The jungle didn’t have mornings; it had awakenings.

  Light didn’t arrive so much as emerge — seeping through layers of mist and leaves until everything glowed from within. The temple walls drank it up like old stone remembering warmth. Birds screamed. Insects buzzed. Someone below was already shouting at someone else to “feel, don’t think!”

  That was Streen, the one other students half-jokingly called the air-sage. His voice carried through the halls like wind through a canyon. Then he would diminish and look almost apologetic. This wasn’t an institute of learning. It was a weird, noisy, chaotic, but still a family.

  ? ? ?

  The first time I joined them in the training yards, I expected discipline — neat rows, synchronized movements, the kind of regimented structure the Empire prized in its academies. Instead, the space felt like a storm of mismatched ideas. One group balanced on tall wooden poles, swaying like precarious reeds in the wind. Another group darted between cloth banners while a training droid swooped overhead, shrieking happily as it peppered them with stinging pellets. A third group sat in meditation circles, desperately trying to ignore the chaos around them; judging by their twisted expressions, they were losing.

  The air itself felt alive, vibrating faintly, as if absorbing the students' scattered intentions and feeding them back in ripples. Luke walked among them like someone tuning multiple instruments at once — steady, calm, listening. He didn’t bark commands or correct postures. Instead, he adjusted a student’s elbow with a feather-light touch, or murmured a reminder that made someone’s shoulders relax. The entire yard shifted around him instinctively, its rhythm bending to match his.

  “Remember,” Luke called, “the Force isn’t a tool. It’s a tide. You don’t push it — you learn how not to drown.”

  His voice didn’t rise above the noise, and yet I heard it as clearly as if he were standing beside me.

  Kam gestured for me to join a small circle on the far side of the yard. Older students sat cross-legged around a scatter of smooth river stones. Some stones hovered gently. Others trembled. A few were as still as the carved pillars behind us.

  Someone made room for me. I sat. The ground was warm beneath my legs, sun-soaked and slightly tacky with dust.

  I looked over at the boy — man, actually — who shuffled over to let me sit. Not human, though humanoid. Taller than me yet not by much, broad-shouldered, dark-skinned, with ridges of overlapping scales on otherwise hairless head and a slightly insecure expression that looked permanently stitched onto his face — leaned over. “Don’t stare at it too hard,” he whispered. “Stones don’t like being stared at.”

  I blinked at him. “What do they like?”

  He nodded sagely. “Stories. Or snacks. Depends on whether the stone has legs.” Then he winked. “I’m Dorsk. Eighty-one.”

  I huffed a laugh — then turned back to the stone in front of me. No legs. I closed my eyes.

  The Force was there. I could feel it, the way you feel sunlight through closed eyelids — not touching you directly, but implying itself. A warmth. A vibration. A movement that didn’t begin or end, just… existed.

  Kam had tried to explain it on the shuttle: Don’t look for the Force outside yourself. Look for the place where inside and outside stop mattering.

  I tried.

  I breathed.

  And slowly—very slowly—I reached.

  It felt like dipping my hand into a flowing stream. Cool at first, then warm. Smooth. Slipping around my fingers. I tried to cup it, redirect it, force it to move toward the stone. But the moment my intent sharpened, the current shied away, sliding past me like a startled fish.

  I frowned. Focused harder. Tried to grab the flow.

  The Force twitched at the edge of my awareness — a shiver, a brief quiver like a taught string plucked too forcefully. The stone in front of me jumped. Just a millimeter, but unmistakably.

  I gasped.

  Dorsk clapped under his breath. “See? It noticed you.”

  Excitement spiked through me. I reached again, pushing with more intent, more direction, more command—

  A gentle hand landed on my shoulder.

  The stream vanished. Not gone — just out of reach, as if it had chosen not to come any closer.

  Luke knelt beside me, his presence calm as shade under a great tree. “You’re trying to wrestle,” he said softly.

  I opened my mouth to protest, but he shook his head.

  “You’re thinking like someone trying to redirect a river with your bare hands. Forcing it. Ordering it.” He touched the stone with one finger; it didn’t move, yet something in the air responded. “The Force isn’t a creature you subdue. It isn’t a servant. If you try to command it, it will slip away.”

  I swallowed, still feeling the echo of that trembling connection.

  “So what do I do instead?” I whispered.

  Luke smiled — small, patient. “You invite it. You guide. Suggest. Offer your intention like an open palm. The Force chooses the path. We simply walk with it.”

