[Dark Nest] - 1(39)

“Raynar?” she gasped. “Raynar Thul?”





TEN


“Raynar Thul is no more,” Raynar said. He was squatting on his haunches in the heart of the Prime Chamber, high atop a circular dais where he would always be visible to the hundreds of insect attendants that followed wherever he went. His long arms were hanging over his knees with the backs of his hands resting slackly on the ground before him, and his blue eyes were riveted, unblinking, to Luke’s face. “We are UnuThul.”

“How strange, then, that I still sense Raynar Thul’s presence within yours,” Luke said.

He found it difficult to meet Raynar’s gaze, not because of those unblinking eyes or the ghastliness of the face that held them, but because of the conflicting emotions they aroused - elation that Raynar had survived his abduction, regret over what had happened afterward, anger and anguish that so many others had failed to return at all… especially his nephew Anakin. He still woke up nights praying that it had been just a bad dream; that there had been a better way to stop the voxyn and he had never been asked to authorize the mission to Myrkr at all.

But Luke was careful to keep those feelings hidden, buried deep inside where they would not show in the Force and complicate a discussion already sure to be difficult and full of emotion for both sides.

“Raynar Thul may be in hiding,” Luke said carefully. “But he is not gone. I feel that clearly.”

“We are surprised, Master Skywalker, that you cannot feel the difference between a ghost and a man.” The same murky presence that Luke had felt in the Lizil cantina rose within Raynar’s body, not forcing Luke out, but preventing him from feeling anything else. “Raynar Thul vanished with the Crash.”

“And then UnuThul was born?”

“The Kind are not born, Master Skywalker,” Raynar said. “An egg drops, a chrysalis is spun.”

“You mean there was a metamorphosis?” Leia asked. Along with Mara and Saba, she was sitting cross-legged with Luke on the dais floor. Han, of course, could not be talked into sitting. He was pacing the edge of the dais, keeping a wary eye on the attendants below and grumbling about the heat and mugginess and too-sweet smell of the nest. “Is that the story on the walls?”

Leia gestured at the colorful mosaics that decorated the interior of the Prime Chamber, and Raynar’s eyes flashed in delight, a pair of blue embers flaring back to life in that melted wreck of a face.

“You are as observant as we recall, Princess,” he said. “Others are not usually observant enough to perceive the Chronicle.”

“The Chronicle?” Luke asked.

Raynar pointed over Luke’s shoulder, where a red streak arced down the domed ceiling to a white smear opposite the main entrance to the chamber.

“A star wagon fell from the sky,” Raynar said.

As Luke twisted around to look, he glimpsed the blocky hull of an overturned YV-888 light freighter protruding above the rim of a still-smoking crater. But as soon as his gaze fell directly on it, the image dissolved into the same blur of semi-random color that had been there before.

“I don’t see anything,” Han complained.

“Only a wall of rockz,” added Saba, whose Barabel eyes were incapable of seeing nearly half the colors in the design.

“You can’t look directly at it,” Mara explained. “It’s like one of those air-jellies on Bespin. It only shows up when you look away.”

“Oh, yeah,” Han said.

Saba hissed in frustration.

Luke let his gaze slide to the next image and glimpsed Raynar kneeling over a wounded insect, his palms pressed to its cracked thorax.

“No, Master Skywalker. Over there.” Raynar pointed to a pinkish blotch on the adjacent wall, eliciting a loud rustle as all the insects in the chamber turned to look in the direction he was pointing. “The Kind do not order such things in the same way you Others do.”

When Luke turned his head, he saw a scorched figure lying in the bottom of the crash crater, surrounded by waiting insects.

“Beside the star wagon Yoggoy found Raynar Thul, a scorched and dying thing,” Raynar continued. “We climbed down to wait for the Last Note so we could share his flesh among our larvae.”

Raynar pointed across the room again, to another mosaic depicting the insects carrying him toward a small enclave of spires similar to those in the city outside.

“But he touched us inside, and we were filled with the need to care for his body.”

The next image showed Raynar’s burned body in the bottom of a large six-sided basin, curled into a fetal position and tended by two human-sized insects.

“We built a special cell, and we fed him and cleaned him like our own larvae.”