Ravas vanished. That didn’t surprise Ayli. Despite what Nix had done, Ravas was still a ghost, and pulling away from Nix had seemed like an overpowering and involuntary reflex.

“Woah,” Nix said and wobbled a bit before Ayli caught her.

“What was that?” Sali asked. Her blaster raised again and scanning around the small cockpit for an attack which wasn’t in danger of coming.

“Sorry,” Nix said. “That was the other Force ghost I’ve spoken with.”

“The other? Does that mean there are only two of them?” Zindiana asked.

“Two’s two too many,” Sali said, remaining wary as only a pirate could.

“This one sounded like she was Jedi?” Zindiana asked.

“I think so? A contemporary of Ravas too, obviously,” Nix said. “She’s not usually as ‘present’ as that though.”

“What does she want?” Zindiana asked.

“What do both of them want,” Sali asked.

“In case anyone cares, I have no idea who you all are talking about,” Goldie said. “Also if you could please put the blasters away. If they go off, you’ll definitely be shooting my insides, which isn’t all that pleasant even if I lack pain receptors.”

Sali and Zindiana glanced at each other, shrugged, and holstered their blasters.

“I think they were at odds when they were alive, and I think they still are, though not quite how Ravas imagines,” Nix said.

“You know their history?” Zindiana asked.

“It’s mostly intuition,” Nix said.

“I’d prefer nice solid facts,” Sali said.

“You can trust Nix’s intuition,” Ayli said. “It’s more than just fuzzy feelings. It’s…”

“It’s the Force,” Zindiana said. “You were right about the Jedi not being completely exterminated by the Empire. One of the Sisters in my order was a Jedi stationed at a creche along the rim. She saved a lot of kids, mostly because a bunch of random people joining my Order is a pretty typical occurrence, especially back when the Empire was coming to power. Sister B’Kallu taught the Sister who had potential what she could, and the rest of us how to recognize a Force user, and how to  deal with them.”

“I’m surprised the Empire didn’t make your Order a higher priority target?” Ayli said, wondering what impact a group of Special Forces Nuns could have had on the Rebellion if they’d stepped up.

Or had they? Ayli knew the Rebellion had survived because of a lot of allies who could never be formally acknowledged.

“Oh the Empire hated us. They eradicated my Order five times. Once even the safe house was actually one of ours,” Zindiana said. “We still have warrants out for the leaders of that particular Imperial garrison.”

“Why weren’t you with the Rebellion then?” Nix asked.

“Some of us were,” Zindiana said. “At least after we got rid of the leaders who wanted to side with the Empire. We had something of a schism, but it all resolved well enough.”

“Peacefully?” Nix asked.

“For those of us who were left? Yes, it was quite peaceful when the Imperial sympathizers were dealt with,” Zindiana said. “I suppose it was peaceful for them as well. We do still pray for them you know.”

“So what’s the deal with all this Jedi nonsense then?” Sali asked.

“That’s for them to tell us, I think,” Zindiana said. “What I know is that the Jedi, and other Force users can do far more than move objects around with their mind. Sister B’Kallu described the Force as being alive itself, and aware.”

“Alive and aware, but it doesn’t care how it’s used?” Sali asked. “I mean, there were bad Jedi too right?”

“It’s more complicated than that?” Nix said. “And, honestly, I have no training in this. I’m just going by what I’ve experienced and what feels right.”

“That might make you a better source than most,” Zindiana said. “The Jedi had their teachings and that would have colored their views of things. Being able to compare what you’ve discovered with what they believed would make for an excellent thesis.”

“How it is more complicated?” Sali asked.

“You’ve heard about the ‘Dark Side of the Force’, right? I mean if you watch even one bootleg vid with Jedi in it, there’s always some evil witch, or fallen master, or some stuff like that were someone ‘fell to the Darkside’. The thing is there’s an element of truth to that, but it’s not the Force that got a ‘Darkside’. It’s us. We’re “dark” and “light” and all sorts of mixed up bits in between.”

“I thought the Force was alive and aware though? Are you saying it’s all good, or is it just like an animal? Like it depends on how you treat it?” Sali asked.

“It’s…I wish Kelda was still here. She would definitely have the words to explain this,” Nix said. “Not that she would though. Okay, so, my take on it? The Force doesn’t have ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sides. It has ‘harmony’ and ‘disharmony’. Like a jump drive. All of the pieces need each other – and the ‘engine’, or the Force, is really just the synthesis of those pieces. No one piece is an engine, and no one person is ‘the Force’, but all together, we are.”

“So we’re all just cogs then?” Sali asked.

“No, that’s why this is hard. And my metaphor sucks. We’re so much more than that pieces of a machine. And that’s why the Force is so much more than an engine. We don’t have one preset purpose for existing and so neither does the Force. But there’s still a flow to it as we create it and are created by it. “Dark” or “Light” if you do something with the Force, you’re altering that flow. I try to work with it, but from what Ravas has said, her master taught her to compel what she wanted, through anger, and fear.”

“That’s not healthy from what Sister B’Kallu described,” Zindiana said. “According to her, using the Force in anger let the Dark Side take hold of you and once you started walking that path, you would just get worse and worse.”

