The Rebel Faction

Dolash seemed to consider the question, his wandering around the cavernous room as he searched for a response. "In short," he said, steepling his fingers on his lap, "you are simply not naturally gifted in the Force. Not nearly enough to learn the art of the Jedi, anyway. You hear the calling, this much is true, but there are degrees of affinity and I can sense that the Force has not chosen this path for you."

Cold though the temple was, the words of the Jedi Master seemed somehow colder still. "What gifts you do have may be enough to grant you sense or luck beyond your nature, but nothing more. Now please, for your own safety go, the affairs of the Force can be quite dangerous for the unprepared."

With that statement Dolash reclined back into a meditative sitting position and closed his eyes. At the edge of hearing the stillness of the previous meditation began to creep back into the air, leaving Aleister isolated again.

If Dolash had heard Aleister, he made no move to aknowledge him. He made space for the young man to sit, and was joined now in full meditation.

There the two sat for long, uncomfortable hours. If time had seemed strange before, it became definite now, minutes ticking one by one like the fall of mighty boulders. The cold became less of a nuisance and more of a life-draining deep freeze. The stone was rough and uncomfortable. The unnatural life that lingered in the air was maddening.

They continued like this for the rest of what might have been the day. When the torches burnt down to stubs and darkness threatened to completely engulf them, Dolash rose from his sitting position and headed back towards the spiral ramp leading to the surface.

He paused here, glanced back to Aleister, then looked up at the distant spot of surface light at the entrance to the temple. The old Jedi master then coiled like a creaky spring, and with one surprisingly graceful movement began to bound speedily up the temple walkway.

Upon reaching the mouth of the tunnel again, Dolash made immediately for the outside. Night was falling fast and the bitter cold had turned into a true deep freeze. The return of the wind was another reminder of how inhospitable the planet was.

Dolash quickly began to climb the side of the mountain, scrambling up well-worn rocky outcroppings. Any thought that he planned to scale the immense peak in such lethal weather was dismissed as he reached a small plateau not far up the side of the mountain. There was another cave mouth here, another shelter from the wind.

That wasn't all, though.

Inside the cave, lit by luminous mushrooms, a trickle of steaming water emerged from a long-eroded spout in the wall - a natural hot-spring welling up from deep within the mountain, providing unfrozen water. Around it had grown a tiny mini-ecosystem that had perhaps been planted by the temple's original inhabitants, with lichen clinging to the walls and thin reedy vines coming down from the ceiling.

Dolash sat cross-legged before the hot water trickle and cupped his hands. He drank deeply from the little hot springs, and with a free hand scraped some lichen from the wall, which he ate. His hand was careful to avoid the luminescent mushrooms or the reedy vines, picking only choice bits of bright green lichen.

There was a space already cleared, as if in preparation, on the other side of the water.

The two ate and drank in silence until both had had their fill. When that was so, Dolash rose, and placed a hand on one of the reedy vines hanging from the ceiling.

He felt the texture, which seemed to satisfy him - he pulled the vine free and rolled it up around his arm. He pulled off a few more promising vines before turning back towards the exit of the cave. By now it was so dark that it seemed impossible to find their way back to the entrance to the underground temple.

It was here that Dolash ripped a strip off of one of the vines. He plucked one of the luminescent mushrooms from the cave wall and crumpled it in his hand, spreading the mushroom paste on the end of the wooden strip. This he struck against the cave wall - igniting it into a blazing torch.

Torch in hand, Dolash led his new guest back down the mountain towards the cave mouth, arm raised against the whipping night time winds.

The journey back down to the bottom of the temple was just as long and as arduous as it had been the first time, only by now all of the torches save the one in Dolash's hand had burned out. They moved in complete darkness until reaching the temple floor again, where Dolash seemed to lead them far into the dark.

When at last they had gone far enough for whater Dolash's purpose was, he reached upwards and slotted the torch into an old stone brazier hanging from the ceiling. It cast dim light over a wide area, revealing a side-chamber hollowed into the temple's unfinished stone wall. Here rested threadbare blankets and pillows in an old heap. Dolash pulled free one such bedset and lay it on the ground, falling instantly asleep atop it.

There he lay, in the dim circle of light, without even a word or gesture to the complete stranger who stood over him. Night had at last come to Ilum.

Concepts like day and night were somewhat academic at a certain depth underground.

Therefore, when Aleister awoke at what he guessed to be morning, Dolash was not there. The stubs of torches smouldered in their stoney brackets, and by these embers the unoccupied pile of bedsets could be seen.

The silence of the temple was just as complete as the day before, only now without Dolash's presence a distinct emptiness permeated the place. The invisible, pulsing vitality seemed to have left with him, leaving just cold stone and flat shadows.

The distant spiral column that lead outside was now just barely visible, caught in the reflected rays of morning sunlight and old flickering torch-light. It beckoned, if only because no alternate path presented itself.