B'Omarr comin'!

[Amilthi Camlenn]

A piercing pain from afar penetrated Amilthi's meditative state. It took a moment's investigation of the sensation to recognise it as such, and to determine its origin in her arm - so far was her mind removed from her physical existence at this moment.

Amilthi forced her consciousness out of the altered state it was in and tried to refocus on her body. Her eyelids were heavy as she tried to open it, and she felt herself fall over from her sitting position. It was difficult to transition from one state of concentration to another that was the polar opposite. She found her consciousness dimming and only with much strength managed to hold on to a tiny bit of clarity about the sensations on her face. She felt her cheek against the cold stone floor, and then her hair where it fell as she was lifted up.

Her concentration was exerted to the utmost that her sorry state permitted, holding on to her consciousness and directing the flow of the Force through her body to resist the noxious anesthetic. Actual movement of her limbs was yet outside her reach.

The clarity of her mind eventually started to increase noticeably, and she found herself lying on her back. As she opened her eyes, the first thing whose sight she caught was a hand with a scalpel. It took only a split second for the Jedi to spring into decisive action, her hand shot upwards and took a decisive hold of the other's wrist while, pulling him with her, she rolled over and off the table on which she lay. The hand lost its grip on the surgeon's tool, and with a singing metal sound it hit the floor first, followed by Amilthi and then, on top of her, the monk whose wrist she had taken hold of, his body serving as a shield for her back.

Nailing the helpless monk's hand firmly to the floor with hers, Amilthi had her other hand retrieve the scalpel from under herself. Without thinking or looking, she stabbed forcefully into a spot above her back. She could feel the body on her back twitch and then go limp. Only now did she realised that there was confused and exasperated chatter, intermingled with screams, all around her, and she began to apprehend her situation fully.

An old artifact she had found in an abandoned B'Omarr temple on Teth had finally enabled her to gain the monks' attention and be permitted into one of their monasteries of Tatooine. Then it had not been so difficult to convince the monks that she was interested in their teachings and persuade them to share them. While Amilthi had initially suspected that the whole order might be a matter or charlatanery, she soon discovered that the monks did, in fact, have their very own and rather unique approach, and their disembodied elders did indeed exist in a strange state of being that they attained through it. The monks recognised in Amilthi an experienced meditator and found her to be making rapid progress. It was after a few months she had spent in the isolation of the monastery that they first suggested she might consider undergoing the procedure of disembodiment - to have her brain removed from her body - which, naturally, she had no intention of allowing. Now it was turning out that the B'Omarr monks didn't take no for an answer.

 

[Amilthi Camlenn]

Amilthi slumped against the wall in agony and sank to the floor. A sensation of burning intensity consumed her, it was as if her entire being was on fire. It was not bodily exhaustion that she felt, indeed she barely perceived her limbs at all. The feeling had no location and yet was all-encompassing. She began to fear that she might have broken and ruined something in herself irreparably by so recklessly practicing strange and foreign techniques.

But Amilthi began to observe. It was tempting to immediately fall into an analytical mode about her condition and speculate as to its nature and cause, and she made an effort to push these thoughts aside. The fire continued to rage while her full awareness was focussed on it, but so regarded as something separate from herself, it became bearable and less disconcerting, and eventually began to subside. It must have been a curious interaction of the residues of the unusual meditation she had performed and her exertion in the Force.

She was left feeling completely drained, but noticed that mental clarity was returning and her racing heart and breath were slowing down. The stone of the chamber was cool, and Amilthi noticed that her feet were bare. Her shirt and trousers were stained in blood, and her right hand moist from the same. Three dead bodies lay on the floor. For now she was safe, insofar as there was nobody around with an immediate intention of cutting open her head. But she was also stuck somewhere, she knew not where, in a labyrinthine monastery full of cultists who were even insaner than anyone might have guessed, and in conspicuously soiled clothes that made it impossible to look innocuous.

The Jedi picked herself up and examined the dead monks' garments, which were likewise in unpresentable condition. She looked down on them with a certain indignation. She realised she might have to do the same thing to a dozen others - and at this particular moment, she was oddly at peace with this prospect.

 

[Amilthi Camlenn]

The monks had built a dizzying maze of corridors and shafts into their age-old monastery, many of them hidden, and Amilthi didn't know how long she wandered about the place without encountering anyone, venturing into sections she had never entered and not even been aware existed. The coating of dried blood on her hands caused an odd feeling of her skin, but at the same time it was a welcome reminder of her good fortune not to have had to wet them again in the same manner. Some might have said the B'omarr monks deserved to be destroyed; but they had discovered curious things about the mind that it would have been a shame to lose, and they did not bother anyone but each other. For all their - apparently violent - dogmatism, their attitude towards recruiting new members was the very opposite of eagerness. It was a surprise that their lineage still existed at all. Amilthi would rather leave them in peace.

Crawling on all fours, she followed another shaft like many before. It was sometimes difficult to even judge which way they went, but it seemed to her that this one was sloped upwards. After a minute or so of crawling in almost complete darkness, she painfully hit her head. Feeling around, she came to the conclusion that this was a cul de sac - until her finders by accident touched something that was smooth and metallic and quite unlike the stone of the walls. Further investigation suggested it was a switch of some sort, and upon being activated, the wall in front of Amilthi parted and revealed, to her astonishment, a thin line of sunlight that grew into a rectangle of sky.

