Sorry for the repost... Zanny made me write a bit to go with this one. c.c She's about 19 years old here, in her 3rd year at the Academy on Coruscant.

~~~~~~

They reached for her, insidious fingers of darkness from out of the murk. Everything was swirling fog, thicker than the mists on a Coruscant night in Invisec, and twice as deadly. Her every sense screamed of danger. It pounded in her head like a second pulse, inevitable, unavoidable.

Zannah took a step and the mist eddied in dizzying whorls around her feet. She could see nothing but fog, but she could feel the darkness in it, patiently waiting. The only light was a pale flickering nimbus that seemed to surround her, as though it exuded from her own white fur. It was just enough illumination to imagine the nightmarish thing that paused just beyond her limited vision.

"Show yourself!" she cried. "I'm not afraid of you!"

What kind of response she expected, the vixen wasn't sure. She wished desperately for the weight of her lightsaber in her hands, but that was back on Lemoria, left safely in Master Thorodin's keeping. Though he had not agreed with her decision to leave his tutelage for Coruscant and the Academy, he had done that much for her. The consequences of being caught with a Jedi weapon were deadly. Now, though, she wondered if leaving it behind had been enough. Her fur stood on end when a rush of wind stirred the murky mists. It carried with it the foul breath of something purely evil. The small bit of calm she had gathered from the Force shattered beneath a thrill of terror.

'Where are you, little Jedi?' The taunting voice had a singsong quality, vicious and gleeful as a hunting beast. 'We feel you, foolish whelp. You cannot hide from us. We are coming to find you...'

The darkness crashed in upon her from all sides, chokingly thick and vile.

"No!"

Zannah threw an arm up as though to ward off the tide of evil that threatened to overwhelm her. For a moment, hope surged as her aura of light flared to life, momentarily beating back the darkness. Then with a noise like a planet growling in its innermost depths, the assault of oily blackness redoubled. The last thing she would ever see was the feeble light of her own life snuffed out before her eyes. Evil cackling echoed in her ears. Her horrified scream choked off in a whimper as the darkness took her.

~~~~~~

Zannah sat bolt upright in her bunk, forgetting the low ceiling and banging her head painfully. "Aaagh." Both hands gripped her throbbing skull, ears folded back against black hair gone damp and tangled with sweat. She panted for breath while she waited for the vestiges of the nightmare to fade. By some miracle, her nocturnal thrashing had not woken her fellow cadet. Given the workload and physical activity their days required, she was not terribly surprised. Her breathing and heart rate eventually slowed, but the sense of crawling dread and impending doom did not abate. The vixen swallowed hard and swung her legs out of her bunk. Her eyes roved the tiny dormitory cubicle she shared with her roommate, little more than a closet with prefab furniture in the form of two bunks, a terminal built into the plasteel wall, a tiny food prep unit, and a battered chair stolen from a lounge on another level. Nothing was out of place or dangerous here. Zannah dropped into the chair, too wound up to try sleeping again.

Taking a risk, she closed her eyes and reached out with a different level of awareness. Using the Force, even passively like this, could be dangerous. Coruscant had once been the heart of the Jedi Order. The Temple had been located here. Some of the most savage actions of the Purges had been concentrated not far from where she sat now. She could only hope the sheer number of varied lifeforms present might help camouflage what she was doing. Zannah pushed out her sphere of thought gently, delicately. She searched for anything that might have been the cause of her nightmare. Jedi did not dream often. She knew that much from Master Thorodin.

Opening her senses to life on Coruscant was a vast undertaking, fascinating, but not entirely pleasant. The Force was everywhere, bound to the lives and deaths of the teeming organisms around her. Zannah shuddered as her thoughts brushed the edge of a murder, the killer glorying in their actions. The flickering spectre in her mind of a cooling corpse slumped in a fetid puddle in some nameless blind alley made her want to recoil, but something made her pause. In the half-seen, half-sensed vision, the killer brusquely kicked the corpse over and rifled through its clothing. She felt a surge of elation as it found its prize and hefted it into the dim amber light of air taxies and holo-advertisements filtering down from the upper levels. The wicked chortle that reverberated through her brain exactly matched the laughter from her dream, chilling her to the core.

The glinting object clutched in those dull talons could be nothing but a lightsaber. The murder she had felt had been the death of another Jedi, not terribly far away. There was blood on the saber's hilt.

Violently, she wrenched her awareness back to the present. Zannah found herself near hyperventilating from what she had unwittingly stumbled across. That had been a Darksider, a Hunter. There was no question in her mind about that. As to whether he, she, or it had noticed the vixen's own presence was debatable. She might have gone unremarked, or the Hunter might be coming for her now. She ran a shaky hand down her muzzle. The one thing she knew for sure was that she could not stay here. Unless she left the Academy, left the planet, she would be hunted down just like that unfortunate. Zannah knew coming here had been playing with fire. She had thought she could handle it, but all it had taken was one dream to prove to her that she was in over her head. Master Thorodin was right. She wasn't ready to face this kind of danger.

Swallowing hard, she turned to the terminal and began composing a hasty letter of resignation to the Academy Commandant, citing a family emergency. At least if she had to leave, she would do it without getting herself branded a deserter. Going back to Lemoria meant facing everything she had left behind when she had come here, but it also meant Master Thorodin and her lightsaber. Those were odds Zannah liked decidedly better. Though she hated to leave her cadet training unfinished, it wasn't worth the cost of her own life. That was one lesson she had learned well from her master. She sent off the letter and hurried to pack her things. If she left now, there would be less explaining to do.

One way or another, Zannah was going home.


<<< PREV | FIRST | NEXT >>>

~~~~~~

_{Like this image and want to use it? Check my Art Usage Guidelines for more information.
Want one of your own? Commission Me! =D}