  His hand squeezed my shoulder once, reassuring, and then he stood.

  The stone lay quiet before me, but the stream was still there, waiting.

  And this time, I tried not to grab it — only to touch, lightly, as though offering my story to a river that might choose to listen.

  ? ? ?

  I let my breath settle. In. Out. Slow enough that the noise of the training yard softened into something distant, like wind moving through branches. The chatter, the laughter, the thud of boots on packed earth—they all faded into a single, low hum.

  The Force wasn’t gone; it was simply waiting for me to stop reaching as though it owed me something.

  So I tried again. Not grabbing. Not pulling. Not pushing.

  I imagined lowering my hand toward the river the way Luke described—open, palm-up, fingers relaxed. Inviting.

  A faint warmth pressed against my awareness. Curious. Hesitant. Like an animal sniffing the edge of my thoughts to decide whether I was safe to approach.

  My heartbeat stuttered, but I didn’t tighten my focus this time. I let the sensation wash around me, through me, carrying tiny eddies of impressions—cool stone, bright sun, the playful scrape of dust… and underneath it, a rhythm. Slow, steady, ancient.

  The Force felt like a long exhale from the world itself.

  And this time, instead of trying to bend that breath, I whispered to it—without words, just intention.

  Here. If you want. With me.

  Something shifted.

  The warmth brushed against me, then slipped past my awareness, gentle as silk drifting over skin. The sensation glided toward the stone at my feet. No hard shove. No burst of power. Just… agreement. For the briefest moment, the current and I flowed in the same direction.

  The stone rose.

  Only by the width of a fingernail. But it lifted, weightless, as though being held by a breeze too delicate to ruffle hair.

  Dorsk sucked in a victorious gasp. Someone else nearby murmured, “Did you see—?”

  And then the moment broke.

  The stone clicked softly back to the ground, settling into dust as if embarrassed by its own audacity.

  I exhaled shakily. My palms were damp. My heart felt too large and too light at the same time. “I—did that actually—”

  “It did,” Luke said from behind me.

  I hadn’t heard him come back. But he wasn’t watching the stone; he was watching me, expression warm with pride that wasn’t loud or showy. Pride like a candle flame—steady, contained, meant to guide.

  “That,” he said, “was you listening. Not demanding.”

  My throat tightened. I didn’t trust my voice enough to answer.

  Dorsk nudged me with his shoulder. “First try? That’s pretty good. Took me three days, and that was with Luke breathing down my neck like a worried mother hen.”

  I laughed—actually laughed—and some knot inside me loosened.

  Luke rose to his feet. “That’s enough for now,” he said gently. “It’s tempting to chase the feeling right away. But the Force isn’t something you grasp all at once. Let it settle. Let it echo.”

  Stolen novel; please report.

  I nodded, still staring at the tiny stone as though it were some holy relic. It didn’t look different. It hadn’t changed shape or color. And yet I felt as if it had opened a door I didn’t know existed.

  A door I’d spent my whole life pressing my ear against.

  Luke stepped away to correct a student wobbling on a balancing pole, leaving me with the soft thrill fluttering in my chest. For the first time since leaving Theta-9, the overwhelming strangeness of this place eased into something gentler.

  Possibility.

  And the faint, steady sense that somewhere in the endless current of the Force, something had finally noticed me back.

  ? ? ?

  That evening we ate in the common hall — long tables, metal trays, smells of stew and wet robes. Tionne played a small stringed instrument near the far wall, its notes flickering like candlelight. Everyone talked at once, swapping stories of failed meditations and near-misses with training droids. I sat near the middle, half-listening.

  A tall woman with braids down her back — Kirana Ti, I remembered— was arguing good-naturedly with Kam about lightsaber forms. Across from me, a young man with pale hair, one of Streen’s pupils, described feeling the Force as air pressure, as though the world breathed through him. Another said it was light, darting in and out of her vision. Someone else said it was heat, like standing near a campfire you couldn’t see.

  When they turned to me, I hesitated.

  “I… hear it,” I said finally. “Sometimes it’s humming. Sometimes it’s whispering. Lately, it’s like the sound you get when a shell touches your ear.”

  They looked at me curiously.

  “That’s not sound,” Kam said gently. “That’s the sea you’re hearing.”

  “I know,” I said. “But maybe the Force has oceans too.”

  They laughed softly, not unkindly. I liked that sound — shared wonder, not mockery.

