Star Wars || Shadows Rising

CHAPTER I

Obi-Wan Kenobi was dreaming.

It was a peculiar thing indeed, for one to realize they were in a dream. With the awareness that he was experiencing a reality that existed in his mind alone came the inevitable first attempt at probing his surroundings using the Force as he had been trained to do since he was small, which failed with equal inevitability. It was as if a ragged veil, worn down in places, had been thrown over his senses – while conscious of everything, he could absorb and interpret only selective bits of information. He could decode what the dream wanted to tell him and nothing more.

He wondered if this was how it was for someone who could not feel the Force as a Jedi could. To him, it seemed like it would be a life without color, but being a Force user, he knew his opinions on such things were biased. People made their way in the galaxy just fine and even prospered without it.

In the dream, he was standing in a vast, open prairie. A foreign sun – this one far yellower and warmer than the one over Coruscant – shone down on his face through his closed eyelids, and when he opened them, the heat of high noon made the horizon shimmer.

The grasses that came to about waist height were in every color Obi-Wan knew by name: greens and reds and oranges and purples. As a cool, clean breeze blew in from the north, they came alive like the waves on an ocean planet, curling around him and whispering amongst themselves in the secret language of the natural world.

It was a beautiful place, wherever it was, but Obi-Wan sensed there was far more to it than met the eye. While the breeze kept things moving, the air around it had a thickness to it like it did before a rainfall, even though there wasn't a cloud in the sky. It was heavy with apprehension rather than moisture; apprehension for something that had not yet come to pass.

Through his limited perception of what was going on around him, he heard a faint clashing, zipping noise. A few moments later, the cool breeze brought with it the sharp stench of burnt ozone, and, moving as though being controlled by some sort of invisible puppeteer, he turned around in hopes of finding the source.

He couldn't make much out due to the distance and the distortion from the sun, but he could clearly see the flash of a red lightsaber against green.

Suddenly, the ground lurched beneath him, and Obi-Wan was unable to keep his footing. As he stumbled and fell, he had the reasonable expectation that the ground would catch him, but he was surprised to realize it wasn't stopping him – he was sinking right through it into the darkness below.

The sunlight disappeared through the rippling multicolored grasses, which fused together into a grey mass Obi-Wan soon realized was a metal ceiling. But it was growing further and further away, and soon, Obi-Wan finally hit the ground.

Well, a ground.

He had landed on a walkway adorned with tiny lights and let out a grunt of pain, but he wasn't able to stop himself from rolling off. His lightsaber skittered out of his grasp across the floor. He didn't even remember having taken it off his belt.

He could hear the sounds of a confrontation with lightsabers high above him, and while he wanted to believe it was only two Jedi training, it sounded... vicious. His ears told him that one fighter was showing restraint, while the other wasn't holding back in the slightest.

And the Dark Side of the Force was so heavy in the air around him that he almost found it hard to breathe.

Obi-Wan pulled himself to his feet and gazed upward, blinking in the bright light of the enormous power conduits just behind him that stretched down towards the generator far below. He immediately spotted the same two figures from before locked in an epic duel, and while he could see them more clearly now, he still couldn't make out their faces.