Na'an ran, and the jungle seemed to part at her feet like water. She laughed as her toes dug deep, kicked up loamy earth, sprung her from tree to tree with only a step or two between. The last time she had been here, she was new, and the heartbeat of the place deep in her bones had scared her, and so she had walked.
But now she ran. Ran, and swung, and clambered like a wild dancing thing, and her laugh seemed to make the monkeys in the trees eager to join along.
And no, she did not run alone. The others followed her, just as she'd hoped--quickly enough, if with less grace through the thicker underbrush. She could feel one, two, three--four? Fantastic.
Wonderful. The pack had grown even in the seconds since she'd started. Helping Daws would be all the easier, and then they could get to the real work.
"Most people," she said gaily, knowing her voice would carry
, "who study the Force think it's some secondary thing, you know? Like sensing it is different from seeing or hearing or touch."
She eased her gait, slipping parallel to Daws, masked only by a thin sheet of vines covered in flowers. The Miraluka was fascinating to watch run, blind as he was. Not unsure, exactly, for he never stumbled or gave an uneasy step. The odd syncopation in his pace was more of a deliberate unevenness, fits and starts, like the way an insect moves in the dark. Na'an reached out the disturb the vines, the flowers quivering against her fingers, and Daws turned in response to that tiniest of rustles. She laughed again, and started ahead before he could catch her.
"Right, right! From the minute we're born, we're in the Force. It's our natural element. We're meant for it, and it's meant for us. That's the only reason we can use it at all."
The Rabbit burst through a dense thicket of bushes, her armor bright with pollen dust and smears of green. She scowled, and lunged for Na'an, but the scowl wasn't as hostile as it looked. She even looked like she was enjoying the chase, despite herself. Na'an danced out of reach, pulling herself up a nearby tree hand over foot.
"It's our eyes and ears, our hands and feet. It's the joy in your heart--"
The strange blond one passed just under the tree, pulling short at the sound of her voice just above. On a whim, Na'an waited until he passed, then swung upside down on her branch to drop just behind him. She snorted at the way he started. If Daws was an insect, this one moved with all the unthinking fluidity of a fawn in the woods--too new to the universe to have learned how to be wary--a strange contrast to the darkness he carried with him like a personal fog.
"And it's the hunger in your bones," she whispered, only laughing aloud when he started again. She sidestepped past him, ducked, beckoned him forward and back into the run; he followed her easily.
"It's everything living...."
They ran together--not just them, now, for others in the jungle were joining them. The monkeys overhead were loud, screaming and chittering in turns as they clambered from tree to vine to tree at all the fun happening below, while through the canopy the group could see flashes of brightly-feathered birds. The figure leaping through the thicket to her left could just as easily be a lothcat or a kath hound as one of the people she brought. And for the moment, all of them were running together, not just to go somewhere but for the simple joy of the motion. The only pulled away when the jungle opened up, and Na'an led the group towards the ridge overlooking the ship graveyard.
She paused on that ridge for a moment, to let the group catch up, looking idly over the ancient starfighter nearby. The cockpit had broken open, as had the skull of the skeleton still belted inside; as she watched, a small seabird swooped into the ship with a fish in its mouth. She held the fish over the skull, feeding it to the fledglings nested in its cavity.
"And everything dead," she said softly, as much to herself as to the approaching redhead.
"All of it feeding each other. The living feed the dead, who feed the living in turn. See?"
The redhead nodded, his eyes following the fledgling mouths as they tore into the fish. Na'an just turned and led them on. It was some moment hard to pinpoint, after the second or third mile, maybe, that a shift seemed to happen within the group; each member, without cue and without explanation, synchronized to the rest, one by one. If Na'an focused, she could feel not just their presences, the simple fact of them existing belong her, but their heartbeats. The blood singing in their veins, their muscles straining against the effort, the startle response when they felt her feeling them, the echo of her own laughter in their ears. The impacts of their feet on the earth and their hands against the trees thumped together, the opening drumbeat to a song only at the edges of conscious thought.
At last. At
last.
Na'an whooped, and one of them--she couldn't tell who--whooped in response, and the pack, a truer pack now, only ran faster.
"It's all connected!" she sang.
"Like a river! And if you open yourself up? Swim with the water, rather than fight against it, try to control it?"
And speaking of the water, there it was. Na'an drew up short, skidding on her heels until her toes sat at the edge of a familiar-looking pool. She looked up, squinting against the sun towards the ridge on the far side. At the top of the ridge was the waterfall, spilling out of a dim little cave ridged with big mossy stones. She sucked in a breath, smelling the freshness the mist gave the air. When she spun back to see her pack emerging at the pool, her face was flushed, her good eye bright as molten silver.
"Well. I don't think it'll be that hard to fix you, Daws. Given that you know what needs fixing, first." 
Vidalu Na'an
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Adelle Bastiel
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Sakri
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Eliana Shan
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Kalic Daws
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Darlyn Excron
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Taozi Fuyuan
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Maximar Fugold
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Song
