Her body was not her own as she slid down the canted rock face, the back of her head already littered with abrasions and lacerations too numerous to count. It took everything she could muster to ride gravity between broken stone pillars, calved sections of carved statuary and innumerable jagged rocks. The dust and scree that carpeted everything in the blasted cavern surrounding her made even the slightest movements deadly as she scrambled to place a foot here or a hand there. Echoing reports bombarded her montral from all directions, confirmations that sent chills up her aching spine as each stone loosened in the chaos found the ground below, a reminder of her fate should she lose any more of her dwindling focus. Her mind was ablaze with the art of staying alive, a welcome diversion she thought, from the emotions that themselves threatened to tear her apart.
With a deft roll to her left, Ahsoka Tano, managed to get her foot in place to enable the leap she was envisioning to an adjacent slab of debris littered stone. She hesitated suddenly, a wave of remorse tugging at her, her mind forming questions she did not want to face at the moment...or ever if she was honest about it. ‘Just let go.’ The thought proclaimed, her mind finding a thousand rebuttals in a fraction of a second. ‘Just end the pain.’ The thought responded in turn, causing her stomach to lurch at the prospect as she pushed herself off her stone slide with a grunted effort and landed a few short seconds later on the adjacent slab, angled in the opposite direction, although not as steep. Her general direction was irrevocably downward however, no matter the effort she enacted to slow the descent.
Ahsoka saw her next leap looming ahead as the thoughts returned, ‘there is no hope.’ She grappled with the sincerity the thought elicited before rejecting it outright and doing what she could to tune out the detrimental proposal. She regained her focus in time to leap from her right foot this time onto a wedged stone beam that was relatively flat, landing on her stomach with an air depleting oomph. Ahsoka saw stars for a moment as she lay there, her face planted into the stone’s cool surface as her lungs contracted with painful results. Her chest felt aflame from the pressure as she pushed herself up on her hands and knees, her head spinning with the encroaching dizziness of oxygen deprivation. She felt the emotions she had been able to drown, rising to be reckoned with as a hint of air made its way into her mouth, her lungs flaring wide in greed. The pain was enough to stamp the emotions back down into afterthought as her chest felt like it was tearing itself apart from the additional thrumming of her heart slamming into her ribs. On the threshold of losing consciousness, she managed a simple exhale, displacing what dust was left on the stone that her face had not picked up. It was enough to satisfy her instinct for base survival as she felt her aching muscles relax from their exhaustive efforts and her face reacquaint itself with the stone below.
The thoughts returned. Without the distraction of saving her own life, Ahsoka was now at their mercy. With them came the emotions, unchecked, unbridled, and furious for attention. ‘Let it all go Ahsoka’ the thoughts spoke as one, echoing within every recess of her racing mind. Images joined the words that reigned in her conscience absence, images of lightsabers, crossing each other, sparking discharge firing off the red and white blades in all directions. Her mind played the scene for itself repeatedly, all from different perspectives. She saw herself, her orange pigmentation a fiery version of itself in the glowing crimson of his saber. His own helmet a vision of star fields for every angle reflecting the white of hers. Her mind reviewed the surroundings of the temple, burning its own fiery red as it closed them both off from any hope of ending the duel. Arcing red lines, pulsing with an existence of their own as the temple walls came to life around her. He did not seem fazed or distracted through the chaos as he struck high and low with his own furious resolve. Her sabers met each attempt to end her life in stride, blocking, diverting, parrying, he had no opening with which to keep his promise. He had trained her well.
The images began to fade, to blur into themselves as the thoughts returned to convince her mind that life was hopeless. ‘Let it all go Ahsoka’ they coalesced again into an echoing epithet, one that even her mind refused to acknowledge. Emotion threatened to throttle her back into consciousness as her mind shot them back into afterthought, its own efforts in dire need of reinforcement as it began to waver in its own resolution. ‘You’ve earned the easy path Ahsoka, just let it all go.’ The thought was distinct as it worked its way around her mind’s defenses, hinting at what her life had garnered. Ahsoka’s mind knew it was failing as the synapses fired wildly to awaken her. Small victory came by way of a slight tremor in Ahsoka’s index finger, and her mind thrust forward with a renewed sense of urgency. More synapses firing, faster and with more intensity registered a shaking wrist and a dancing ankle. More. Her mind pushed every connected web in her brain toward a single goal as it fired everything it could. With a throaty groan, Ahsoka breathed in sharply and blinked her eyes several times, motes of dust descending out of eyesight as a single pebble pinged its way ever downward. ‘Wake up!’ Her mind took the opportunity and ran with it, its last remote hope to save itself from the aggressive thoughts and encroaching emotions, as she groaned again and opened her eyes fully.
