Before the Storm - Michael P. Kube-McDowell [12]
For months Luke had been using Temple Atun as his sanctuary. Unlike the Great Temple, which had been given new life as the home of the Jedi praexeum, Atun had been left as it had been found, its mechanisms inert, its passageways dark. Its outer chambers had been looted, but a trap made of two great sliding stones had long ago sealed off the upper chambers. The trap still held the crushed bodies of the would-be thieves who had tripped it.
Something tickled Luke’s consciousness at the hazy fringe of awareness. He closed his eyes and lowered his inner shields long enough to search the temple, reading the currents of the Force as they flowed around and beneath him.
There was life everywhere, for the creatures of Yavin 4 had long ago claimed what the Massassi had abandoned. Collapsed stairways limited most vermin to the lower levels. But stonebats had made nests in tiny ventilation shafts all over the temple’s face, and Luke shared the eyrie with purple-winged kitehawks, which soared into the sky each evening to search the jungle’s upper canopy for prey.
There was an unfamiliar presence, too—but not an unexpected one. Streen was coming, as Luke had asked.
Luke had given Streen no instructions except to meet him at the top of Temple Atun, thereby turning the keeping of the appointment into a final test, and the temple into a puzzle and potential horror-house. Concealing himself by exerting no will at all on the currents of the Force, Luke marked his protégé’s progress. Even as an apprentice, Streen had distinguished himself by his maturity. That quality was evident in his purposeful ascent of the tower. He moved lightly through the rookeries, surefootedly through the dark passages.
The last fifty meters of the trip to the crown required a dizzying fingertips-and-toes climb up the steep, crumbling sunset face of Temple Atun. As Streen neared the top, Luke nudged the kitehawks into the air with a thought. They passed over Streen’s head like beclawed shadows, crying and beating the air with their wings. But Streen did not startle. Holding very still, he made himself invisible against the crumbling stone until the kitehawks wheeled away, then finished his climb.
“I’m pleased,” Luke said, opening his eyes as Streen joined him. “You’ve confirmed me in my choice. Come, sit, and face the east with me.”
Streen complied wordlessly. The curve of Yavin was just touching the line of the horizon, forming the geometry of the symbol found everywhere on the Massassi ruins.
“Have you made any progress in your reading of the Books of Massassi?” asked Luke quietly.
He was referring to a collection of tablets unearthed from a collapsed underground chamber found two years earlier in the jungle nearby. The tablets were written in the dense, arcane symbology of the Sith, but not by a Sith consciousness. The Books were silent on their authorship, but Luke believed they were the creation of a single Massassi, a life work of essays in history and faith. A minority view held that they were the original sacred texts of the Massassi, an ancient oral tradition recorded by educated slaves.
“I thought I would have finished by now, but I’ve only reached the sixteenth Book,” Streen said. “Reading them is more tiring than I expected. It seems to be a thing that cannot be hurried.”
“And what have you learned about what the sight before us meant to those who built this place?”
“That Yavin was both a beautiful and a terrible god to the Massassi,” said Streen. “It lifted their eyes to the heavens, but made their hearts small and fearful.”
“Go on.”
Streen gestured toward the horizon. “If I have understood what I have read, the Massassi measured themselves against this all-dominating presence and found themselves wanting. They stood at the pinnacle of life on a fecund world, and yet felt themselves and their attainments to be nothing. And that paradox colored their entire history.”
“Yes,” said Luke. “They failed to learn the lesson of humility. The grander their works, the more they ached for the