Runaway (Kazahan)

The shadows lengthened as the Ossian afternoon waned into evening, half an hour before dinner in the Jedi colony of Sanctuary One. For most of the camp, from younglings to masters, it was free time, an opportunity to relax after a rigorous day of training and study. On an ordinary day, Reverend Solomon would have spent the time walking in the afternoon sunslight, seeking some quiet copse or meadow where he could spend a few minutes in prayer and meditation before supper. But something had come up.

Four younglings stood before him with drooping heads and shamed faces, and with them was Kestra Martel, a stocky teenage human Padawan who had been assigned as a junior chaperone for Rancor House. Her motherly face was equal parts angry and terrified, and he didn’t doubt she was equal to the task of meting out discipline where it was needed. Solomon didn’t need to be the voice of judgment now. He simply needed information.

So he kept his face and his voice calm as he asked, “Why don’t you start from the beginning and tell me what happened?”

The ringleader of the group was Tyler Bran, a freckled eight-year-old whose impulsive behavior had landed him with interviews like this on a regular basis, but to his credit, he spoke up first. “We were on our way to meditation class after lunch, and we saw Eela sitting under the big tree by the sparring circles,” he said. “We went over to see what she was doing. She had a big beetle in her hands, just running over her fingers over and over.”

Solomon nodded. “And did you say something to her?”

Tyler swallowed nervously and looked toward Nivelle, a tall Mirialan girl who looked older than she was. “We tried to talk to her,” she said. “But she just ignored us. She kept looking at the beetle. Like we weren’t even there. So finally I asked if her friend would like to learn to fly. And I made it float out of her hands.”

“We started passing it around, you know, using the Force,” Tyler said. “And Eela got upset and tried to grab for it. We made it float higher so she couldn’t get it.”

“I was passing it back to one of the others, but we dropped it,” Nivelle continued. “And Eela tried to snatch it out of the air, but she ended up squashing it between her hands.”

“We all laughed, then,” Tyler said, looking shame-faced at the ground. “She started crying and ran into the woods. We thought she’d get over it and come back, but she wasn’t in mediation, and she wasn’t in maths or even biology, and she never misses biology. I ran back to living quarters, and she wasn’t there, either. No one’s seen her since.”

Solomon looked from Tyler to Kestra, who now looked more fearful than angry. “They came to me, and I brought them straight to you,” she said. “Eela’s always running off to be on her own, but she’s never been gone this long before. What should we do?”

The preacher considered the waning light in the sky and took a deep, bracing breath to help him order his thoughts. "Send these children to supper," he said. "And alert security to keep watch for Eela on the perimeter. I'll call a meeting of the knights and organize some search parties. The more people we have looking, the better. Don't worry, Kestra. We'll find her."

The padawan forced a brave smile, nodded, and scurried off with the younglings in tow.

The next thirty minutes saw Sanctuary One engulfed in a maelstrom of activity. At once several off-duty Alliance scouts were aloft on utility speeder bikes to begin sweeping the immediate area surrounding the colony, and Solomon and the other knights summoned volunteers from the work crews, the Gossam, the Cizerack Jaani'saari, and even Suriyesh Rajinaathra's retinue of droids, and together they mapped out a grid search pattern that could continue into the night. Several more aircraft lifted off into the evening sky as the assembled crowd dispersed into their respective parties, but Solomon had eyes for one Padawan in particular.

"Kazahan, come with me," he said. "I want to trace Eela's trail from the beginning, and I'm going to need your tracking skills."

Kazahan nodded and shouldered his VM-10, allowing the crowd to disperse before speaking.

"Of course," the Trianii said to one of the only Jedi he'd met he didn't completely tower over. "Where shall we begin?"

Solomon began leading him to the spot.

"This youngling — Eela, if this one remembers correctly — what is known of her? Kazahan has heard it said that she wanders often. Where does she go?"