Half expecting to find herself in front of a cliff and no way further, she stuck her head out - but in fact, she seemed to be on the roof of the temple. Shaped like a mushroom cap, it wasn't flat, but the inclination was not too great to stand on, and Amilthi breathed the fresh air in with delight. She followed the sensation of the stream of air from her upper lip to her nostrils, through her nose and throat, and into her lungs and enjoyed the simple and familiar sensations thoroughly. Looking into the vastness of the Tatooinian desert below the blue sky, she felt tremendous relief and liberation. It was still not, in fact, trivial to reach anything resembling civilisation from here, but right now this problem seemed like a mere trifle.

But first, she had another very important thing to do. She had hidden her lightsaber between the rocks of the mountain into which the monastery was built, as the B'omarr monks did not welcome armed visitors to their home. And of course she needed to get off the roof.

She turned around to face the rocks that obstructed the view on the other side of the monastery. She surveyed the terrain and eventually identified a spot she wanted to reach. Taking a running start, she propelled herself through the air off the slanted surface and with somnambulistic surety landed with her feet on a ledge in the rock face, metres away from the roof of the monastery. She looked back and for a moment felt a deep satisfaction with the powers she obtained through the Force. Traversing the ledge sideways, she soon reached more walkable terrain. It was a matter of climbing for a few minutes to reach the spot near the top of this rocky hill where she had hidden her lightsaber between rocks above a scree.

But when she arrived in the area, she found herself puzzled. It didn't have quite the same look that she remembered. Somewhat lost, she bounced over the difficult terrain. Her heart stopped when she found that at the upper end of the scree there was nothing like the rock formation she was looking for. A rockfall had transformed the terrain, and Amilthi looked down over the rabble that extended a good hundred metres below how. With elastic steps she descended over the small rocks that felt like molasses under her feet. She didn't really have much of an idea where she was going, and her heart sank when no intuition surfaced that directed her one way or another.

The stones under her feet began to flow downhill. She tried to jump into the air, but the surface was too soft to allow her to push herself off it, and she lost her balance. The rocks were painful against her back and shoulders and she was lucky to keep her head off them as the was carried away and towards the edge of the scree. Suddenly the ground beneath her vanished entirely and she could feel herself falling into a crack over the thundering sound of rocks falling on rocks.

The loss of balance was more than physical. Amilthi felt betrayed by she knew not what, confused, and at a loss. A sudden feeling of hopelessness threatened to swallow her. She was yanked away from when she managed to eventually catch herself on a small ledge, her feet hanging in the air. Stones falling below into the depth of a subterranean cavern in which their impact on the ground, some fifteen metres below resonated widely. The light was dim, but present, and there had to be an exit nearby.

Amilthi collected herself and moved her hands a few times to obtain a stable grip. Her fingers and arms would hold out for a while, but not forever. She twisted her neck to look around and below to see any place she might venture to reach from her precarious position. There was no obvious way to proceed except to fall to the ground. But somehow, a particular heap of rabble caught her attention. It was not visually distinguished, but something seemed important about it and she would find her eyes returning to it. It dawned on Amilthi that perhaps her lightsaber might be buried there.

 

[Amilthi Camlenn]

Suddenly she heard a sound that was a rarity and simultaneously well-known at least to those who lived outside of Tatooine's city. This could only mean one thing: the cave below her was the lair of a krayt dragon. Soon she could see the shadow the beast was throwing into the cave as it was blocking out the sun. Eventually it came into view, its tongue darting around, taking in the foreign smells. It looked up at the dangling human creature above, eying it.

Amilthi considered whether she should attempt to launch herself from her position to reach a spot from which she could outrun the predator, but it did not seem a certain prospect, and to be out in the wilds of Tatooine unarmed was disagreeable.

Attracted by the blood on her clothes and the warm flesh of her body, the krayt dragon lifted itself up on its hindlegs and lunged upwards in an attempt to reach her, but it fell short. She was confident that the cave's roof was high enough for her to at least be safe as long as she managed to hold herself, and so put her attention back on the heap of rabble that had seemed special. The feeling of the proximity of her lightsaber grew stronger and stronger, and she pulled it towards her. There was a clacking sound and some of the stones rearranged.

A grumbling noise intensified, as if the weapon was fighting the rocks to escape. Amilthi let go with one hand and stretched it out in the direction she felt the lightsaber in. It found an opening, broke free of its cage, and darted up towards its master - only to impact hard on the side of the krayt dragon's jaw. It bounced off and fell to the ground, while the creature hissed irritably. Amilthi's hand fell limp before she brought it up again to support the other.

The krayt dragon's attention, however, had momentarily been distracted from the Jedi as it was investigating in the direction from which the hit had come. Looking down on its back, Amilthi caught a glimpse of her lightsaber's metal under it on the ground. She lost no time in thought and let go.

The impact on the ground was painful, and she could only spare part of her attention on her legs to steady them so as not to lose the focus on her lightsaber. But aided by the Force, and one hand, she caught herself, and her mind latched on full to the weapon, her other arm stretched out to welcome it.

She had landed directly behind the krayt dragon, only narrowly avoiding its tail. If it had moved the other way, the creature might have swept the Jedi off her feet, but when a claw reached for her from the other side, Amilthi already had the shining lightsaber in her hand and met it with a decisive strike that chopped it off. A step forward, raising the lightsaber above her head, another high, heavy strike cleft the beast's snout in half. Cauterising the wound at once, it left a bizarre sight. She stepped back again, and roaring in pain, the beast lost its balance over its lost limb. She didn't hesitate, jumped, and turned the blade around to stab it downwards right into the creature's brain to end its misery. Amilthi stumbled back onto the ground as the corpse twitched under the remainder of nervous energy.

The krayt dragon had fallem to the Way of the Krayt Dragon.