“It’s not what you say to the council Snips, it’s how you say it.”
“What?” Ahsoka said, picking her aching head off the cold hard stone and throwing it around in wild arcs to find the speaker to no avail. The darkness only stared back in return, the echo of her own question asking numerous times before it dissipated into silence. She knew it could not have been real, even as she felt the hot winds and stinging red sands of Geonosis on her skin, “What the…?” She trailed off the question as she looked down to inspect her arms, only to find the ravaged and bleeding flesh peppered with layers of dust and drying blood.
“Because it’s only after we neutralize the guns that we can push for the factory.”
Ahsoka rocked her head around in all directions, steadying herself with both hands before her as the resulting dizziness threatened to topple her over the side. With a firm lefthanded grip on the stone’s edge she brought her right up to press against her temple, driving her thumb in hard to stabilize her swaying vision. “Who’s there?” She asked, again greeted by her own echo. Trailing streams of dust, forced loose by the changes in pitch caused by her frantic actions, cascaded down to the ground below in response.
Ahsoka peered over the side to gauge the distance to no avail as the darkness withheld its secrets from her. ‘What is happening?’ She could only ask herself as her skin began feeling cold, an icy embrace she knew had nothing to do with temperature.
“You’ve already made your decision, haven’t you? This meeting is just a formality!”
His words were shouted now as they had been then, though, for her alone. She closed her eyes and let them echo through her mind, remembering the look on his face as he cast protocol under his boot heel in front of the Jedi Tribunal. The determination of faith in his eyes as his rage brewed behind them. His trembling jaw line and quivering lip as he did his best to subdue the roiling contempt within him.
“You can’t do this!” Anakin shouted, in defiance of the Jedi master’s judgement. His voice echoed off the chambers walls as she heard them echo in her mind.
Ahsoka clamped her eyes shut tight as memory mingled with thought and emotion, a feeling of dread taking hold of her senses as she tried focusing on the imagery that flickered in and out of view. Austere walls, pocketed with lines of illumination. Senators lined up in rows at various levels as she was set in manacles before the accusatory diatribe of Chancellor Sheev Palpatine. Charges of sedition and treason reverberated in and through her mind. “Where were you Anakin?” She found herself mumbling in the present, a cold whisper that equated to the memory she had suppressed for so exceedingly long. She could feel the penetrating gaze of Admiral Tarkin bore through her as he continued to finger blame and accusations of further sedition upon her. Tarkin. The memory caused her to shudder involuntarily.
“I am here with evidence and a confession from the person responsible for all the crimes Ahsoka has been accused of.”
“You didn’t abandon me, did you Master.” Ahsoka said in a hushed tone, her eyes still squeezed shut in deep reflection. The hopelessness her own thoughts had insisted on convincing her of earlier, renewing their assault, ‘you abandoned him Ahsoka.’ The thought caused her to catch her breath with a sharp inhale as her mind raced her memory to the Council chambers atop the Jedi Temple. She squeezed her eyes shut with such ferocity her head began to spin again, trying to bypass the image, to bypass the moment she made her decision. Despite her efforts, she closes Anakin’s hand around the Silka beads and swallows her sorrow again, eliciting a whimper from deep within her. The look in his eyes when he realized what had transpired.
“Why are you doing this?”
“The council didn’t trust me.” She mouthed the response in her quiet lament, suspended above a dark unknown.
“What about me? I believed in you. I stood by you.”
‘Don’t say it you fool’ she forced her mind to say, knowing what was coming, “This isn’t about you.” She whispered again to the ruins surrounding her. “I need to sort this out on my own.” Ahsoka said with more authority, opening her eyes to the darkness beyond, “without the council….and without you.” She finished, rising to her feet, the suppressed emotion beginning to win the war of attrition with her soul. The damn she had erected around the anger she had been suppressing threatened to eviscerate itself into oblivion as she felt the fires of rage boil within her. “No.” She whispered to the stone and darkness. “No.” she said aloud to the raining of scree and dust as it danced on the air before her. “No!” She grumbled through her clenching teeth to the remains of the temple around her, seething the words with her increasing anger. “NO!” She yelled to the cavernous chamber, splintering rocks, and debris, fragmenting various portions of the remainder of the ceiling above. “NO!” She shouted to the temple ruins and Malachor itself. “NO!!” She screamed to the galaxy, the Empire and beyond. “I will not own your failure Anakin. I will not own your fall.” She said, spittle forming at the corners of her mouth as she seethed the words into existence. “I will not own what you have become…. Vader.”
