Chapter 8
Two lone figures stood across from each other with sticks drawn they prepared to fight. One was a large furry humanoid; the other was a squat, compact man. With a smooth motion the short man struck, aiming a long sweeping cut at the other’s head he lunged forward. Sensing the deception the bigger one move with lightening speed bringing his stick down perpendicular to his legs to block the short one’s real cut. As the sticks touch the big one spun away from the cut bringing his stick up for an overhead cut. The short man however moved had already moved in towards the larger one after his first cut and dodge the attack completely. Taking the momentary advantage the short dropped to one knee and swept his legs through the larger ones cracking his ankles together, with a groan the big one hit the ground. As he hit the ground he began rolling away from his opponent until he came to rest against a tree, to his surprise his attacker hadn’t made a move. Instead he had just slowly stood up and dusted himself off. Raising his stick to the en guard position he signaled he was ready. As he stood up the large one switch the grip on his stick, putting his left hand mid-hilt and riding the pommel with his right. With his stick now pointing down and to the left he moved it in a triangular form, the short man nodded at his opponent. He knew that using this form the big one could perform quick parries and then come back with short slashes to the midsection of his opponent. In response to his opponents switch in form he switched his form. He knuckled on his stick and held it out to his side parallel to his body. At first glance his stance seemed to leave him open to attack and the large one took the chance he struck at his opponent’s open side and was rewarded when he saw his stick rebound off of his opponents ribs, but was disappointment when his opponent moved faster and had already brought his stick around in a cut that would have opened him up from stern to waist long before his stick would have struck home.
My training sessions with Aren had become my nightmares. When I was awake he beat me repeatedly and I could not even escape the beatings in my sleep. It had been two months since Aren asked me that fateful question about lightsabers. We were practicing with sticks until Aren thought I was going to be good enough to use a real lightsaber. I remember Dieago telling me that Master Aren had fought three Jedi Masters to a standstill. When he first told me that I wasn’t sure whether I should be impressed or not but now I began to understand the depths of Aren’s skill. “You fight with your whole body, the lightsaber is just an extension of your arm. Just because you have it doesn’t mean you should neglect to use your feet, knees, or even your teeth.” I learned to use my whole body and eventually my mind. With the force I was able to sense Aren’s position his stance and I could see his thought process. He focused me into a box and coming off the box were tendrils for each move I might make and the counter he would use to get me back into his box. Slowly he would shrink that box until I had no move to escape the box and then he would have me. Most of our training sessions began with me in a large box with hundreds of tendrils and slowly the box would shrink and the tendrils would become fewer and fewer. No matter how hard I tried, no matter what move I would make he already had it catalogued and was prepared with a counter for it. His knowledge of stances and techniques was so vast I thought I would never absorb it all, and would always fail.
One day Aren explained my style of fighting, “I examine your thoughts,” he said “And I wait for you to focus them like the point of a knife. “ In that instant I know you are preparing to strike before you have even decided to strike, I am moving before you even move. You must learn to hide your thoughts better or you will allow your opponent to know your every move and intention.” So when I was not practicing with my “sword” I was meditating and focusing on holding my thoughts close to me. I imagined myself as a black hole and sought to pull all of the stray thoughts in my head within me. During practice one day Aren commented on my focus, “Your doing very well, when I try to read your thoughts and emotions I must dig deep into your consciousness, you no longer radiate stray emotions. Now that you have learned to hold your thoughts close you must learn to have no thoughts no emotions in a fight. You must seek to be perfectly still and at peace. Your mind must be blank and your body must move on instinct and trust. Your body will deceive you; you may think you recognize your opponents attack until to late when he was really feinting and you end up dead. You must trust the force, it will tell you true. Tonight we will test your faith in the force until meditate on what I have told you.”