“You have to figure the Jedi weren’t entirely wrong about that,” Nix said. “They had a lot of experience with people making mistakes with the Force after all.”

“But you’re not wrong either,” Ayli said. “I know what you’re saying about using anger to make the Force give you what you want. It’s really easy to demand more power when your afraid or enraged. You feel so right in what you want, and I think the Force responds to that, even if what you want is to destroy people.”

“And when getting angry and smashing things becomes a viable answer…” Nix said.

“Then a lot of problems look like ones that are worth smashing,” Ayli said. “Because it works. To a point. But you pointed out that it’s still a choice. You can still walk away. When we fought the specters, well, I didn’t win, but I remembered the work we’d done.”

“And you didn’t give in to your fear, or your anger,” Nix said. “I could feel that. And I think it saved us. If you’d reached for power with your hate, I think it would have drawn on the Ancient Specter’s power.”

“And then I would have been possessed by two ghosts,” Ayli said. “Though maybe not for long. Ravas made pretty short work of the specter.”

“She did more than that,” Nix said. “When she destroyed him, she tore out the knot the Force had been twisted up into there.”

“Wait, what had happened to the Force?” Zindiana asked.

“Back when she and her master were setting up their Immortality scheme, they needed a nexus in the Force where they could work easily, so they created, for lack of a better term, a Dark Side nexus. The Force flowed there still, sort of, but it was bent and twisted and wrapped in on itself. It was miserable and horrifying, and by ripping the heart out of the Ancient Specter she also tore the blockage in the Force that they’d created free. There’s all kinds of other twists and snarls there, but with the main one gone, it’s possible the Force will be able to unravel those on its own.”

“Why would she destroy something she created?” Zindiana asked. “That’s her legacy.”

Ayli glanced at Nix who nodded to her.

“I don’t think she’d happy with her legacy,” Ayli said, trusting to the impressions which had been building in the back of her mind since Lednon Three. “She’s been trapped by that legacy for centuries. The Children of the Storm, woke her because of it and tied her to it even further.”

“It’s kept her from her rest,” Nix said. “And from someone she loved.”

“Someone who she still thinks betrayed her, it’s worth pointing out,” Ayli said.

“She might be coming around on that,” Nix said. “I think she wouldn’t have left like she did if Kelda’s words hadn’t hit something deep inside her.”

“So why did you say she was going to be our enemy then?” Zindiana asked.

Because she’d existed for longer than they’d all been alive and had never expressed an interesting in changing who she was even once? Ayli wondered if there was a universe where they ever could have met where Ravas wasn’t their enemy.

“Not the Ravas we saw here,” Nix said. “That was her spirit, or whatever essential element in us is in communion with the Force.”

“I thought there were some blood bugs that did that?” Sali asked.

“You’ve studied the Jedi too?” Zindiana asked, openly surprised.

“Not for real,” Sali said. “This was in one of the bootlegs Nix showed me.”

“You remembered that one?” Nix asked.

“You wouldn’t shut up about it for a week, how could I forget?” Sali said.

“It was a good vid,” Nix said. “And I looked up the ‘blood bugs’ thing. It turns out the Empire destroyed most of the facilities that made tests for them, but from I read they weren’t how you used the Force, they were just a life form which multiplied strongly when someone used the Force a lot. Basically like plants growing when there was a lot of good soil, sunshine, and rain. So correlation, but not causation.”

“That makes sense,” Sali said. “If it was like the movie, someone would have bottled up blood supplements of the bugs and everyone would be Jedi Masters or something.”

“I’m pretty sure the who ‘master’ thing takes training and effort,” Nix said. “I’ve been using the Force since I was a kid, I just didn’t realize, or wouldn’t let myself realized, what I was doing.”

“Wouldn’t let yourself realize?” Ayli asked.

“While there’s a mountain of evidence to the contrary, I have usually tried to keep myself safe,” Nix said. “Observing things, listening to them, knowing what people are feeling? Those are all pretty hard for anyone to spot. And pretty easy to play off as just natural character traits. Lifting heavy objects? If you keep your hands on them and they’re not too large, it’s pretty easy for that not to draw any attention either. Anything beyond that though? It never felt right to try more stuff, even when I’d just caught a good vid. Which I think was the Force warning me to not even consciously acknowledge what I could do or else one of the Inquisitors would help me down. Assuming they actually existed that is.”

“They did,” Ayli and Zindiana said at the same time with Zindiana adding. “Did in the past tense, and the galaxy is better off for it being the past tense.”

Ayli had never met or even seen one of the Imperial Inquisitors, but she’d heard the stores in the Rebellion. The cells which had been utterly destroyed. The ones which had been compromised. The ones that had sold other cells out. Zindiana was right, the galaxy was a much better place with the Inquisitors having been removed from it.

“Which brings us to the problem of Ravas,” Nix said. “I don’t think she is ‘past tense’. I think the Immortality treatment is why she’d so much more present than Kelda is, or even can be. When we get to Praxis Mar, I think we’re going to find the piece of her the Immortality treatment worked on. The part that’s holding her here.”

“The part she wants to destroy,” Ayli said.