Kazahan was normally described as absent-minded, though in truth he was merely easily distracted, not forgetful. It was not applicable in this case. Toting a military grade blaster and wearing slightly baggy trousers and a belted jacket with several power packs stuffed into pockets on a bandolier and a large knife tucked into a sheath on his belt, some remembered that he had been a member of the Trianii Rangers before coming to Ossus to be a Jedi, and he looked as attentive and focused as any could remember him ever being.

He was not looking at Solomon, and so wasn't able to tell if the human understood why he was asking such questions.

"She may not be there, of course those places will have been searched already, but tracking is as much understanding one's prey itself as understanding a broken twig or a footprint. One makes different decisions in different states of mind, but will follow their general habits."

It was growing dark, which troubled him some. Even though he could see well enough at night, given good ambient light, some small cues or signs could be easily missed.

"Eela has a few haunts scattered around camp, but we've already checked the ones we know about. We have some younger Padawans scouring the buildings to make sure she's not hiding in a closet or an in attic crawlspace somewhere."

Solomon led Kazahan past the sparring circles to where a huge kingwood tree spread its ample branches, a keen temptation for any child with more than one working limb and a sense of adventure. The tree stood a stonesthrow away from the edge of the forest, which was thick with tangled undergrowth. Solomon crouched beneath the tree and ran his fingers through the dry grass, still warm from the heat of the afternoon.

"Eela was rescued from a slaver ship carrying a dozen other Twi'lek girls toward Hutt space," he explained. "I'm told she rarely speaks, and never more than a few words. But she has a deep and powerful fascination with animals."

He scanned the ground and, in the failing light, was just able to make out the crumpled form of a reek beetle with a caved-in shell, covered in tiny ants who were diligently breaking it down and carrying its nutrients back to their colony.

"Your natural senses are strong, Kazahan," he said. "Have you learned how to attune them to the Force?"

Kneeling next to the Knight, Kazahan breathed deeply and concentrated. He'd heard the story of how she came to run, and he pictured the scene in his mind; the girl, horrified and embarrassed and apologetic, running from her inadvertent destruction of a fascinating, amazing little creature, and the cruel children that had led to that circumstance. She ran, into the forest, as the children said.

He would start there. He looked up, and smiled. A bright moon was rising in the sky. It would be waxing gibbous, if he remembered the phases correctly.

Even so, he pulled a torch from his belt and flicked it on, scanning the line of the forest.

"Kazahan may be able to do such a thing," he said absently, standing and stalking from the tree to the forest. "But if this one can, it is unconscious. At times my senses are sharper, yes. I can hear, and see and smell much more strongly than otherwise. But it is not a thing I can do on command, unfortunately. Kazahan believed it was a sign of the gods' favor on him and his hunts in the past."

He pulled some branches of a low bush to the side, and smelled them. Taking one leaf, he lightly ran his tongue over it, and nodded.

"Salt," he said. "Sweat. She ran through here in... that direction."

It was a start, but not enough to call any of the other search parties off their grid. Once they were farther along the little girl's trail, they could begin to narrow the field, refine their search patterns. A seven-year-old Twi'lek could only run so far.

Solomon followed closely behind Kazahan as the Trianii forged a path through the underbrush. Though the preacher didn't have the natural graces of a nocturnal hunter, he could root out Eela's path by other means. The currents of the Force had been disturbed in these woods, and a patient mind could sift through the tangled leylines and find the shape of the disturbance echoing back through time, like reconstructing a ship from the wake it left in troubled waters. He sensed the echoes of anguish and fear, and sharp, high notes of panic of a sort unique to children.

The trail took them steadily downhill into moister sections of the forest, where ferns gathered in thick clumps under the shade of the kingwood trees. In the distance, they could hear muffled voices shouting Eela's name, and overhead a floating probe droid buzzed by through the treetops.

"The search itself is going to attract attention," Solomon said. "If there are Ysanna about, we're likely to run into them before we find the girl. Have you dealt with them before?"