That night Aren took me to a cave. The cave was completely dark but Aren had brought a few glowrods with him. About 10 meters into the cave we came to large circular cavern, about 15 meters across and 8 high. “This is where we will train.” With that Aren turned off the glowrod plunging us into absolute darkness. I heard the scuffling off feet and before I could react I felt a sharp crack against my back. “You weren’t using the force were you? You should be expecting an attack at all times, but that lesson is for another day. Tonight’s lesson is trusting the force, open your self up to the force and use it to defend yourself.” My first instinct was to use my natural senses I thought I could smell Aren and if I listened I could figure out his approach. I heard a rock hit to my left and as I turned to swing felt Aren slap the back of my legs. “You still trust your body, all I had to do was distract one of your senses and you turned away from the true attack. Do it right, or by the end of the night you will be too sore to walk out of here.” I decided he was right and began to open myself to the force. With it I could feel the lichen clinging to walls around and by channeling it through me I could feel the rock beneath my feet. Suddenly I could see the cavern, nit with my eyes but I could feel it. I knew every dip in the floor; I knew how many paces would bring me to any wall. I knew that we were not alone in the cavern there were small animals in the ceiling and insects all over the ground. I could have ran around the cavern and never slipped on the small wet spot to the right of me caused by water leaking through the ceiling, I would never run into a wall and I certainly would not leave until my job was done. With the cavern catalogued I began to send the force out of myself in waves searching for my Master. The waves centered on a figure to the left and slightly behind me, he was about four steps away. I could sense his position and his intent; again I got the impress he was boxing me in. However instead of being at his mercy I could now “see” him and defend myself. He came at me again, with out so much as a whisper of movement, if I hadn’t been using the force his attack would have struck home, instead his stick rebounded off of mine. “Good you’re finally learning to let go and trust the force. Now evade me for one standard hour and we will go home if not we will start the hour over.”
Pride is the downfall of all Jedi or at least that’s what I think it would be. That night I fell into a disturbing routine, after I evaded four or five of Aren’s attack I would get cocky and my force sense would waver and I would lose track of Aren and he would land a blow, which not only hurt but wounded my pride. With that sense of shame I was able to let myself go again and trust the force. So after three hours I was finally able to evade Master Aren for one straight hour. “Good you not only learned to trust the force, but you learned something else. Trusting the force is absolute, if you become secure in your own strength and forget the force you’re vulnerable. So go rest now and we will start again in the morning. So that’s how it went for a month, learning stances and techniques in the morning and learning to trust the force at night. By the end of the month I was able to evade Aren all night with out so mush as the wind from his stick touching me. Though my defense was great I was still never able to strike Master Aren and I knew that eventually I would have to attack my opponent, but I was not sure if I would ever be able to.
“Now you have learned to hold your emotions and thoughts and trust the force, your last lesson will be stillness of mind. Picture the force as a river in your mind, and then place all your thoughts and cares into that river until nothing is left but the river and the emptiness of your mind. In that state strike me.” I pictured a river in my mine and tried t put all my thoughts and emotions and cares into it, but I couldn’t. There was always a stray thought of “Am I doing this right?” When that thought flashed across the emptiness of mind it shattered and I ended up on the ground with a bruise on my body. “You forgot your other lessons already; you’re just picturing a river. The river is the Force remember your earlier lesson of letting go, this is just an extension of that. You must place all your thoughts and emotions in the Force and trust it. The Force will hold your emotions and allow you the stillness of mind.” Standing across from Master Aren, with my stick held in high grip blade pointed at the sky, I began to picture the Force as a river in my mind. I then placed all of my thoughts and emotions in the river, in the Force. My mind was empty all there was, was the Force. The Force flowed through me and all around me like a river, but I stood in the center a rock of stillness, receiving the Force. I did nothing to the Force I just allowed it to wash through me and carry away my stray thoughts. Then without even realizing what I was doing I struck with no thought no compunction my body moved. When Aren deflected my blade my body followed on its own, it was like I was outside of myself watching. From this vantage point I could recognize the stance and style that Master Aren was using and I could counter it. I just told the Force what my body should do and it did it. My body moved faster that the speed of my thoughts because I was sensing the moves Aren was about to make and I was already planning a counter. I had him in a box surrounded by tendrils; slowly I was boxing him in. Until I had him the box had shrunk and there were no more tendrils and suddenly Aren made a move I had never seen before. He feinted towards me and moved with a surprising speed in a spin away leaving his stick suspended in front of me to block my advance. Then he did the most surprising thing, he clapped. “Very good, for the first time in my life I felt pressed to the limit. And without any normal recourse I had to resort to a forbidden form. I have taught you every thing I know, all six stages of lightsaber combat, how to trust the force, how to reach a stillness of mind, how to use the force to enhance your speed and strength and reflexes, how to shunt pain and weariness, and how to heal yourself. The only thing left for you to do now is to build your own lightsabers.
