Aberration

PROLOGUE

Junto, Head Master of the Jedi order, sat cross legged on the thin carpet on the thick stone floor of his chambers.

He didn't feel the coarse cloth pressing against his skin, or the solid surface beneath.

His thick belly and broad green shoulders expanding and contracting with his deep breathes went unrecognized.

His mind had expanded past his body,

past the room in which the dimming Coruscant light was making its last attempts at heating the hunched figure out the meditation mat beneath the large window.

Past the high walls of the Jedi Temple the window was sat in.

His consciousness had broadened beyond the temple itself, and the planet that spun beneath, with towers and scrappers so high the crust was kilometer after seemingly endless kilometer deep.

His mind was beyond what even the best cosmologist's scopes could see. Junto, was in and of the force itself.

The thick Twilek didn't concern the force with his desire. Didn't try to express his will to search for what he yearned to find upon it.

He communed only by listening, allowing himself to disappear into it's will.

Junto wouldn't burden the great power with his need to find his former Padawan and friend, though he did have such a need.

Didn't place his desire to find his distant whereabouts at the foot of the alter he had entered inside of, though he did desire as much.

He brought none of the anxiety he felt for the Jedi's wellbeing, though it too was carried by him.

He left his annoyance with the Order of the Shadows, and their archaic doctrines of silence, behind before reaching out and into the great depths of the force,

though they stayed planted upon his shoulders.

The act of those burdens being lifted, if only momentarily, was reward enough for the act of their release. But, he hoped, in a distant inexpressible way, he would be given more.

There was no carpeted floor anymore. No sunlight tinted window. No Twilek.

Suddenly, there was only dark. In some far away place a Jedi Master's body shuttered, but whatever Junto had become now could not even recognize the needs of flesh. He was a cold void.

Looking out with eyes that did not see onto a forest whose trees were densely packed, and were not trees.

A forest of bones, twisted and deformed, reaching into the poisonous sky that poured rain that was not rain. Rain that was thick as syrup and red as a Sith blade.

Rain that smelled of copper, though his olfactory registered no smell.

The blood of the poison sky pooled down and each drop that hit the pool was as load as a hammer in his ears, though his auditory systems did not function.

The taste of acrid air was in his mouth and on his lips, but he could not taste, and had nothing a sentient would call lips. But he could feel. And all he felt, was pain.

So intense was the pain Junto's eyes snapped open. He could see again. Actually see, not the false senses he had just experienced. He could see the last stray light from his window.

And feel the coolness of his body as the sweat evaporated. The force had granted him something. But what? a different place, time, and viewpoint? Just one, or all three? He had no way to tell.

No way of knowing with any certainty. Though he knew this much. Larz, still needs my help.