"Kazahan has met Ysanna," the Trianii said matter of factly. "And has studied them since. The nearest tribal camp is twenty four kilometers away. Their hunting grounds do not come quite so close to here, because of the Library, this one thinks. They only come to watch us. Our starships frighten them more than anything else, it looks like."

Kazahan stopped at a large fallen log and crouched, snuffling the ferns softly. He had not said they wouldn't come into contact with Ysanna; if anything, he seemed to be more convincing himself that they were unlikely to meet them. He stood.

"She was moving very quickly," he said thoughtfully. He pointed the torch at the ground and gently ran his fingers along the moist earth. "The indentations are deep here. Her steps took most of her weight at once. She was running. But to run all this way and keep running?" He snuffled the ferns around the tree and stopped suddenly. That acrid smell meant few other things in this circumstance.

"She stopped here. And then she... saw something?" he followed the lighter indentations around the moss and lichen covered log, in erratic circles and hesitant swirls. "No, it seems like she was hearing something. She wasn't afraid, since she stepped away from shelter for a bit, but she was wary, as she kept returning. And then... she starts to run again."

He kept his face and torch trained to the ground, until he reached the edge of the semi clearing the fallen tree dominated, and peered at the tracks hidden by the ferns and the growing darkness. The moonlight was bright, but it didn't have the clarity that sunlight brought.

"Should we find Ysanna, we should run," Kazahan said abruptly. He glanced over at Solomon, his eyes glinting green in the moonlight. "Or hide, should they lose us. I do not believe they would harm Eela, if they found her."

Solomon recalled reading reports of the Ysanna attack on a Gossam caravan not too long ago, a nasty business that had embroiled Morgan Evanar and three Padawans in a bloodbath and a subsequent chase to free Gossam captives in the aftermath, and he realized he should have remembered reading Kazahan's name among the respondents. That encounter likely made him the Trianii ranger one of the Jedi's foremost authorities on the Ysanna, albeit with the worst elements of their fractured culture. And that made his conjecture surprising, to say the least.

"What makes you so sure?" the preacher asked. "That they wouldn't harm her. They've taken children captive before."

"Yes, they have," Kazahan responded, trying to pick out a path through the forest. He was still crouched close to the ground. "But have we ever discovered the children's dead bodies?"

If they had, Kazahan hadn't heard of it. But it was possible if unlikely, so he didn't discard the idea.

"The Ysanna are as diverse a group as this one has ever seen, but they remind Kazahan of Trian, in many ways. This one thinks that warriors capturing Jedi keep them alive. As hostages? Perhaps. But it is also likely they wish to learn of us as we of them, yes? It may be also a declaration of power. They take our young and make them theirs."

Kazahan had decided on which was the most likely path the little one would have taken, and followed it easily: even in the dim light of the moon and stars, the wide trail made through that area was visible to Kazahan with his night vision and Solomon, who had none. Kazahan's strides were long and careful, even though they were moving at a fairly quick pace.

"There is no honour to their warriors for killing a child. Their tales, if they are anything like Trianii legends, are full of honourable combat between heroic fighters."

Kazahan had seen the dead Gossam in the convoy, and had noticed that only the adults had something torn from them, some skin or other trophy. The children, though killed, had been left mostly untouched. He had been left alive as well, which troubled him, though he didn't say anything about it, then or now. But why leave him alive? It was a puzzle that had bothered him on and off ever since, but he was no closer to an answer now than before.

"Kazahan believes that she will be unharmed by Ysanna, should they find her. But if there are other things out there, they might not be so kind."

The two Jedi followed the little girl's trail deeper and deeper into the wilderness. Solomon had hoped that once she realized she was lost Eela would find shelter and stay put so she would be easier to find, but something had driven the girl on through the woods, and at a prodigious pace for a seven-year-old Twi'lek. They were far enough from the Jedi compound that they could rule out anything to the East, or north toward Miwù Shanmà. There simply hadn't been time for her to double back that far.

