Zannah: "This has been in my sketchbook for quite some time, and I'm still not happy with it, so I probably won't finish it. The story is set in wielder's version of the SW universe, while Zannah is Padawan to Master Harkan Thorodin. I believe she's fifteen or sixteen at this point, which is the issue of Order 66 and the start of the Purges. Argh, I hate drawing technology. x_x Cockpit is mostly based on a shot of the Millennium Falcon."

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Do you know what a blaster bolt feels like? The awful, wrenching, sickening pain comes in waves until you think you'll go mad from it. You can smell the stench of your own flesh and fur charring, the stink of cooked meat coming from your own organs. I fell to the deck screaming, clutching at my stomach even as my brain fought to process two disparate sets of sensations. The brown tunic beneath my hands was whole, my white furred belly untouched, yet at the same time, I knew I had been struck by a blaster shot. I writhed from the pain a moment longer until I felt my master's hand on my arm, his presence bringing me back to myself with a gasp.

"Zannah?"

I blinked tears of pain from my eyes and struggled to sit up. He helped me. "Master Thorodin... Runi's dead!" How I knew, I could not say, but for a certainty, I knew whose pain I had just channeled. Runi was still a Youngling, a Padawan Hopeful back at the Temple on Coruscant. The Younglings were supposed to be safe there. So why had I felt one of my old friends, someone a bare three years younger than me, dying of a blaster wound? My master frowned at me, but I sensed no disapproval from him, only puzzlement. The pain had barely begun to let up when I went rigid with another phantom blow, like a lightsaber to my still-throbbing gut. Then another. And another. I knew every one. I sobbed their names aloud, all of them Younglings, not yet Padawans. They had been students like me, training to be Jedi, yet all I could do was feel their deaths like acid trickling through my brain.

Consciousness became a subjective thing. I knew on some level that I was in my master's arms, moving at great speeds, but my mind told me I was also in the Temple. I felt the wounds that murdered my friends as though they had been inflicted on my own body. Again and again came the merciless blaster shots, and worse, the awful burning numbness that could only come from the blade of a lightsaber. Not all of my poor friends died under the guns of the clones that day.

