Li, my brother, was sitting quietly. Tach, who took care of us, was talking and inattentive. He was often talking like this and nobody was listening. I didn’t know what the words meant until I found them again in one of the libraries of the dark monks. This speaks of their power, that they could stay in my mind, uncomprehended, only to reveal themselves at the moment I had enough knowledge to comprehend them. I know now that what Tach did was dangerous. I didn’t know then.
  Then, twenty years ago, the words were many things to me. Lullaby, magic spell, words in which I could find feelings that I didn’t comprehend. But above all they were Tach and all that he was to us. When they first met him, many people thought that Tach was an imbecile, one of the many people driven mad by the loss of their homeworld, maybe one of the last of his kind – and there were many such people when I was a child. It wasn’t a strange thing to have lost a planet, it was as common as losing a toy or a parent. We lost both parents, but we had toys and we had a planet. Not that Li ever saw it, but I did. In fact I am currently sitting on a shuttle taking me from the surface of my own planet back into space, which belongs to nobody but is always being fought over. The interior of the shuttle is turned red and orange by the light given off by the friction heat. People around me look pale and lonely. There is much fear in this little shuttle. Much clutter, too, since the staff didn’t bother securing the refreshments too well. Even though the stabilizers have improved immensely in the last decade or so, it is still difficult to keep away the feeling that one is among many dice in a cup, shaken by an enthusiastic player, as one passes from air into airlessness. Streaks of flame and heat turn to blackness and it takes a while until the pilot decides to turn on the shuttle’s internal lights, so one races from fire into shadow. Everything becomes quiet with an inexplicable suddenness, as if some cosmic giant clapped his hands and so took all noise away. I become very still inside, feel myself flowing out, hoping against hope to fill that immeasurable emptiness that I am going to cross.
  It is in these moments that I feel that which they call the Force strongest. Against the black backdrop of space all hopes, plans and fears become starkly visible. My own plans, my own hopes, my own fears are reduced to a single thread and it takes all my strength to keep following this thread, symbolic of my existence, as it weaves into the tapestry that appears in my mind.
Then something vast drifts past beyond my window. A star destroyer. People say they are large enough to be spotted from the surface of the planet with the naked eye. The lights of the shuttle go on, the people around me sigh collectively and some begin tentative conversations. The tension is broken and so is my vision. The man next to me offers me a globule filled with clear violet liquid. He speaks a few words of his tribe and there is pride and the edge of a sword in his voice. He says that he has left the endless wars his people wage to search for different things, now that his life draws to a close. He speaks of the battles that he has fought – his voice firm and proud – but also that he can no longer see any pride and any glory in the slaying of another man. Having said that, he pauses, looks around quietly and his face shows its age. Scars and wrinkles intersect, he wears a grizzled beard and his eyes are almost hidden in folds of skin. I suspect that his body might not withhold the rigours of daily training that the Mandalorians, to my inexpert knowledge, keep up well into old age and that he feels a sort of shame that he can no longer be assure of victory. But the moment passes and soon his face is animated again and he speaks, almost as if pleasantly drunk by it, of the beauty and fierceness of that planet that we left behind. He seeks to chronicle such places, places that like himself have been proud and glorious once and then turned into “deserts of a music of the tongue and mind”, as he describes it with strange and unexpected poetry.
  “Try the globule,” he urges me as our conversation slacks off again. It gives one peace of mind and strength of memory. I put it in my mouth, not to disappoint the old man, but instead of savouring its effects, I analyze them and try to separate the tastes, original and synthetic, that mingle in my mouth, while the old Mandalorian speaks on about the weakness that is old age. He does so proudly and elegantly, never betraying that it might be his own fear but rather some universal poetry shared by all thinking and acting beings and I drift off into my own thoughts, maybe strengthened by the essence contained within the globule.
  I tend to push my assignment out of my head, overlay it with memories of Li and Tach and my time at the academies that I was sent to as a younger man. At times it almost becomes difficult to remember what exactly it is that I was sent to do. I proved to be apt as a philosopher more than as a fighter – make no mistake, I can fight as well and disciplined as any well-taught Jedi – but it was this aptitude that made my master choose me for the task that I am on. I have been travelling in fulfilment of that task for nearly twenty years now. People tell me that I look younger than I am and I have learned to use it to my advantage, but I think, sometimes, that it comes from moving constantly, in body and in mind.
  I was sent to create a map of the force in the outer parts of the galaxy. I was taught to empty my mind and to let the threads and ebbs of places strong and holy or dark and forgotten fill me until the very inside of me was a mirror of such places.