Among the many different styles I had learned, Aren taught me how to use more than one lightsaber at a time and even how to use a longer thinner blade. So for my lightsabers I was going to build a dual phase saber, with a standard 133 centimeter blade that would elongate into 300 meters. I was also going to build a smaller lightsaber with a blade length of about 60 centimeters. Aren provided me with the parts I would need, the Jedi Council had given him spare parts to create lightsabers for his students. All I would need were the gems. For the small lightsaber I selected a druindfire gem, I used a small sized handle, according to Aren it was a style for women. When I held it into my hand the topped barely peeked out of my fist. I cut out a circular hole in the activation switch and fitted in one of the button eyes of the bantha. When I had it all fitted together I set it aside and began working on my other lightsaber. I chose the longer handle usually used for a double blade, but I closed off one of the ends and filled it with a liquid form of transparisteel that quickly hardened giving the base of my lightsaber a weight of a kilogram or two. Then I placed a corsuca gem that Aren gave to me out of his personal collection and two diamonds in the handle. The corsuca gem would power the main blade and with a flick of my wrist the two diamonds would slide into place causing the blade to elongate. I also cut a hole in the activation button and placed the other bantha eye in it. When I was done I set both lightsabers down in front of me. All they needed was to be charged for the first time. I plugged them into the charging unit and bathed them in the glow of the Force. As the energy flowed into them the Force flowed through tem as well, growing the parts of my weapons together as if they had been one all along. I could feel changes occurring within my lightsabers allowing them absorb more energy than the cell should have held and as the changes occurred within my lightsabers they occurred within in me. No longer was a jumble of disparate parts, a former test subject, a hunter, a wookie, a being with no honor, now I was a Jedi. The force had bonded all the past aspects of my life into one, I was one whole being. I meditated on this while my lightsabers charged and when they were done I was done. I stood and stared at my Master, “I am complete”
“You are. You are now a Jedi Knight may the Force be with you.”
“Thank you Master.” I bowed to him and asked, “When will the shuttle come to pick me up.”
“It’s already waiting.”
“Before I go there is one thing I must know, in our last duel you said you used a forbidden technique. What was it?”
“That my friend was Vapaak, the seventh level of lightsaber combat, created by a Master during the Clone Wars, Mace Windu was his name. Maybe someday I will teach it to you. Before you go may I ask you one last question? Why did you place the eyes of that bantha in your lightsabers?’
“To remind me of who I am and what I carry. I have named my lightsabers, the large one that will at time become unwieldy and unable to control is Father. The smaller one that is my constant companion is Brother. These names also represent a part of my past that I will not forgot. Thank you again” With a nod I left his hut and walked to the landing pad, there a shuttle waited for me. As I approached I saw Master Kith descend.
“Welcome Jedi Knight, are you ready to begin your new life.”
* * * * *
That was a month ago and now I sit on the plane of Ithor waiting for my first mission. I have a meeting with Master Kith in a few minutes. He said I shouldn’t be late, because I would be working with a familiar friend.
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