The truth she and many others had assumed, made whole through her own perspective, real through her own action, removed the strength from her knees as she fell forward onto the flat cold stone, only placing her hands out to break her fall at the last second.
The force of suppressed emotions threatened to break free from the final tethers she had forcibly wrapped around them as she stared at the dark striations within the stone slab, heavy breaths exhaling swirling eddies of what dust was left undisturbed out and over the rocks edge. She could feel herself burning from within, a tumult of unfettered aggression focusing with reckless intent through emotionally blurred eyes. That same emotion taking many forms as she pushed herself up again, squaring her feet to stand. Ahsoka Tano released the finite tendrils of her control and stood waiting for the anger, the rage, the hate to take its own control. She snapped her hands down to retrieve her saber hilts and violently ignited them with a guttural scream of raw aggression. The internal struggle to direct the enormity of her emotion into workable tangibility materialized itself into the form of genuine hatred. Her eyes, she knew, reflecting that resolve as she felt her brow furrow, intensifying her own ferocity.
The flood of raw negativity, the explosion of festering grief and sorrow, anger and resentment made itself manifest in her thoughts and actions as she gripped her lightsabers with unusual vehemence, the tendons and ligaments in her hands and arms turning into thick ropes of durasteel cable. Ahsoka let loose a feverish dirge as frustration, shame and guilt worked their way into the fold, the echoes of which sounding like a charging Dubak as more pings of moving and cracking stone added their reports to the angry electronic ripple of the saber’s blades. She arced the weapons in tight circles before her, building momentum as she sent rockets of her raw emotion into the act, feeding the rage they represented in her grip. She ripped her blades through the apex of one of the twin spires her flat stone to come to rest upon, then returned the action. Repeatedly she laced the white blades through the unforgiving stone, carving deep gouges and furrows into its surface, dripping red hot slag poured from the wounds. Her anger would not be satiated as she dove deeper into the stone, turning the slagging drip into an unyielding flow, like blood from a mortal wound that could not be staunched. She did not relent. The sabers moving with almost blinding precision, striking the stone at every angle. The white light radiating in eccentric lines and circles, reflecting off the tears of both sorrow and anger running down her cheeks.
Her eyes bore the outward sign of the hate taking form. Fierce, narrowing hatred took up residence in the place of the cascading tears. Hate for being naive. Hate for her cowardice. Hate for her weakness. Hate of her past. Pure unrefined, imperfect. Raw. Ahsoka could feel the hate turning to rage as the thoughts began to refine the emotion into weapons of choice, sharp and perfect in their deadly precision. She felt a betrayal welling deep within her, manifesting itself through her own fury, eradicating reason, and rationality to the point of absolute exhaustion.
Ahsoka was panting, completely out of breath, every muscle sore from the tirade as she dropped the sabers from her grip, the metal hilts clanging resolutely to the stone at her feet as the white-hot light pulled itself back into the emitter with a pitched whiny. The emotions lay there, waiting for her to address them in turn. Each one vying for her immediate attention as she dropped to her knees again, the muscles giving way to gravity as her bones vibrated with an impact she did not acknowledge. Tears flooded her vision again flowing from her the way the molten stone had from the carving execution of her saber’s blades. Ahsoka knew she was becoming hopelessly unbalanced. She could hear Obi-Wan through the fog her mind had become, “let go of your emotion Ahsoka, or it will guide you down a path no one can follow.”
“No.” She said aloud, “there would have been one that followed.” She whispered to the mind conjured Jedi Master.
