"It's easier. Faster. Tempting. A shortcut. In other words, it's exactly what I need right now."
The Dark Side was an insidious thing.
It did not demand you stab a baby to access its strength. There was no tollbooth keeping you from the express elevator to power. Heck, there wasn't even so much as a sign dictating that you had to be willing to kick dogs of a certain size.
Personally, I drew the line at anything smaller than a corgi by weight.
Well, it's not like I would ever have to see a tremble rat ever again. And wasn't that a kick in the gut? But right then, with everything around me on fire? With what needed to be done to save these people being beyond my current abilities?
It was a welcome reminder.
Something to stoke my anger at having been torn from my home and dumped into a galaxy that seemed to run on madness and idiocy. Something to remind me that I was willingly compromising on my values just to keep this galaxy from erupting in another round of bloodshed and destruction for a little while longer. Something to remind me that Darth Angral was trying to ruin everything out of a misguided sense of vengeance.
Blood pounded through my ears as my current situation faded from my awareness as a desire to meet violence with violence took priority. The desire to twist off Darth Angral's limbs took priority, the desire to break him in mind and body until he was pitifully weeping in a puddle of his own blood and bile and tears. I wanted to show him that he was nothing, that everything he had done was in vain, to do to him what he was so willing to inflict to countless people, and then take it a few steps further.
I did not stem the flow of these thoughts.
They were necessary.
The Dark Side did not need action; it needed intent, the desire to actively do harm, and the commitment to follow through.
And those thoughts were enough.
The roof that had begun burning at the edge of town guttered out in a heartbeat as I willed it to die down. The burning crater right next to it that had caused the fire to spread was only a little behind it. A brief exertion of the mind, a bit of focus to bend reality to my will, and the flames in the crater were smothered like a Spartan child with a misshapen head.
As for the fire still threatening the village… the orange and yellow tongues of flame still threatened to spread beyond the thin ring of intact trees. Much as I liked how much power I had at my disposal, I had to remember that I had limits. Smothering that much fire was beyond my capabilities, even with the two streams of power still flowing into me.
Naturally, I did what I had planned to do originally: turn up the heat.
The world turned brighter in an instant. Where once the flames had cast everything in an orange tint, yellow light overshadowed it with blinding brilliance. All around me, the villagers reacted logically: with blind panic. Strangers had dropped in from above, the fires had spread, and now the fires had gotten even brighter and hotter.
How, they no doubt wondered, could this get any worse?
A few seconds later, they no longer had to wonder. I released my control over the flames, and they guttered out almost instantly. The trees that had fueled it had been reduced to ash and cinder and smoke. Without me directing the Force to sustain and enhance the conflagration, there was nothing left to fuel the fire.
The fire break did its job.
My plan had worked, and the village was safe.
I had been a fool. An idiot of the highest order. An utter buffoon. Such power at my fingertips, a mere thought away, and I had spurned it for months? The power to reshape reality as I saw fit?
How much could I have accomplished with this level of power at my disposal? How many lives could I have saved? How many risks could I have avoided?
"Well," I began to say, only to cut myself off as my throat seized with a cramp. Had my voice always been that raspy? Had I gotten a few too many lung fulls of smoke? "That worked."
"Finally gotten your fill of screaming?" Natia asked, and one of the streams of power ebbed away. No great loss, that. I was more than strong enough to make up for it, now.
"For now," I said, my lips quirking in a hidden smile. Had I been screaming? It certainly explained why my voice wasn't cooperating. Shouldn't the bugs have worked to counteract that? No, if I had screamed my throat raw, then simply being able to talk was a blessing. The healing the bugs provided, though accelerated, still hadn't fully repaired the damage, that was all. "Everyone safe?"
"The aliens survived," Natia confirmed, nodding. "Most of them, at least. That bleeding heart of yours finally turned out to be worth something."
"Silly Natia," I said, the ache in my throat beginning to fade. The bugs were good for something after all. "It always has."
"Keep telling yourself that," she scoffed. "What's our next move?"
"The Jedi Temple," I said. All around us, the villagers were beginning to realize that the world was not, in fact, going to end right this very second. Head-tailed aliens with skin colored blue and green and red and yellow slowly came to this realization, unsure of what to do with this information. "This village is safe, but we still need to draw out Darth Angral."
"You think you can draw him out?" the Little Jedi asked. Oddly, she was still lending me strength, still sending power flowing into me, still sending flashes of myself from her perspective. Part of me wanted to reciprocate, to share some of my strength with her. The rest of me knew damn well that she did not need my help, so I opened my mind instead, allowing the images to flow freely.
"We can taunt him," I answered, rolling my left shoulder experimentally. The motion sent burning lances of pain shooting through my entire left side, but that was just fuel for me to use. Angral and his goons were responsible for this, and I would make them pay.
The thought was a reinvigorating one.
"That's your plan? Make fun of his dead kid?" Natia asked.
"I'm not so limited," I said, striding towards the edge of the village. Not towards the tiny fragments of intact forest, but towards the entrance to the valley that housed the village. At some point early in the bombardment, a blast had caused a rockslide that blocked the only way into and out of the village. "Darth Angral is a veritable font of failure."
That rubble had to be shifted. I had a lot of new power. Advanced mathematics, this was not.
As I got a good look at my obstacle, I felt like I had perhaps understated the difficulty of this obstacle. This was not just a pile of rocks blocking the way. Rocks were present, of course, and in great number. Boulders, pebbles, mud, and sand all accompanied them, forming a heterogeneous mass that had filled the narrow mouth of the valley.
Eh, do or do not.
Either I was going to get it done or not. No sense angsting about expectations or abilities.
The bigger rocks I sent flying first, yanking them out of the mud and then lobbing them over the impasse. Those boulders were the main thing giving this thing any kind of structural integrity, so they had to go. I couldn't sense any living creatures large enough to be people on the other side, so it was as safe a method of disposal as I could think of.
After four or five rocks had been removed, the amalgamation of mud and stone began to shift. With so much of its structure removed, the barrier began to deform. Mud slid down towards me before parting around an invisible barrier, and the blockage went from being taller than two people standing on each others' shoulders to barely coming up to my waist.
Good enough for now.
"Why do you insist on wasting time?" Natia asked, lightly leaping over what little remained of the obstruction while I carefully clambered over it on foot. Past this smale vale with the village was a larger valley, gently sloping down before following a winding river.
"These shoes aren't meant for jumping," I said. "And these people will need to get some supplies. This will save them some time later."
"And this will cost us time now," she countered.
"I know your kind collects head trauma like medals," the Little Jedi said, also choosing to jump over what little remained of the rubble, "but you cannot have already forgotten about Nestor's 'bleeding heart,' as you so eloquently put it."
"Bite me," she shot back. "Which way to the Jedi Temple?"
"We follow the river, at least for a little while," the Little Jedi said, pointing to the gently flowing stream. In it, the reflections of tall trees and the sparse fires that plagued this part of the valley danced and trembled.
"And then?"
"Then we go that way," I said, gesturing in the direction in which I could sense my compatriots. It was little more than a whisper at this distance, but they were recognizable.
"Around those mountains, I hope," the Little Jedi snarked.
"You don't know the way?" I asked.
"I've never been to Tython," the Little Jedi admitted before gesturing to her robes. Her green robes. "Corellian Jedi, remember?"
"There's a difference?" Natia asked, setting off at a jog down the slope.
"Fewer restrictions," she admitted, following the small apprentice. In no time, she had caught up and immediately pulled ahead.
Now, why did that set off alarm bells in my head? And amusement from Natia?
...
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