I could feel parts of myself shutting down and closing off, helping to distance me from the pain. Perhaps it was Master Thorodin helping to insulate me from the onslaught. I was too insensible to think clearly. The fear, agony, and anguish choked me past the point of grief. I rode the razor's edge of consciousness, barely aware of being strapped into a seat, my muscles loose and uncoordinated. Master Thorodin could have flown us through a dogfight, and I would barely have noticed. All I saw was chaos and darkness when I opened my eyes. The kick of a Hyperdrive activating thumped my head back against the seat, and blessed darkness swallowed me up.

~~~~~~

I was alone in my own head when I came to, for the first time I could truly remember. The silence alone was almost more frightening than the memory of what I had sensed before unconsciousness took me. I licked dry lips with a tongue gone as raspy as sandpaper. "M-master Thorodin," I quavered, hating the wobble in my voice.

"I'm here, child." His voice was soft in the confines of the cockpit. I had a moment of disorientation, since when I had last been fully in command of my senses, we had been aboard a Republic warship, not what appeared to be a small freighter.

"What... What happened?"

Master Thorodin was quiet for a long moment. "Do you remember what happened aboard the Judicator?" he asked.

I shuddered, not wishing to remember. "I... I fell. It hurt..."

"Do you remember what you told me?" he pressed.

My ears pressed flat to my skull. I knew I hadn't imagined what I had sensed, but that didn't make it any easier. "They're dead, aren't they?" I asked flatly. "The Younglings left behind... my friends..." I felt tears burning my eyes as I thought about those bright young lives so callously snuffed out. Other children I had known, befriended, squabbled and sparred with, all gone in a matter of heartbeats. "Master, why? They never hurt anyone. Who would do such a thing?" I could feel what remained of my calm slipping.

The old wolf turned his graying muzzle toward me, his eyes serious. "It was not only the Younglings."

I felt my heart drop through my stomach at this piece of news. More Jedi dead? Killing our Younglings would take the heart from the Order, but I could barely contemplate the sort of attack my Master inferred. "But..."

He sighed. "I don't know how many survived as we did, but I fear few had the warning to escape."

"Warning?" I glanced around the small cockpit. "Is that why we aren't aboard the Judicator anymore?" I could not remember receiving any warning, certainly not about the impending deaths of our fellow Jedi. I shuddered to recall how Runi's death had slammed into my unprepared mind.

"You were our warning, Zannah," Thorodin explained gently. "Perhaps I should have told you sooner, but I believed it would be better to allow your gifts to mature before I sought to train you in them."

I stared at his familiar face, lit by the flickering eddies of Hyperspace, and frowned in confusion. "My... Master Thorodin, I don't understand. What gifts?" So far as I knew, I would be a Knight of middling strength when my training was through, useful to the Order, but not particularly outstanding. Not someone like Master Kenobi or Master Skywalker, or even roguish Master Cloudbreaker. I had never thought to be anything other than ordinary among the Jedi. In truth, being taken as a Padawan itself had been a surprise as well as a relief, but I had mostly put it down to the necessity of training new Knights to replace those lost in the Clone Wars. I had never considered there might be some other motivation that a Jedi like Master Thorodin, who had not taken a Padawan in two decades, would take on a student like me.

"Consider that you felt the deaths of your Youngling friends when I did not. Do you wonder at this?"

I shook my head. "Of course not... I mean no disrespect, Master, but they are my friends, not yours." I bit my lip. "Were my friends."

"Of course not," he repeated gently, and sighed. "You have always had that kind of connection to everyone you have ever shared meditation with, anyone with whom you have worked with closely, including your teachers and sparring partners, correct? You share that connection with me as well, do you not?"

I started to nod, my mind automatically reaching out along those lines, only to encounter a...a wall made of static. I sucked in a breath, simultaneously hurt and confused that Master Thorodin would shut me out. I tried to reach for inner calm, but it slipped away. When I tried to touch the Force, I felt as though my mental fingers had been wrapped in thick Bantha wool, clumsy and fumbling, unable to grasp it. Not only could I not touch the mind of the wolf sitting next to me, but I could barely sense him at all. I felt a kind of panic descending on me. Where was the Force? Why had it abandoned me? My breath came in gasps as I fought to break through the strange barrier that cut me off.

Master Thorodin touched my arm and the panic faded enough to leave me clear headed. "Easy, child," he soothed, his gruff voice gentle with concern. "Zannah, the ability to form bonds with other Jedi is not particularly rare, as you know. It takes time, familiarity, and practice, however. You, on the other hand, form them almost instantly. Any Jedi who shares deeply enough with you creates a permanent bond. That was why you felt the deaths of your Youngling friends."

My eyes burned with unshed tears. So I simply latched onto any other Force user without even meaning to? I had long grown accustomed to not being alone in my head, to sensing the thoughts and emotions of others without trying, but I never knew it wasn't the same for all other Jedi. "I-I can't feel anything now, Master." My voice sounded piteously close to a sob.

He nodded. "Give it time," Thorodin said, not unkindly. "I expect so many deaths along so many bonds overloaded your mind. It will probably be temporary, but even if it is not, you will adapt. It may even be for the best," he finished grimly.

I stared at him, horror dawning in my mind. I might be permanently numbed to the Force, and he thought it was a good thing? "Master, how can you say that," I choked out. "They... They need us! What use am I if I can't touch the Force to fight?"

"It will help you hide better," Thorodin returned flatly. "We have more enemies than allies now, Zannah."

I sat there, dumbfounded as he explained to me what had happened since I felt those first deaths. He told me that the clone troopers on the Judicator had turned against us, how they had tried to stop him as he carried me off the ship. The Judicator itself had fired on our small vessel when he sought to escape. Our story was not unique. On planets all over the galaxy, clones had turned on their Jedi liaisons and commanders unexpectedly. Most of the Jedi had not survived that first awful, crippling assault. On Coruscant, the former Chancellor Palpatine had branded all Jedi as terrorists, and ordered us wiped out. No longer Supreme Chancellor, Palpatine was now Emperor of the galaxy. In one order, he had turned my young life completely upside-down. I had no way of knowing if any others had survived. Neither did Master Thorodin. We might be the last two Jedi alive in the galaxy for all we knew, and we would be hunted, assuredly. I could not suppress another shiver, feeling more alone than I ever had before.

The cockpit was quiet for a long while after he finished his explanation. I swallowed hard against a throat gone a dry as a Tattooine desert. "Master Thorodin... Where will we go now? What will we do?"

He stared out into the swirling morass of Hyperspace, not looking at me. "We go on," Thorodin told me. "There may be others who escaped. There are enclaves... Plett's Well, Thantella, Dantooine... If others among the Jedi survived, we will find them." He heaved a deep sigh. "From now on, we cannot travel as Jedi. After today, I am your uncle Harkan. You are my niece. We are independent traders aboard the freighter Sunrunner. We have no connection to the Jedi Order. We are civilians, seeking work that keeps us away from conflict. Am I perfectly clear?" he turned to look at me again, his blue gaze boring into mine.

"Y-yes, M-, Uncle," I managed to catch myself, amazed at how easily the fictions rolled off his tongue. I got a firm nod of approval, though it did little to ease the troubled knot in my gut. I sat there, awash in doubt and grief, trying to pull myself back together enough to accept the new life my master was building for us.

“Good,” he said, and pulled up the navicomputer, typing in a new line of code. “Our first stop is Nar Shaddaa.”

I gulped. “The Smuggler’s Moon? But M-. Uncle, why there?”

He smiled slightly. “Because this freighter is still registered to the Republic merchant who owned it,” the wolf explained. “That must be addressed first if we don’t wish to become a moving target in short order.”

“Uncle...” I gave him a searching look as I fought to commit the unfamiliar title to my mind. “It sounds as though you’ve done this before.”

Thorodin gave a mirthless chuckle. “Outside the Temple, one quickly learns things aren’t so black and white as we sometimes like to believe. Yes, Zannah, there have been times when it was necessary to do things the Order would consider... unorthodox in order to survive.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. It was dangerously close to deception, and that was the Dark Side. “If you say so... Uncle,” I allowed dubiously.

“It won’t be forever, Zannah,” Thorodin said. “Just until this crisis is past.”

Nodding uncertainly, I slumped back in my seat. I felt exhausted and sick to the depths of my soul. Without the Force, everything seemed muffled and dim to my senses. Sunk in private misery, I let the formless swirls of Hyperspace lull me into an uneasy sleep. Perhaps the world would seem more solid when I awoke. Either way, the one thing I knew for certain was my life would never be the same again.

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Pencil on sketch paper. Artwork and story by  zannah, who owns Thorodin and Zannah. Wielder belongs to :icon wielder:, and all things Star Wars belong to George Lucas. Image reposted with permission of the artist.

Original image can be found here: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/7131606