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By Root 2052 0

he was able to keep up with his nephew and Harrar on the undulating path, but his physiology had been altered by the venom, and he was compelled to draw subtly on the Force to sustain himself. Perhaps it would just be a matter of time until his body dealt with the vestiges of the venom, but he suspected that the damage had been done in the first instance of his being pierced by the serpentlike weapon. As had been the case with Mara, healing tears could only do so much. He realized that the battle in Shimrra’s bunker had brought him very close to the dark side, whose venom was every bit as potent as that of the royal amphistaff. But he had no regrets about having skirted that razor’s edge, and knew in his heart that he would have walked even closer to the edge to safeguard Jacen or Jaina.

What troubled him was that they, too, appeared to have suffered as a result of their confrontation with Onimi—Supreme Overlord Onimi. Several of the Jedi and the Ferroans had already remarked to Luke in private that Jacen looked older, and just that morning Luke had heard whispered exchanges regarding Jaina’s sudden and uncharacteristic gravity. Neither Leia nor Han had said anything to Luke, though their concern was evident. But then, who hadn’t been affected in some fashion by the events that had unfolded on Coruscant and Zonama Sekot?

The planet itself had been damaged, chiefly in the Middle Distance, where the Ferroans were doing what they could to rebuild their homes and nurse the boras back to health, the frosty conditions notwithstanding. Most of the several dozen Yuuzhan Vong warriors who had been hauled to the surface were traumatized. After some effort, Harrar had talked them into leaving the place where their coralskippers had been set down, but they remained confused as to whether they were prisoners or guests. The presence of the Jedi had confirmed their worst fear—the one the heretics had embraced—that the gods had allied with the Jedi to obliterate the Yuuzhan Vong. And yet a few of the warriors had undergone what amounted to conversion experiences, espousing to their humbled comrades that they could feel the gods in the sweet taste of Zonama’s water, in the soil under their feet, on the wind, and inhabiting the giant boras. To them, the living world was a paradise regained, and they had urged Luke to recount that to the Yuuzhan Vong elite, should he decide to agree to mediating the surrender, as the leaders of the Alliance wished.

“We’re here,” Jacen announced suddenly.

He led Luke and Harrar onto an intersecting trail that descended a short but steep slope, ending at a tranquil pool fringed with ice and surrounded by towering boras. Luke had expected to meet only with a thought projection of Sekot—perhaps Anakin or Vergere—but instead Jabitha was there, having somehow arrived first by some other path from the canyon.

“Some of what I wish to say you must have guessed by now,” Sekot said through Jabitha, as Luke, Jacen, and Harrar were approaching the edge of the pool. “Especially regarding the Yuuzhan Vong.”

“You told Danni that you wanted to welcome them home,” Luke said. “Were you suggesting that Zonama is actually their primordial homeworld?”

“Much as I evolved from the consciousness that presided there—the consciousness of my parent—Zonama is a seed of Yuuzhan’tar, the world that birthed the Yuuzhan Vong and became the template for their gods.”

“I wanted to believe,” Harrar said in astonishment, “but I didn’t dare …”

“Where is Yuuzhan’tar now?” Jacen asked.

“I hope in time to be able to answer that question. I suspect, though, that it was destroyed by its symbionts—by the species that became the Yuuzhan Vong, in retribution for what my parent did to them: casting them out, severing its connection to them—stripping them of the Force. All as a consequence of their hunger for violence and conquest, which had been awakened by a single confrontation with a warfaring race. I further suspect that without my parent they were unable to move beyond the biotechnology they were given—or stole. In need of a guiding consciousness,