Their path took them steadily downhill, deeper into the valley that sprawled before the plateau where the Jedi had settled - and deeper into Ysanna territory. The character of the forest was beginning to change. The trees here were older, taller, with a thick canopy of interlocking branches that blotted out what was left of the daylight. The tangle of shrubs and vines that had carpeted the forest floor had given way to a floor of hard-packed earth and decaying leaves. There was less cover here, but there were also fewer signs to follow.

Solomon rested his maimed hand against the trunk of a hornbeam tree and sensed the imprint that Eela had left as she'd passed it. He could almost see her, a tiny shape in a loose youngling's habit, one finger raised to her lips as she paused and decided where to go next. She wasn't frightened - the shock and shame that had driven her into the forest had been forgotten.

"She was following something," the preacher said, keeping his voice low to avoid disturbing the wildlife. The after-image of Eela looked up, and he followed her spectral gaze. "Something moving through the trees."

In his mind's eye he saw the branches overhead bowing under the weight of a massive creature that moved with uncanny grace from tree to tree. Eela watched it from below and scurried after it in the direction of an old, damp creek bed.

Solomon started after her, but he sensed there was more to this scene. "There was something else, here," he said. "Following her over the ground. Do you sense it?"

Another ghostly image passed by the tree, a long, sleek form slinking low to the ground on large, padded paws, its ears and eyes trained forward with an unmistakable purpose. An adolescent choku had found Eela's trail.

"Yes," Kazahan murmured, sniffing slightly and eyeing the trail left for them. It was not easy to distinguish such things in the dark, but he could tell there were paw prints. "A predator. Young, but still alone and of good weight for its size."

It was only a quick glance that was needed to determine the orientation of the creature, and where it had gone.

"This way."

Both of them had to suppress the urge to rush. The trail was yet hours old, and they could do nothing to help Eela against a beast that had already found her or lost her before their search had even begun. If they lost the trail in their haste, they might never find it again.

There wasn't much of it to tell. A line of scuffed leaves. Half a shoe print in muddy earth. The undergrowth thickened again, a tangled mess of ferns and creeping green branches and Kazahan and Solomon were both wading in it waist-deep. Eela would have been submerged entirely, pushing her way through a Sargasso sea. The light of Solomon's hand torch showed bruised limbs, a few broken fronds underfoot weeping chlorophyll into the peaty soil.

"She picked up her pace," Solomon said. "She was afraid. I think she knew she was being followed."

Another twenty meters in, and they found a sapling as thick as Kazahan's thumb broken and cast aside, the freshly injured wood gleaming white in the gloom. The Choku, too, had abandoned stealth for speed. The ghost of Eela's fears were bright and sharp now, and Solomon needed no subtlety to follow it.

And then the thicket dropped away. Not for lack of plants, but because something great and heavy had beaten them down to the ground into an ankle-deep morass, crossed by looping vines like razor wire on a battlefield. Here and there, dark droplets gleamed on the edges of leaves and broken stems. Solomon's heart lurched in his chest at the scene of devastation.

Until he saw the crumpled form at the other end of the clearing, what might have been a pile of discarded pelts if not for the grinning jaws splayed open like a trap. It was the choku. Its skull was caved in and lay in pieces around its twisted neck.

"By the moons..." Kazahan breathed, taking in the scene before stalking over to the dead Choku. "If this one did not know any better, the signs would say that this creature was crushed underfoot."

Kazahan's eyes drifted along the ground around the dead carnivore.

"But... what creature could simply step on this?" His eyes widened and he crouched low, inspecting a patch of beaten earth. "Very large. And perhaps it was not a foot, but a hand. A very large hand."

Kazahan started skirting the edge of the 'clearing', looking for signs of where Eela had gone after this. But after completing a circuit around the mashed vegetation, he could find no tracks, no signs of passage.