Her tears renewing their descent as her hatred simmered away to a deeply rooted sorrow. “No.” She said again in whisper, “I will not own this.” She could feel the waves of negativity pulling at her with their own renewed vigor. Resentment and blame for her own path being undeservedly thrust toward innumerable individuals, yet she knew she was the only one responsible for the choices she herself had made. ‘Why Anakin?’ The thought was constant since his pleading use of her name. “All you had to do was come with me to Mandalore Anakin.” She pleaded her case to the universe once again. The feelings of betrayal and abandonment refreshed themselves as a rush of anger and pain began to seep their tendrils into the chaotic disorder of her own rationality. The cascading effect of emotions trading places with one another continued to lead her down to the path of despair she was battling against and losing. She felt herself becoming the epitome of the descendant path the Jedi had warned against for eons, as guilt and shame gripped her very soul. She felt as though the universe were laughing at her, mocking her pledges of ownership, and forcing her to accept her responsibility for her own guilt, her own shame. Her mind serviced her thoughts, revealing that she had turned her back on him on multiple occasions, not just once.
“It doesn’t matter how many times.” She said in answer, pitching feverishly back and forth on her knees, congealing what little sanity she left as she felt herself losing this battle of attrition.
She let the final tears of guilt and shame snake their ways down her cheeks as she prepared herself for the waves of grief, sorrow, and despair to replace them. Her mind painted a perfect picture of what could have been. She could imagine a life that was not held in secret, one where she could adopt her own moral codes to her own path as Jedi. She envisioned Anakin and Padme in open declaration, their children at their sides. A life she would actively be a part of. She knew it was pointless, fruitless to think on such matters, but she also understood the need to let each passing emotion have their place in her thoughts if she was to be free of their burden, war of attrition be damned, “have your say, then leave me.” She whispered to the still darkness, doing her best to heed the imagined advice of Master Kenobi. Knowing what could have been led her heart to the avenues of loss and frustration, not for what life she could have been a part of, but for Anakin himself. How his presence now was but a shadow of the man he had been, despite all the armor, gadgetry and displays of dark dominance. ‘It doesn’t matter what you project Anakin, for you are truly dead.’ She thought through the truth itself, leading to the pain and suffering she had long been fearing to confront. Ahsoka bowed her head low to the ground as she pounded a fist into the stone, knowing she could have done more. She could have insisted he come to Mandalore. She could have taken the Silka beads and found a path for them both. She could have bowed to his will right here on Malachor, yet she did not. She chose her own path, one that diverged from his, long ago. Where she had spent years protecting those she could from the Empire’s grip and policy, following her own just code meticulously, he had extinguished himself truly and given everything implicitly to the Force in some distorted perspective she could not understand. With that final revelation she felt the weight of anxiety lift from her shoulders, take up residence in the air itself and waft away from her being into the darkness beyond.
“You’ve chosen your path Anakin, now I chose mine.” Ahsoka said with a decisiveness that eliminated the impression of the internal battle that had waged for far too long.
Ahsoka felt some relief with the victory but knew it was only a battle in a wider ranging war that never seemed to cease. Thoughts of Anakin…. of Vader brought with them the confirmations she had always involuntarily sought. Confirmations of the seeds of suspected corruptions that stemmed from the true enemies of freedom and peace. Palpatine was a force the galaxy was not prepared for even as Supreme Chancellor. Exacting the role of Galactic Emperor upon himself should have been the wake-up call everyone needed to play the hands their own suspicions had delivered. Yet they did not, as she had not. She knew her perspective was a matter of timeliness as she looked around at the ruins of the temple yet again, knowing that whom she faced, and subsequently ran from with Ezra, was precisely the man she knew him to be. Her thoughts revisiting the numerous encounters with variations of the man over the years as she absently grabbed for her right elbow, aware only now of the pain that subsided within it. Her immediate past casting itself into focus as she could once again feel the searing heat of the blue flame touch her skin, penetrate the bone beneath and threaten to consume her entirely. She patted at the extremity to satiate her need for clarity as she lifted it to her eyes for inspection, finding a harsh and severe looking bruise in the increasingly orange light that began filtering in from the ruined ceiling above. Small bumps of irritation lingered but no real pain to speak of as she let the elbow drop back down to her side. The act brought with it the promise she made to Ezra as they did the only thing, they could stem the tide of Sith flame intent on destroying them.
Ahsoka’s thoughts, then, turned to Ezra and the very promise itself she had made him as her parting words. As grief, shame and guilt had serviced their respective agendas within her thoughts, so to sorrow and despair. Loss, pain, and suffering, being concordant with the cycles of nature, would never truly leave her but despair and frustration would only lead her down avenues perpendicular to the promise she had made him. Ahsoka finalized herself analysis with a true eye toward her surroundings, as the commitment to Ezra brought with it the return to reality she could operate from. She knew she had not faced her anger, or her rage, but thought better of addressing them any further as that reality presented itself in the form of fact. Malachor.
