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“Someone cut this out of the pit wall,” she observed positively. “I wonder who, and for what purpose?”

“I wish I knew,” Luke admitted. “Too bad Halla’s not here. I bet she could tell us.”

A loud, reverberant scraping sound from overhead killed further conversation. Pressing tight against the pit wall, they turned wide eyes upward. The sound wasn’t repeated.

Luke felt the warmth of the body next to him, lowered his gaze. Framed in the faint light from above, the Princess looked more radiant, more beautiful than ever. “Leia,” he began, “I …”

More scraping, louder, ominously so. Several rocks and pieces of wall fell from above and shot past them. They tried to bury themselves in the unyielding stone, tried to merge with the dampness dripping down its sides.

A loud thunk sounded far below. It was one of the fallen stones finally hitting something. Luke wasn’t sure it was bottom.

Breathless, they stayed huddled together, eyes fixed on the circle of misty sunlight above. With infinite slowness, something slid into view. At first it looked like a sooty cloud obscuring the sun. Small sounds came from the Princess’ throat. Luke was completely paralyzed.

The massive worm-head eclipsed the opening. It swung back and forth like a horizontal pendulum, moving from side to side, searching with senses unimaginable.

Looking around desperately, Luke spied what might have been an opening in the pit wall. It was at the far end of the ledge.

“Follow me,” he instructed the Princess. When she didn’t move, he grabbed one hand and pulled. She followed him, her gaze still frozen on the monstrosity above.

The opening turned out to be large enough to hold both of them. It was tall enough so that Luke hardly had to stoop to fit inside. Both stared up and out, relieved to be off the narrow ledge.

Perhaps the creature above was sensitive to their relief. Something certainly attracted it, because the great skull abruptly ceased its weaving motion. It turned downward, facing them.

“It sees us!” the Princess breathed, gripping Luke’s arm so hard it hurt. “Oh, it sees us!”

“Maybe … maybe it’s just looking down the pit,” Luke responded, more hopeful than sanguine.

With a hunching movement that filed stone and rock from the upper edge of the chasm, the head drifted lazily down toward them. Its vast mouth was agape, framing a darkness deeper than that of the pit itself.

“It’s coming down,” the Princess breathed. “It’s coming for us, Luke.”

“It can’t. It can’t reach us,” Luke insisted, feeling for his pistol. It wasn’t there. He’d dropped it in the retreat from the crawler. His hand went around the hilt of his lightsaber.

A ponderous groaning sounded. Larger chunks of dislodged stone fell past them, went crashing and booming off the walls below.

“How long is it?” Luke wondered, indicating the worm-like creature.

“I don’t know. I didn’t get a good look. It seemed to go on forever,” she responded. The wandrella was less than a dozen meters above them, and still moving. There was no doubt that it saw them now. “Can it get a purchase on the wall? It’s so slick.”

“I don’t know,” he mumbled dully. His fist tightened convulsively on the hilt of the saber.

All at once the worm-thing seemed to leap down at them. The Princess screamed, her shriek echoing madly around the walls of the pit as Luke yanked the saber from his belt and activated it. In the plutonian confines of the well its clean blue light was small comfort.

But the wandrella was not striking at them. Overextended even for its own incredible length, it was falling. It went rocketing past, a seemingly endless white waterfall of faintly glowing flesh. Leaning out, they saw it shrink to a dot, a pinpoint of brightness before it finally vanished into the abyssal depths. Echoes of the creature bouncing and bumping from wall to wall drifted up to them with steadily increasing faintness, dying memories of a massive death.

Luke shakily deactivated his saber and reattached it to his belt.

At the same time, the Princess grew aware of how tightly she