Confronting Fear

Lake Natth

Follow me, follow me
As I trip the darkness
One more time
Follow me, follow me
I awake from madness
Just in time

Trip the Darkness- Lacuna Coil

"So, that's Lake Natth." Rey asked Ben trying to keep her ration bar in her stomach where it belonged. The Dark-Side rolled off the glassy black lake in thick waves turning her stomach.

They'd been hiking the better part of the day after making the thankfully uneventful climb up the canyon wall on the opposite side of the waterfall than they had come down. The winds had died down overnight, leaving instead a chill in the air that had little to do with the actual temperature of the planet.

The hike had been quiet as the pair individually considered the visions they had in the night, neither sharing their experience with the other. Rey didn't want to give Ben the idea that she was agreeing to join him and Ben didn't want to scare Rey with the idea of starting a family. Not now, not when they had so much else to do. The weight of the consequences should they fail was already enough to shoulder, there was no reason to add to it.

The Darkness of the planet and this place didn't affect Ben as badly as it did Rey, a result of his having trained for years in it. But Rey wasn't exhibiting the signs of one normally in the throes of its seduction as she had on Mustafar, a sign her own training had paid off.

She plunked down on a nearby boulder, eyeing the lake with interested disdain. It didn't look like much, just an expanse of black water about a mile in diameter with jagged spikes of rock emerging from the depths in no apparent pattern. But, to one strong with the Force, it was a well of liquid Darkness that seemed to absorb all the light from the space around it, the ripples on its surface caused by the movement of Dark creatures and spirits moving through its fathomless depths.

How do you hide a holocron in that? And how did you find one?

Ben cast out his senses around and under the lake, feeling for something, anything out of place. He'd seen a lake like this before, on Mustafar while looking for the Sith Wayfinder. Then he had met a creature that had guided him to it. There was a chance, however small, that something similar could be guarding the holocron.

His Force picked up on nothing though, nothing that could be considered alive like the Eye of Webbish Bog had been. He grounded himself in his body with a sigh. "Looks like we're going to have to go down. You ready?"

"No, but I don't really have a choice, so let's get this over with." Rey answered cranky.

Her unease and pain were filtering through the semi-closed bond making Ben's own head spin. He removed his lightsaber from his belt but didn't ignite it, gesturing downward. "Let's go then."

Rey removed the two halves of her staff from her belt, locking them together. Her gazed lingered on the igniter afterwards, the buried shame resurfacing in the crimson of her cheeks. The last time she had used it, she had tried to kill Ben with it. With a flick of her wrist she banished the thought to the depths of Lake Natth where it belonged. The past was over, time to move on.

Their pace was slow as they picked their way down the precarious scree that led to the gray rocky shores of the lake, neither wanting to risk becoming a victim of the water and whatever was in it.

The red sun was lower in the sky than Ben would have liked by the time they found a relatively flat piece of shale on which to stop about a half a mile from where the foothill met the water. So far nothing had happened and he was starting to become impatient for whatever it was that was supposed to happen to happen. He was so sick of this Force-forsaken place that if it was his destiny to die here then he was ready to get it over with.