Ahsoka would, at some point, must determine the workings of Ezra’s actions. How he could inconceivably place himself in the duel she had forcibly removed him from. He had changed, she remembered. Something about losing Kanan. His answers to the numerous questions she had asked were indistinguishable from the haste with which they were uttered. He was anxious, naive, and well on his way to undoing everything Kanan had sacrificed himself for. She understood the moment, she could freely admit now, only because she had not acted out of emotion, and knew her promise would be kept simply because he needed her to keep it.
As the light from above grew brighter, so did her surroundings. The devastation was deceiving in its scope as the light could not fully penetrate the ever-present haze of dust. Tiny crystalline particles within the air shimmered a refracted version of the light coming in from above. ‘A rain that will never fall’ she thought with a curious eye into the unmoving prism under her scrutiny. Her memory triggered the last few seconds of her duel with Vader into conscience thought, the decision that she had made at the time to intersect both of their fates into a known entity. She would die, but not without destroying Vader in the process. As she looked about the ruins, she could understand then what had happened, but not how. As she was alive, through an intervention she could not even begin to describe, so too was Vader. The ruins would suggest otherwise, but she was certain their fates would intersect again, thus forcing the truth of his survival into her consciousness.
What remained of the temple around her was inconsequential the more she thought it through. It only stood as a reminder of her efforts, a reminder of what was and a calling to follow through with her intended promise. She raised her head to the vacancy above her, Malachor’s sun filling the space with a contrasting warm, soft glow as a whisper manifested in the stale dusty air around her. It was indecipherable, nothing remotely reminiscent of the voices her mind had conjured as it drifted lazily through her hearing and out again. Her montral unable to determine source or direction, she only looked about slowly, relying on her sight to decipher what her hearing could not. She waited patiently for an echo that never came. “Hello?” She asked softly, not entirely sure she anticipated an answer. Her query returned an echo the whisper had not which reasoned her pause. She blew out her breath in exasperation as her patience was wearing thin, “Commander Tano, always on duty.” She mumbled to herself, thinking of Rex in the process. She could feel the internal shift as she adopted the military mindset that had kept her alive and the friendly face of the man that had helped mold her into such an instrument.
“Assess. Locate. Analyze. Identify. Cover.” She recited the Captains creed aloud to calm her fraying nerves. Assessing the situation, she knew answers to her questions would not reside in her present location. Locating a way out of the ruins was going to be a test of her mettle, but proved to be the only course of action as she thought through the remaining three objectives. Ahsoka closed herself off from any further distractions, rising from her knees and grounding her footing into the flatness of the stone at her feet. Closing her eyes, she reached out through the Force for any sign of a way out, anyone that may have been responsible for the whispers and to return her core to the internal peace she sought. There was no one else here.
Ahsoka opened her eyes to the truth of her predicament with no clear direction established with which to solve it. She looked down to her left wrist, unfastening the broken wrist comm secured around it and pitched it over the side of the stone slab. She would have to figure out how to get out alone. Looking up she saw columns illuminated near the ceiling that spanned the distance to the floor below, knowing she had the ability to jump between them in an effective evacuation but felt absently for the contusions on her elbow and knew she would not get halfway without failing the attempt and plummeting to an assured death. She closed her eyes again to call upon the Force, willing it to guide the broken stone that lay in all directions to form a natural path upward, but could only gasp in response as the Force itself hesitated, ebbing its flow away from her instead of in. Something that had been natural for as long as she had memories was now a thing that could not be relied upon. She closed her eyes again with determined focus, concentrating on the stone slab beneath her feet. She could feel it vibrate and shudder from her efforts but nothing more. A loud crack, echoing its resonation into the bowels of the chamber and beyond stopped her immediately as she looked down to see a meandering split trace a chaotic line perpendicular to the stone’s edge. Gravity would only keep her in place for a few more minutes she assessed, while her mind beseeched answers she could not fathom. She was missing something and had precious little time to determine what it was.
In the confluence of thought, the registering coincidence of thinking and perception regarding betrayal, she began to understand the struggle itself in its present form. The equation she needed to solve for was missing the context from which her solution could only be derived, and the knowledge almost made her head spin. She was out of her element within the temple, and although the Force had responded when called upon earlier, she realized it had only done so to satiate a query, not enact an escape. She knew the Light, which she routinely called upon was itself being deceived by the one thing this temple, this planet, was rife with. She would need to utilize its counterpart but had little to no knowledge regarding ‘how’ to do so. Very few of her mentors in the past would entertain her questions regarding such matters and those that did would venture into philosophical applications or outright conjecture, providing her with nothing of use now. The registry of nascent emotion threatening to return her to her earlier predicaments as the scope of what she needed to do mirrored the very thing she knew her Master had fallen victim to.
