Poe could feel the land under his boot soles as if he and his friends were climbing all over a sleeping person's prone body, which, he supposed, they were. The planet's sentience had curled up in the back of his mind like a panther, one with a mutilated paw and an infection in its lungs. It wheezed and whimpered, begging for help one moment and death the next.
Its eyes are still fierce.
He could hear Zawati panting with exertion behind him, stumbling along with Jess at her side. It knocked something loose in his head.
"Why the hell is it talking to me and not you?"
"I can sense it," Zawati mumbled. "But I'm not the key to its healing. You are."
The Force tree. It came to him immediately, without a moment's effort on his part. It had to be because he'd grown up under its branches, infusing him with some kind of Force sense or another, apparently. Enough that the planet had recognized it, had spoken to that part of himself.
Tree-talker.
Images flashed through his mind, coming home covered in mud after a day of playing, the Force tree glinting as he walked up to the house, a glorious crown of shining silver leaves. His father telling him not to fear nightmares or monsters, because the tree protected him and his family. Him and Ben Solo chasing each other around its trunk, playing at being Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker for hours, their found deadfall as real to them as the lightsabers they were meant to represent as they clashed and strove against one another.
A pang of sorrow made his heart whimper, half-frozen in a desolate snowbank.
"Sure hope there's something we can do for it," he allowed, ash describing each of his footfalls in mute testament to the death and destruction that had taken place here. Hardly so much as a breeze came to mar the edges of those ridges and whorls. Even the weather had suffered. What was weather, to a corpse?
To a sleeping vampire, more like.
Poe easily recalled the stories of a Jedi so corrupted by the Dark Side that he had to eat pure Force in order to survive. That one had kept him up nights for months.
They trudged on, not speaking. Wandering in this place meant fatigue and listlessness, such that Poe worried on more than one occasion that they'd strayed too far from the path. Or whatever passed for the path; he was going by feel, silently asking the remnants of that waiting sentience to guide him.
In a moment he found himself cresting a dusty hill dotted with animal skeletons. Perhaps they had survived the direct bombing only to die of their wounds, skeletons preserved where they'd fallen; it looked as if some of those animals had been hit mid-stride. Obsidian jutted out of the ground, a testament to the sheer firepower that had been visited on this area. Nothing remained and yet, somehow, he could clearly see the temple ahead.
"Whoa," Jess whispered. Poe found himself nodding in agreement. The temple had seen better days, but that it retained a recognizable facade at all was a miracle. It's broken columns and pockmarked steps still gave shape to the interior, and the roof still sheltered the main chamber.
Sudden, bone-deep homesickness awoke in Poe like a fever as he came closer, close enough to see the carvings. Faces, so incredibly detailed and yet ravaged by canon fire, birds, rivers, the long, undulating lines meant to depict a zephyr. His fingers found the images, following the lines that told a story not unlike those found on Yavin 4; he could remember tracing and re-tracing one of his favorite carvings at the closest temple to his childhood home, a jaguar partially obscured by stylized clouds. What tale could be found here, for those who knew how to interpret the depictions?
