The Jedi And The Warrior

Salvation And Doom

Flyra and Obi-Wan scrambled to their feet, utterly exposed in the moonlight flooding in.

The creatures cocked their blasters, taking their time, as if they knew they need not hurry.

Flyra staggered as she tried to reach the sword that Obi-Wan had propped against the cave wall, clutching onto the rock for support. She slid down, crying out as her knees hit the floor and she crumpled, pain lashing up her thigh. She looked up at their attackers, and her mind at last spat out a name for them as she tried to stand again and failed. Rancor. The semi-sentient reptiles that lived on Dathomir. But she'd never heard of this many in one place.

Obi-Wan snatched the sword from the cave wall and took up a position between her and the rancors.

"Ben!" she gasped out, dragging herself across the cave floor to the boy's side.

She shook him awake, just as the first creature released its blaster and Obi-Wan ducked, the back wall of the cave blowing up instead of his chest.

Flyra threw an arm over her head as shards of rock rained down upon them, as more rancors swarmed into sight, as Obi-Wan deflected another blast as if on instinct, and the sword shattered into thousands of shards of glittering steel, tumbling through the air like the pieces of the life she'd had.

They were gems dropped into a tomb as they fell, clinking on the rock.

But they had blocked the blast. And even as the creatures snarled to themselves in their strange depthless voices, Flyra stared at Obi, who had somehow blocked that blast as though he had anticipated it.

She was sprawled out on the cave floor, one hand still on Ben's shoulder, while the boy tried to scramble from her grip. She yanked him back.

"Stay here," she hissed, remembering Obi's promise to protect him.

Their promise to protect each other.

She couldn't let him die there alone.

So Flyra began dragging herself across the craggy floor towards him, to reach him, to stand beside him, for whatever good it would do, whatever time it would buy them.

The inky black of night was fading to a dark blue. Dawn was coming.

Obi-Wan was still gripping the hilt of the sword when they heard it. The roar of a ship, swaying the leafless trees, blasting the snow into great flurries as it neared, sleek and crimson red against the lightening sky... and something was dropping from it.

And as the figure drew closer, Flyra realised with a jolt that it was a man, sailing closer to earth as though he had harnessed the very winds to his will.

She stopped moving. The creatures began panicking, some fleeing, some turning to this new assailant, others turning to fire upon Obi-Wan, and Flyra, and Ben.

Obi-Wan fell to his knees to avoid the streak of red light — but that was all the chance the rancors got. The man was upon them, and he had a lightsaber. It cut through them as though it were a mere extension of his arm, a dance of death through helpless flesh that slumped to the ground, and it was strangely, sickeningly beautiful in its fluidity, its utter control, its undaunted power.

The flash of the saber brightened the dim dawn, its hum a swarm of wasps through the chill air. And even as Flyra gaped, the last of the creatures slumped to the ground in two pieces, and the Jedi stood amongst the shattered bodies of his enemies, their saviour.