“Of course.” She alighted the air before her with objective sarcasm.
A very real fear gripped her suddenly as that reality became ever more pressing. She would have to utilize the Dark side of the Force, tap into the energies the temple itself was a conduit for, without letting it consume her soul. For only a moment she acknowledged the fear, understood its wisdom then just as quickly let it go. Ahsoka knew there was no other way. If she clung to the fear, she knew she would be consumed by both it and the powers she hoped to channel. She knew she did not need to be Sith to call upon the Dark side, she need only embrace the feral and natural energies of the place long enough to stem the tide of resisting energies she was used to calling upon. She knew enough of the Dark side to understand what she had to do and quickly let her emotions rush in once more.
They came fast and furious, but she did not wear them, only to acknowledge them in concert with her efforts, as tools to accomplish a task. She focused on the sorrow, on the pain and on the hatred specifically, willing them into a usable form. She closed her eyes tight in concentration as she willed that form into steps hewn from the broken stone around her so she could simply climb her way out. She slowly raised her hands before her, feeling the manifestation of power sufficient for the undertaking. The effort was quickly exhausting her, yet she refused denial. She cracked an eye open hoping for results but only seeing failure. Her arms were trembling from the strain of her exertion, her head throbbing from the intensity, with nothing to show for either.
Ahsoka could hear the splitting of stone, the raining of dirt, dust, and pebbles all about her but the stones she sought to utilize remained unmoving. She dug her feet in place and gave her attempt one last momentous exertion of the last of her remaining energy as she focused solely on her anger. She could feel a vibrational hum from every stone structure around her rattling her montral in a tumultuous cacophony of mind scrambling tones, she could see the opening far above rip in upon itself and send metric tons of debris crashing to the floor far below, the piercing sun blinding her for a second as she exhaled her aggression through closed teeth in a shout that defined her intent. A tremor in the very stone she stood upon caused her to cease the endeavor lest she fall anyway in the attempt. She collapsed onto her knees yet again as the strain of the efforts had tapped her very core of its own life-giving energies. Panting, she looked around and could only marvel at the new level of destruction she had enacted. Eddies of pluming smoke from innumerable heat sources she had created from ripping stone from stone cast the dust and crystalline particles into a chaotic frenzy of motion that danced in the orange light of the sun. She blew out her breath slowly, trying to correct her breathing as her mind focused on the unprecedented resistance she was succumbing to. “Fine predicament Tano.” She mumbled to herself.
There was no direct instructor for what she knew she had to do. The power to simply remove herself from this place was within her. She only had to do what she had refused to do moments before. Light side energies came to her naturally, this place resisted its use from every angle. She had to become unnatural to herself and block the very thing she was attempting to use. She had no idea how to shelve her morals and integrity, if even for a moment. But it was the only way.
Ahsoka sat in her meditative pose, rested her hands on her knees and slowly, very slowly, closed her eyes. It was then that she reached out. Not to draw the force to her, but to feel it. She could feel both sides, but also an in-between. Dark. Light. An equity of both. The light side spoke to her as it always did, a rhythmic heeding that had guided her since birth. That unnamed presence of equity acknowledged her presence but did little to greet her. The dark side, however, was moving in to embrace her. She broke off that connection, although hesitantly, to meditate solely on its meaning and how to translate it into something tangible. It surprised her how warm it had felt, how inviting it seemed and how surprising it was to not be frightened by it. She focused again on the dark side and, again, it came to her. Not in a rush but as an intimate friend. She held it there, in check, inspecting it, inspecting herself inspecting it. What seemed unnatural moments before seemed like a thing forgotten. A thing that was once a passion. Despite her internal cautions of investigating this further she knew she had no choice. She slowly drew her right hand up off her knee as if in anticipation of receiving. She watched herself first touch then hold that energy as it greeted her fully. The pain in her arm was instantly gone, and upon realizing that, she took that energy in the palm of her hand and drew it forward to her chest. The energy itself hesitated before her. It needed to be invited in. She had one last decision to make it seemed.