The Jedi And The Warrior

A Glimpse Of The Future

The forest had become a labyrinth of snow and ice.

They had been moving for hours, jogging when they could, walking when they couldn't. His mother was weak, stumbling along in his wake, but they couldn't stop now. Obi-Wan wasn't even sure where they were anymore, since he'd never been this far from the village and they'd fled in such a blind panic. He walked now with his silent hunter's tread, Ben and his mother a little way behind and Flyra slung over one shoulder. He was carrying her sword — his father's sword — in his free hand.

She'd been hit with a blaster right after the bomb went off. For a while he'd been able to feel the hot drip of her blood on his threadbare tunic, but it was so cold under the midnight moon that it now simply froze upon contact with the open air. Obi-Wan suspected that the only reason they hadn't been frozen into the ground was their unceasing movement.

But the cold was taking its toll. He knew because he could hear his mother's laboured breaths scraping against her throat, and the chattering of her teeth as she stumbled after him.

Blood looked black in the moonlight, he observed, the thought a separate fluttering of consciousness somewhere beyond his control.

His father was dead. This he knew, because he had seen the body, lying in a slowly spreading pool of dark blood in their doorstep, but it felt as though the cold had numbed his horror as effectively as it numbed his fingers. The attack on his village, the fall of his father, he knew to be a very terrible thing, but fear was the only emotion he knew in this maze of a forest.

He didn't feel pain, not like he'd felt every inch of space between Flyra and that falling ship, felt the very essence of the world crackling at his fingertips and the command in his head that the ship would not fall on her. He'd known, instinctively, that it would require every ounce of concentration, of willpower, of mindfulness that he possessed in him to keep it in the air, but for his brother, and for Flyra...

The snow all around them blanketed the sounds of the night creatures and would hopefully cover their tracks, but some alarm within him spiked, as though something had brushed against him. They weren't alone. Whatever life-form he was sensing, they weren't alone.

A soft cry broke from his mother behind him, and he whirled, fear spiking within him. But she had only stumbled in the snow, her eyes bleak and hopeless. Ben reached for her, but even he looked utterly spent, and Obi-Wan realised he'd been walking on fear alone for hours. Flyra was a dead-weight on his shoulder, and suddenly he was terrified they wouldn't make it.

"Mother..." he breathed, stumbling the few steps that took him to her side. "We can't stop yet."

Her face, so wrought with pain and hopelessness, softened at his tone. "Oh, Obi-Wan," she murmured, cupping his face with a hand so cold he almost flinched away. "Promise me you'll keep him safe."

And she sunk slowly to her knees, sagging in the snow.

There was frost on her eyelashes, staining her skin so, so pale. Her clothes, too, were stiff with so, and her body was wracked with shivers.

Ben reached for her, kneeling with her, but Obi-Wan saw it in her eyes, the weakness, the fading, the giving up. He had never known dread like he did in that moment as he set Flyra gently in the snow and gripped his mother's wrists, as he understood but tried to pretend that he didn't.

"Who? Keep who safe?" he tried to keep his voice gentle, but it cracked and trembled.

She looked at him, at them both, and tears glistened in the brilliant blue eyes that Obi-Wan had inherited. "Your brother," she whispered, her voice barely more than a sigh of breath. "Don't fail your brother, Obi-Wan..."