"Troubling," he said, coming back to Solomon's side. "This one can find no evidence of passage away from this place."

They called it in, but Solomon couldn't in good conscience recommend narrowing the search grid. Redeploying from a last known location could speed up the search tremendously, but they'd reached the end of their trail and come up empty, and they couldn't rule out the possibility that the trail had been false all along. Solomon's instincts rebelled against that notion, but Ossus was still largely unexplored, and powerful in the Force. It could be a Ysanna trick, or some other subtlety he didn't have a name for.

The preacher crouched by the choku carcass and laid his hand on its shoulder, as if he might draw its dying memories from its broken body, but the Force surrounding the clearing was turbulent and confused. He needed a more natural than supernatural solution.

"Kazahan," he said, "I asked earlier about tuning your senses to the Force. Typically when we seek the Force's guidance, we ignore our natural senses so we can't be distracted by the physical world. But the Force is of body as much as it is of mind."

He rose and turned to face his Trianii companion. "Your nose is much better than mine. Tell me what you smell in this clearing."

"This one's sight is much better," Kazahan, even while he was focusing his attention on his nose. He closed his eyes for good measure, and bent low to get a whiff of the smell of the dead choku, and then the crushed vegetation around it. "I smell the choku everywhere. But something here reminds me of the Ysanna."

Kazahan tried to distinguish the smell, but the crushed foliage, the choku's corpse, and the earlier scents were somewhat overwhelming.

"This one cannot do so," he said finally. "Apologies."

"No need for apologies," Solomon replied. "It's a starting point."

The mention of Ysanna was worrying, but not enough to go on yet. The preacher took a deep breath of his own from the thick and heady air of the clearing, heavy with the stench of blood and the chemical distress of the broken plant life. There wasn't much he could discern from it, but it gave him a reference point to guide Kazahan's superior senses.

"You're smelling blood, sweat, loose fur, and dander, things that originated in the choku while it was still alive. It shed those pieces of itself as it moved through this thicket, and as it moved through time. Everything you smell is a window into the past. I want you to focus on the choku's scent. Let everything else fall away like dust on the wind."

The breeze picked up then, scattering discarded pine needles into the gathering twilight. Soon it would be dark enough that their eyes would be of little use.

"The choku left its imprint on the Force, just as it did on the forest. The body and the spirit of a beast are nearly one and the same. Follow it back. Find its center, like ripples on a pond. The scent can guide you there."

Kazahan hummed slightly, vocalizing his deep breathing. The choku was easy enough to smell, but his eyes were easily his strongest natural sense, followed by his hearing. But he continued, breathing deeply and letting go of his breath and each time he would focus a bit more on the smell of the choku.

And then, it was like the wind was carrying him the scent from all corners, in its varying strengths. He could tell where the choku entered, its incredibly violent movements through the clearing, and then to its death at his feet; he could smell the blood as if it were fresh. But there was a void, and that was what had killed the choku.

"This one has come no closer to divining the girl's path, nor what has killed this creature," Kazahan said, finally. He opened his eyes and regarded the steadily darkening form of the human in front of him. "Though Kazahan now knows where the creature entered this clearing, there is no identification for the mystery animal which killed the choku."

"Hmm."

Solomon frowned and reached with his own senses, as deeply as they would go, but he couldn't find anything that might have escaped the Trianii.

"Perhaps, then, the choku's killer didn't enter this clearing from the ground at all."

He looked up at the canopy that arced above the thicket. A sturdy bough spread directly over the choku's crumpled form, better than five meters off the forest floor.

Kazahan's gaze followed Solomon's up to the branch.

"From the trees?" he asked. "It does not seem like there is any other way for the creature to have entered or left."

He strode to the tree which sported the limb, and scrambled up it with only some difficulty. Once there, he inspected the bough, and looked about for any visible signs of the path the creature may have taken.

"Tracking through tree limbs will be more difficult than on the floor," he said. "And picking a random direction is not advisable."