  ? ? ?

  Tionne began tutoring me privately. She believed every student should learn how to express what they felt through art or story. “The Force isn’t language,” she said, plucking her instrument, “but it speaks through whatever words you can give it.”

  She told me of the Massassi, the red-skinned builders of the temple; of the Exar Kun who had ruled them, and the echoes his darkness left behind. “Some scars don’t fade,” she said, her voice saddening. “The important thing is learning which are yours and which belong to history.”

  I asked her how she felt the Force.

  She smiled, eyes half-closed. “It’s music, but not notes. It’s the silence between notes — the space where meaning hides. Some people hear it as rhythm. You, perhaps, hear harmony. Others might feel it as movement or smell it as rain.”

  I thought about that for a long time. Maybe the Force wasn’t one thing but all things, wearing different faces so everyone could find it.

  That night, I wrote in my datapad:

  “The Force can sing, breathe, taste, remember. It can shine, crawl, or wait. It is the echo of life talking to itself.”

  ? ? ?

  A week into my stay, the Praxeum began to feel less like a labyrinth and more like a living organism. The Great Temple breathed—warm in places, cold in others, its long corridors exhaling dust and silence in slow pulses. By evening meditation, I had started to sense the rhythms of the place: a faint hum in the stones, the distant breaths of students concentrating, the jungle whispering through cracks high above the training chamber.

  Luke dimmed the lights with a gesture. “Listen inward,” he said, voice soft as worn cotton. “Let your senses unspool. Don’t hold. Let them drift.”

  I did as he taught. For a few minutes, there was only the circle of our breathing. Warmth behind my ribs. The faint halo of life that threaded all living things nearby. Like floating on my back in calm water.

  Then the calm shifted.

  Something vibrated beneath us—faint at first, like a plucked string somewhere deep under the floor. The sensation rippled through my spine, coiling upward in slow, deliberate movement. The temperature dropped in a breath. The air grew heavy, pressing against my eardrums until they popped softly.

  I inhaled sharply.

  The warmth of the room pulled away from me, as though retreating. In its place crawled something colder than stone. Not alive, not dead—just present, like an old memory that had never finished fading.

  Images flickered at the edge of my awareness. Shapes that weren’t quite people. Thousands of them, working, chanting, bleeding into the foundation stones. The smell of wet dust mingled with something burnt—old metal left out in the storm for centuries. The scent of war long after the warriors were gone.

  And deeper still, there was a pulse.

  Slow. Heavy. Patient.

  A heartbeat too large to belong to a single being.

  More like the heartbeat of the planet itself—or something that had once possessed a body but no longer bothered with such limits.

  The vibration grew sharper, almost a whisper brushing the back of my skull.

  Not words. More like intent—like longing.

  Like a hand reaching blindly through darkness in search of something warm.

  Wanting.

  My eyes snapped open.

  The meditation chamber remained still. Students sat unmoving, peaceful, unaware. Luke’s gaze was lowered, serene. Only one person wasn’t still.

  Tionne’s fingers hovered above the strings of her instrument, exactly at the point where the last note had been meant to fall. Her silver eyes were fixed on me, wide, alert.

  She knew.

  She understood something had touched me.

  Later—after Luke dismissed us, after the others drifted into the hall with quiet chatter—Tionne approached me in the corridor. Her steps were soft, but her presence carried weight, as though she had grown heavier with what she intended to say.

  “You felt it,” she said, voice barely above a breath.

  I nodded slowly. “It was like… a voice. But without speech. Just—wanting something. Or waiting.”

  Tionne looked toward the dark mouth of the stairwell that led downward, deeper into the temple’s belly. Her expression tightened—not fear, exactly, but recognition. A scholar remembering a grim footnote she’d hoped to forget.

  “The temple remembers pain,” she said. “It was built by hands that bled, ruled by powers that corrupted and consumed. Echoes cling to places like this. They linger.”

  “What was it?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Old sorrow. Old ambition. Old hunger. You won’t get words from it. Only feelings—shadows of what once lived here.”

  I swallowed. The cold sensation still clung faintly to my skin.

  “If it… calls again?” I asked.

  Tionne’s gaze hardened, gentle but unyielding. “Don’t answer. Not even a little. Some echoes are not meant to be followed. Let the dead keep their memories.”

  Her words lingered long after she walked away.

  But the vibration lingered too—deep beneath the stone, patient, like a heartbeat waiting for someone to listen again.

