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“Sekot is aging,” Jabitha had said. “I feel her, and yet I feel estranged from her. She remains in exile to puzzle out what has happened; and in withdrawing, she neglects Zonama. I don’t think she has done so deliberately. It is as if she has been abducted by dark forces, and is somehow imprisoned.”

“Nom Anor, Nen Yim, and I are responsible for what has happened to Sekot,” Harrar had said. “We should never have come here. If the gods haven’t already turned their backs on the Yuuzhan Vong, they will now, for we have despoiled a living world.”

Jabitha had listened to the priest’s confession without comment. She said, “I know where we can begin to seek Sekot. A place where the Force is strong …”

Harrar seemed to feel Luke’s eyes on him, and turned. His own eyes were moist, and tears had left streaks on his tattooed cheeks. The cause might have been the wind rushing through cracks in the cabin.

“I am overcome,” he said sadly. “Even with all its recent injuries, this is the world I have dreamed of. The world all my people have dreamed of. The one that ordained our past; the one we prayed would prefigure our future. A world of symbiosis, rather than competition and predation. The very world we have tried time and again to re-create, only to end up with facsimiles. It is no small wonder I felt nostalgic for this place the moment we landed; that I felt I’d arrived home, though I’d never been here.”

“If the Yuuzhan Vong evolved on a world like this,” Luke said, “what turned you to war?”

Harrar took a moment to reply. “The ancient texts are unclear. It appears that we were invaded by a race that was more technological than animate. We called on the gods for protection, and they came to our aid, providing us with the knowledge we needed to convert our living resources to weapons. We defeated the threat, and, empowered by our victory, we gradually became conquerors of other species and civilizations.”

Jabitha interrupted, instructing Kroj’b to steer the airship southwest. The terrain grew more and more rugged. Jagged mountains of crushed lava rose steeply into the clouds. Braided tails of orange-tinted water plunged from the heights into thickly forested gorges. The wind blew fiercely, and the temperature began to fall below freezing.

At Jabitha’s direction Kroj’b and Saba piloted the airship down toward the expansive talus field of a mountain that struck Luke as being younger than Ben and twice as unpredictable.

“Here is where my father’s fortress once stood,” Jabitha explained, after the airship had been anchored to the denuded slope. “Sekot showed Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker a mental image of the fortress as it was before the advent of the Far Outsiders.”

“The Far Outsiders have a name, Jabitha,” Harrar said. “It is the Yuuzhan Vong who toppled your father’s fortress.”

“Of course,” she said. “Old habits are not easily broken.”

Luke asked Saba to remain with Kroj’b in the airship; then he and the rest emerged from the cabin and began to follow Jabitha uphill, fighting a cold, strong wind that swept down from the invisible summit. Luke saw the cave entrance before Jabitha drew everyone’s attention to it.

The air inside was warm and remarkably humid. The cave angled down into the mountainside, and Luke realized immediately that what they were in was actually an ancient lava tube. The floor was paved with coarse pebbles that crunched underfoot. Cooled magma from deep in the planet, the walls were composed of dense black stone, but in some places they glowed with a faint bioluminescence.

“How like the interiors of our space vessels,” Harrar said.

Luke could see the resemblance, but he was reminded of something entirely different—the cave on Dagobah that Yoda had dared him to enter. But while that place had been strong in the dark side, the lava tunnel felt enchanted—strangely maternal and enfolding. He began to sense the presence of the animating intelligence he had come to know during his short time on Zonama, the one helped to consciousness