered in tall brown autumnal grass.
Just like her dreams.
Lyra's laugh echoed from her throat and into the air. The sound of pure freedom raced from the ground to the cloud-coated sky above, and it shimmered like an anthem of new hope. She was a flame living on borrowed time and it didn't feel like an omen. Wind filled her lungs so forcefully, she could hardly breathe as the speeder bike zipped across the open plain. The sun burned like a disc of liquid, tainted gold, looking down upon her with nothing but an invitation to see the world in a new light.
Only when she approached a ruinous pile of rock did Lyra slow the speeder to an amble.
The rocks had a methodology to it. It was an intentional fissure of the earth instead of a natural phenomenon; more like ruins of a once-great structure. The air was electrically charged with potential, and the Force told her what she already saw to be true.
Lyra pressed her fingers to the cool stone. Even in the heat of the day, it absorbed nothing. All-encompassing and empty at the same time, an impossible contradiction. She felt the same presence she felt when she had touched the Uneti tree on Yavin. An unshakable Force and a connection to something greater.
There was an opening just large enough for Lyra to pass through. Once she was inside, she had no idea how she would get beyond the rocks and into the World Between Worlds.
Lyra steeled herself and slid through the crack in the stone. The darkness inside was illuminated by the glow of her hand, and she held it near the wall. The tunnel forked in two directions, but before she got close enough to make her choice, something glimmering in the near-darkness caught her eye.
A chunk of a mosaic, shattered and fractured beyond recognition, leaned against the carved out wall. It showed the face of a serious looking man in gray robes. Blank eyes stared back at her, not revealing anything further than what was at the surface. She moved forward. When this mosaic wasn't in pieces, it looked like it might have been a triptych of characters.
The gray man was The Father. To his right stood the daughter in gleaming green robes. At his left was the foreboding face of the son, forever taunting her.
This was the place she had been seeing for months. All of the scribbled nonsense in her sketchbook from those repeated dreams.
"Where are you Wynn?" Lyra hummed, creeping along in the darkness.
She hadn't been expecting an answer. She leaped back with surprise as a chalk outline shape of a wolf bounded out from behind the broken mosaic. It yipped once, glued to its two dimensional form on the wall. It was a cave painting come to life.
Lyra followed where the wolf led, chasing it through the darkness as it streaked down the path to her right. She ran until the grade of the tunnel became steeper, and she realized they were even deeper underground. There, the cave opened up into a dome, like a long-lost cathedral of crushed silt.
The wolf ran in a circle once.
Lyra frowned. If she was supposed to know what to do, the little wolf was going to be disappointed.
It yipped again, cocking its furry head towards the wall. Then, as if it had jumped through the stone itself, it disappeared.
Lyra stepped up to the raised dais of stone. With a flame burning in her hand, she could see the faint outlines of directional runes running in all directions on the wall. Marks from ages past, but their meaning still held true.
The portal is no longer accessible to those without a connection within it. For most it is a door without a handle. For you, it is an open gate.
She was a creature of space and time. Like the wolf, like a phoenix, a thing that could not be explained. This wall was of a similar mold. The key to it all, this was the portal. It had been nearly destroyed, but remnants remained of the power it once held. It would be enough.
Lyra placed her hand on the rippling matter of the wall and fell through.
━━ -ˋˏ★ˎˊ- ━━
a/n woo welcome to cliff hanger central!
I swear I don't do this on purpose, and I promise that I have most of the next chapter already written so it wont be a matter of months before the next one comes out if you're one of the few people who are still waiting on it!
I love reading the comments on this book. every so often someone will say something and then I remember how much FUN it is to write this story, especially at the phase of the character arc Lyra is in right now. she's no longer a violent menace (which is arguably the most fun to write), but I think it's important to really get into this internal struggle she constantly has between who she truly is and who she was expected to be.
things to look forward to: at long last, the official (I promise this time) introduction of miss wynnetka adairi!
-nat