  ? ? ?

  Luke found me later that evening on one of the upper walkways overlooking the jungle. The light was fading—Yavin IV’s sun dipping behind endless treetops, leaving the sky streaked in bruised violet and molten gold. I leaned against the stone railing, massaging the place on my arms where that strange cold had seeped in.

  He approached with footsteps so soft I didn’t hear them until he was beside me.

  “You left meditation early,” he said. Not accusing. Not even questioning. Just observing.

  I nodded. “Something… pressed against me. Like a memory that wasn’t mine.”

  Luke exhaled quietly, folding his arms on the railing. “Tionne told me.”

  As if summoned by her own name, she appeared at the top of the stairwell, silver hair catching the last of the light. She walked over, expression soft but taut with concern. “Echoes appear in many places,” she said gently. “But this one was… more than an echo.”

  Luke tilted his head slightly, inviting her to continue.

  Tionne’s gaze drifted across the treeline back toward the distant temples older than any Republic. “There are layers to history here. The Massassi carved these stones with their pain. And before them… others shaped the Force in ways that left scars.” A quiet shiver passed through her tone. “You felt one of those scars.”

  I swallowed, suddenly aware that my hands were shaking again.

  Before either could speak further, the faint creak of boot leather sounded behind us.

  Kyle Katarn stepped into view—broad-shouldered, calm, politely raising his hands as if surrendering to the suspicion he could already see on Luke’s face. “I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop,” he said. “Not intentionally, anyway. Voices carry in this corridor.”

  Luke gave him a small, knowing smile. “You’re welcome to join us.”

  Kyle nodded once, stepping into the circle with the quiet gravity of someone who understood the weight of dark places better than most. “I only caught the end,” he said to me. “But if you sensed something deep in the stone, something cold… that’s not nothing. Jedi have been meditating here for years, and I’ve only ever felt something like that once.”

  Luke’s brows rose faintly. “When?”

  Kyle hesitated. “On one of the lower levels. Alone. It passed quickly, but… it left the same kind of taste in the air.” He looked at me with quiet seriousness. “You shouldn’t blame yourself for sensing it. Places like this remember. Sometimes they remember louder than they should.”

  Tionne placed a light hand on my arm. “But what concerns us,” she said tenderly, “is not that the temple reached toward you—it’s how easily you felt it.” Her eyes softened. “Most students need months to sense subtle currents. You caught an echo from centuries below our feet.”

  Luke nodded slowly. “You’re particularly receptive to impressions. That can be a gift.” He paused. “But also a risk.”

  Kyle grunted something like agreement. “Sensitivity cuts both ways. First step is learning not to let echoes take root in you.”

  A flush of embarrassment heated my face. “I didn’t mean to listen,” I murmured.

  “You didn’t,” Luke said gently. “You only heard. That’s different.”

  Silence settled between us, not heavy but thoughtful. The jungle hummed below—alive, indifferent, eternal.

  Luke straightened. “We won’t impose limits or restrictions,” he said, meeting both Kyle’s and Tionne’s eyes. “But we’ll keep a close watch. Just in case the Echo reaches again.”

  Kyle folded his arms. “And in case it’s more than an echo.”

  Tionne took a slow breath, then looked at me with something like resolve in her expression. “Kae’rin,” she said softly, “I’d like to spend more time training with you. Our approaches to the Force… align. And if these impressions return, I want you to be comfortable telling me.”

  Her voice carried no fear—only a quiet, unwavering commitment.

  Luke placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “You’re not alone in this,” he said.

  I nodded, unable to trust my voice. The earlier chill clung faintly to the back of my mind, but it no longer felt like something waiting to engulf me. Not with all three of them standing there.

  The night settled around us—warm, alive, trembling with unseen memories. And beneath it all, that faint pulse of darkness lay quiet for now, like a door closed but not locked.

  ? ? ?

  That night, the rain came. Not a storm like Theta-9, but a slow, endless downpour that made the temple walls weep. I lay awake listening to it. The Force felt different here — less a hum now, more a pulse, rising and falling with every drop that struck the roof. I realized the world wasn’t one song but a thousand overlapping rhythms: the river’s, the insects’, the sleeping humans’, the ghosts’.

  And somewhere, under all of it, that other note — the one from beneath the temple. Faint, patient, like something waiting for the right harmony to wake again.

  I whispered into the dark, “Not yet.”

  The rain answered for me, drumming like applause on the stones.