The cold bit furiously at Ekimo as she walked. The storm had been rising over the last few hours and now the wind was howling and tugging at her cloak while the planet’s too distant sun sank beneath the horizon.
“If this snow gets much worse, l can’t make any promises!” yelled a hunched male human from up ahead.
Ekimo and Padma glanced at one another briefly. They had just spent nearly all their remaining credits to charter a ship off planet, and from the tone of the message she received earlier on their transmitter, they needed to go now if they were to have any hope of finding other jedi. The human leading them owned the ship, and had agreed to take them the same night only because they had offered him a premium in cash. An hour later, they found themselves stumbling after him along a steep, winding path up a cliffside overlooking the small village. At the top, they hoped, there sat a landing pad and an old sky-jumper with just enough life left in it to take them to the Bormea sector a dozen parsecs away.
Above the roar of the wind, the old human called back to them “we get bad storms out here sometimes, call ’em razor storms, cause the moisture in the atmosphere freezes solid and starts blowin’ around so fast it could skin a wookie! We don’t wanna be out if it gets like that!”
Ekimo pulled her hood closer around her face. Her soft white and brown fur shielded her from the worst of the storm, but Ewoks weren’t from a terribly cold planet and she found herself wishing she was a wookie. “Much warmer fur” she muttered quietly to herself.
“How much further to the top?” Padma called out next to her, her voice faint over the howl of the storm.
The old pilot turned, but before he had time to respond Ekimo felt a ripple of concern pass through her. A crackle of atmospheric lightning shook the mountain over their heads with the sound of an ion blast. The man screamed as a huge chunk of rock and ice split from the mountainside above and came plunging toward them.
Instantly Ekimo leapt in a high ark and landed beside him in a crouch, her hands lifted toward the falling boulders. She sensed rather than saw Padma next to her doing the same. Together, they reached upwards with the force until they felt the crushing weight of the rocks plummeting down towards them. Ekimo filled her lungs with the freezing air and then exhaled fully, her mind finding focus.
She remembered her master, Tara Denia, firing training projectiles while Ekimo and Padma attempted to slow their trajectories and stop them in the air. It had been hard for her, more so than for Padma, but that fact always comforted rather than frustrated her. She and Padma balanced one another, and one was always there to protect the other. Padma was a natural when it came to connecting with the force. It came with more difficulty to Ekimo, but she had always far exceeded Padma in her skill with a lightsaber, and her ability to propel herself over and around and beneath obstacles.
The two of them were as complimentary as they were equal, and it had always been like that, since her earliest memories.She had been taken to the jedi temple as an infant after she had been stolen from her home on the forest moon of Endor by galactic poachers selling to the Hutts.Padma had arrived the same day, deposited by her aristocratic parents from Naboo. The after growing together as younglings in the jedi order, the council had made the surprising decision to assign both of them as padawan learners to master Denia. The three of them had been together ever since, until recently of course. Until now.
Now.
Time seemed to have slowed as Ekimo returned to the present moment. The weight of the falling boulders met her and Padma’s combined wills at the same moment. Acting as one, they allowed the full force of boulders to descend-then, rather than resisting, they shifted the path of the crushing stones in one fluid motion so that they seemed to flow away from the three of them as if carried by a river. The whole affair lasted less than five standard seconds, and their guide’s face passed from terror to bewilderment to awe.
“How in the outer rim-” he started.
“There’s no time, we have to get out of here now!” Padma shouted.
They found the ship vibrating in the wind, the force of the storm almost tearing it from its docking mechanism. They boarded with the wind screaming at their heels.
“Strap in, this one is gonna get bumpy!”
After exiting the atmosphere, Ekimo took a moment to breathe. Something had happened back there that she only now had time to think about.
＂Padma-” she began.
＂I felt it too.” Padma replied, a look of concern in her eyes.
There had been a ripple in the force back there on the mountain. It went out from them as they tapped into the force to stop the boulders. It had felt like shouting into an empty cave, the echo traveling further and further. And it worried Ekimo.
“It feels as if we made our presence known to something that it would have been better to remain hidden from” She said softly.
＂We have to be more careful” Padma replied. “I don’t know what that was, but something about it was wrong. For now, let’s try to rest. We both could use it.”
Ekimo shifted in her seat, finding as comfortable position as was possible in the small space.
＂I have a bad feeling about this” she thought to herself, and then drifted uneasily into sleep.