Profile: Unicron

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All right. This is just the space that I’m going to use to type out a story that I’m currently reading for the hell of it. Here’s what I’m going to type.



Part 1

Murkhana, Final Hours of The Clone Wars
Dropping into swirling clouds conjured by Murkhana’s weather stations, Roan Shryne was reminded of the former meditations that his master had guided him through. No matter how fixed Shryne had been on touching the Force, his mind’s eye offered little more than a eddying whiteness. Years later, when he had become more adept at silencing thought and immersing himself in the light, visual fragments would emerge from that colorless void - pieces to a puzzle that would gradually assemble themselves and resolve. Not in any conscious way, though frequently assuring him that his actions in the world were in accord with the will of the Force.

Frequently but not always.

When he veered from the course on which the Force had set him, the familiar white would once again be stirred by powerful currents; sometimes shot through with red, as if he were lifting his closed eyes to the glare of a midday sun.

Red-mottled white was what he saw as he fell deeper into Murkhana’s atmosphere. Scored to reverberating thunder; the rush of the wind; a welter of muffled voices...

He was standing closest to the sliding door that normally sealed the troop bay of a Republic gunship, launched moments earlier from the forward hold of the Gallant - a Victory-class Star Destroyer, harried by vulture and droid tri-fighters and awaiting High Command’s word to commerce its own descent into Murkhana’s artificial ceiling. Beside and behind Shryne stood a platoon of clone troopers, helmets fitting snugly over their heads, blasters cradled in their arms, utility belts slung with ammo magazines, talking among themselves the way seasoned warriors often did before battle. Alleviating misgivings with inside jokes; references Shryne couldn’t begin to understand, beyond the fact that they were grim.

The gunship’s internal compensators allowed them to stand in the bay without being jolted by flaring anti-aircraft explosions of jostled by the gunship pilots' evasive maneuvering through corkscrewing missles and storms of white-hot shrapnel. Missles, because the same Separatists who had manufactured the clouds had misted Murkhana’s with anti-laser aerosols.

Acrid odors infiltrated the cramped space, along with the roar of the aft engines, the starboard one stuttering somewhat, the gunship as battered as the troopers and crew it carried into conflict.

Even at an altitude of only four hundred meters above sea level the cloud cover remained dense. The fact that Shryne could barely see his hand in front of his face didn’t surprise him. This was still the war, after all, and he had grown accustomed these past three years to not seeing where he was going.

Nat-Sem,his former master, used to tell him that the goal of the meditative exercises was to see clear through the swirling whiteness to the other side; that what Shryne saw was the only shadowy expanse separating him from full contact with the Force. Shryne had to learn to ignore the clouds, as it were. When he had learned to do that, to look through them to the radiant expanse beyond, he would be a Master.

Pessimistic by nature, Shryne’s reaction had been: Not in this lifetime.

Though he had never said as much to Nat-Sem, the Jedi Master had seen through him as easily as he saw through the clouds.

Shryne felt that the clone troopers had a better view of the war than he had, and that the view had little to do with their helmet imaging systems, the filters that muted the sharp scent of the air, the earphones that dampened the sounds of explosions. Grown for warfare, they probably thought the Jedi were mad to go into battle as they did, attired in tunics and hooded robes, a lightsaber their only weapon. Many of them were astute enough to see comparisons between the Force and their own white plastoid shells; but few of them could discern between armored and unarmored Jedi - those who were allied with the Force, and those who for one reason or another had slipped from its sustaining embrace.