The Revenant Saga - Chapter 3 - The Ring

The Ebon Hawk sped through hyperspace silently as most of Raven's companions sat away from him, uncertain as to how to react to the carnage they had all just witnessed during their 'escape' from the Academy on Korriban. Not that there had been any urgency to it, or any real need to call it an escape. With a quiet shudder, Juhani pondered to herself how it could be considered an escape when there was no one left alive to be escaping from in the first place. She wandered into the crew area, still trying to summon up the courage she needed to speak to Raven. She found him at his workbench, carefully and delicately adjusting the crystals from his custom double-saber, adding the one he had retrieved from the corpse of Shaeela Nur to his already impressive array. 'Raven,' she spoke tentatively. 'Once you asked me to intervene should I ever see you falling towards the dark side.' Seeing his querulous look, she spoke faster. 'I cannot help but think I should have spoken sooner. Your actions in the Academy, they frightened me. They frightened all of us.' She paused a moment, trying to calm her mind and remove the image of two terrified eyes emoting the anguish of having their arms and legs ripped off by the sheer force of Raven's will. 'Please, Raven, talk to me. I know of your loss and how it burns at you. But do you not wish to prove the Masters wrong? Did you not say you wanted to prove that love was not a danger to you, and not a path to the dark side?' Raven stood perfectly still for several tense seconds, then with painstaking care and deliberation put his tools down beside the unfinished lightsaber with shaking hands.

'Juhani, what I am about to tell you cannot be repeated to anyone.' He waited until she nodded her assent before proceeding. 'Bastila is falling. I can feel it through the lifebond as sure as my own heartbeat. I've been trying to help her by leeching away the dark side energies from her and channeling them through myself. I can't do it anymore... Korriban nearly cost us everything.' He relaxed as he saw understanding beginning to dawn on his dearest friend's face. 'That means she is going to fall, and I'm going to have to try and bring her back. That's why we're going to Dantooine. I have to let her go and I have to re-center myself. I'm going back to the crystal cave where we fell in love, and there I'm going to gather crystals and make her a betrothal ring. If I can bring her back, I will be with her for the rest of my life. I just hope that the council will understand and let us continue to help the Order and the Republic. A choice between Bastila and the council is no choice at all.' Quietly, he picked his tools back up, set the last crystal in place and snapped his double-saber to life, its green blades humming quietly in the silence of the ship.

The smell of death lingered heavily on the Dantooine winds as the companions picked through the wreckage of the former Jedi Enclave. 'Carth, you and the others are on burial detail. The only thing we can even do now is gather the remains of the settlers and refugees for a decent burning. Juhani is coming with me to scout the surrounding plains and try to gather survivors where we can.' Carth wordlessly nodded his assent, and began barking orders to the others. Raven turned and nodded to Juhani, and they sped toward the cave in companionable silence. He was relieved to discover that the cave had been partially blocked over by rubble during the bombardment and had therefore gone apparently undetected during the Sith attack. With the aid of the Force it was no time at all before the opening was clear again. The two friends looked at each other awkwardly for a moment before Juhani spoke.

'I should wait out here for you,' she nearly whispered. 'There's nothing inside you cannot handle, so my only use is to guard the entrance.' He smiled his quiet thanks and stepped into the darkness of the cave.

Carefully he walked past the remnants of the guard-nest of the kinrath and into the main crystal cavern. He sat down gently, placing in a delicate pattern before him pieces of precious metal that he and Bastila had retrieved together from the Krayt Dragon's lair as they searched for her father's holocron in the blowing sands of Tatooine. He began his meditation by focusing on the details of her face. The spark and fire in her beautiful blue eyes on Taris when her first saw her; the tears on her cheek as he let her cry out her years of frustration and the death of her beloved father after Tatooine. He visualized the way her hair rippled in the breezes on Kashyyyk and how the dim light from the phosphorescent fungus reflected in the deep blue of her eyes as they stood at that Star Map together. Mournfully, he realized he knew now why the look on her face had been so anguished there. Pushing the distracting thought away, he mentally drew the rest of her, including her beautiful curves, restructured in his mind entirely from scenes from their first (and to date only) night as lovers. Slowly then he drew down and focused on her left hand, building its every detail to crystalline clarity in his mind. Once he knew he had the visualization perfect, he began slowly to build the ring around the third finger, the wedding finger. He began this part with the metals from the cave, forming a band of delicate woven platinum strands. As Raven visualized this, the Force flowed through him, and the metal pieces rose up from the ground and began to reshape into the image as he saw it. Next, the outside crystals, blue for her eyes. As he visualized the cut of the stones, two small blue crystals, perfectly formed but too small yet for lightsabers floated up from one of the crystal formations, shaping themselves into a delicate cut made for ladies' jewelry and set themselves into the formative ring. Then came the interior pair, violet for his lightsaber as it had been, made with the crystal also taken from the Dragon's lair. Again, the dance of crystal repeated itself in the air before him. Then lastly, the center stone showed itself in his mind's eye. Green, the color symbolic of his quest for her redemption, and cut in the shape of a single gleaming teardrop. He focused his will, taking the Force energies swirling about him and with them creating a thread of brilliant white Force energy. With that thread he bound the crystals into a single living matrix of the Force. Then with a second mental tug he connected the matrix from the ring to the lifebond between Bastila and himself. At this, the completion of his meditation, he dropped to the ground exhausted in mind and body and slept there for many hours. At that same moment, far away in the darkness, Bastila cried herself to sleep and prepared to tell Malak what he wanted to hear in the morning. She only hoped against hope her beloved Raven could find her in time to save them both.

When Raven awoke, he reflexively reached for where the ring should have been on the ground before him. Fumbling in the dim lighting of the cave, his hand struck not one but two objects there. Disbelievingly, he first looked at the one he knew, the one he'd made for her. Thin, neatly braided wires with two stones on each side of the center teardrop, mounted among stylized platinum antlers. He then looked to the second one. It was a mirror of the first almost, a solid band with the crystals all inset. Green for his eyes were the outside pair, then yellow for her lightsaber, and the center a larger blue stone. He knew just by looking at it that the ring would be a perfect fit for his own wedding finger. Turning the paired rings slowly in his hands, he noted that the stones still shone with their inner light, and that both rings' light pulsed in time with his heartbeat. Hope and pride swelled inside him as he realized that Bastila must still be fighting even as she fell, for the only way the second ring could exist was if she had made it for him--channeling her will through the lifebond. A grim, determined smile found its way onto his lips as he spoke defiantly into the shadows of the cave, his words punctuated with the drumbeats of his racing heart.

'Bastila-ashke, I'm coming for you.

And as for you Malak... there's nothing left you can do to stop me.'