The Force was in flux. Kandria had always sensed the presence of the Force since she had started her training as a Jedi. Most times it was still, or at least flowing like a gentle river. During battle it would shift back and forth as though someone were rocking the tub, of which Sith and Jedi were the most common perpetrators.

  This was different though. Instead of shifting back and forth like gusts of winds, this sensation felt like the Force itself had condensed into waves. In the small time Kandria had to analyse what was going on she realised what was happening was similar to a Force Push. Unlike the usually controlled and concentrated combat technique however, this was wild. Chaotic. It didn’t have the properties of a Force Push through any purpose or technique, rather it was a simple side effect of the sheer amount which was being moved.

  Being moved right towards Vancil and her. Feeling the wave approach Kandria braced herself while also preparing for the very likely event that she was thrown off her feet. She glanced to Vancil, expecting the Sith to be doing the same; only to find him collapsing as his knees buckled and his head lolled back. Without even thinking about it, Kandria moved to position herself behind Vancil as much as possible, her body moving on sheer instinct, instinct to protect him.

  It certainly didn’t help her situation that Vancil, being in front of Kandria, had become an unwitting projectile. Vancil hit first as he was sent flying into Kandria at the breakneck speeds. Unable to properly brace herself in time, the wind was knocked out of Kandria as Vancil’s body collided with her chest. Yet, she pushed through the disorientation, wrapping her arms around Vancil’s chest and curling around him protectively, making sure to shelter his head in particular.

  The wave hit second. While Kandria had managed to maintain some stability when she caught Vancil, she had no chance against the wave, which promptly threw her off her feet. She didn’t know how fast she was going, only that when she hit the durasteel wall she hit hard. Her chest ached and stung with sharp pain as Vancil’s limp pushed her further against the wall. Her senses were disoriented beyond belief, her vision blurry and thoughts scrambled as the wave continued to roll over her and Vancil.

  She didn’t know how long it lasted, and probably lost partial consciousness at some point, but eventually the wave subsided and the pressure lessened. Kandria slid down the wall, her arms still wrapped around Vancil who had fallen into her lap. Her vision swayed groggily as she struggled to bring into focus what was happening. Vague, robotic words echoed in the distance, as though they were being yelled from a mile away.

  “Expulsion complete… Parasite confirmed… initialising…”

  The entire station shook as millennium old equipment started up for the first time since their creation, errors springing up across monitors which now flickered to life, some resolving themselves, some persisting. Kandria shook her head in a vain attempt to clear the blurring in her vision. Once the pain and aching in her bones subsided enough, she struggled to her feet, Vancil’s limp form not helping matters in the slightest.

  Moving purely on instinct she secured her grip around his torso as she slowly dragged Vancil to the door, her advance slowed even further by the violent shaking that permeated the station. When she reached the now shut door she slammed her fist against the access panel, causing to crack slightly as it flashed a red message; BREAKER IN FIRING SEQUENCE.

  Her dazed and probably concussed mind barely registered the words, yet in her current state there was little she could do to solve whatever the problem was. She couldn’t believe it had taken her this long to realise; the Force, the thing which permeated every being in the galaxy no matter where you were, was gone.

  It wasn’t weak, it wasn’t hidden, it was gone. It felt like a void had suddenly overtaken the entirety of the room. It felt all sorts of wrong, as though the water she had been bathing in all her life had disappeared around her. The Force still existed; she could sense as much just beyond the unmoving door, rolling and sliding as it was pulled somewhere, in a similar manner to the Force wave that had been in the room only moments before.

  Her adrenaline beginning to fade as she failed to open the door, Kandria collapsed against the door, shifting so that she was leaning back against it and Vancil was once again cradled in her arms. Gingerly she raised a finger to Vancil’s throat, the tension in her releasing as the felt the pulse. It was weaker than it should be, but nothing that indicated he was near death.

  Closing her eyes Kandria steadied her breathing, falling back on her Jedi training to calm herself down as she thought of the times she had spent in meditation in the Temple courtyard. Her heart ached slightly as she did so, as while she had already come to terms with her desertion of the Jedi Order it was still the institution, she had been a part of all of her life. Thankfully the ache was lessened somewhat due to all her memories about the Jedi Order being during the one from 3000 years ago.

  As she sat there in pseudo-meditative thought for a few more minutes, the shaking slowly died down, eventually only being a barely noticeable rumble not too dissimilar to the rumble caused by engines in starfighters and vehicles. The Force which had been rolling just beyond the door stilled, yet there was an underlying tension she could sense. Reaching out with her mind to look for the Force was hard when it was no longer around her, but she managed to get a vague idea of where it was and what had happened.

  The entire control room was, to put it bluntly, a complete void in the Force, unsettling her in ways she didn’t think she could be unsettled. Pushing past that however was possibly the largest concentration of the Force she had ever felt condensed probably a few dozen feet beyond the control room in the cold vacuum of space. She obviously couldn’t, but Kandria reckoned that if she touched the mass of Force, it would be solid as a rock. What was strange however was that it wasn’t rolling or whirling in an uncontrollable whirlwind. Instead, it was impossibly still, with only the slightest fluctuations that Kandria could sense.

  Then, somehow, something stranger happened.

  The faint sound of fabric tearing reached Kandria’s ears, yet it came from no direction nor seemed to have any volume she could pinpoint. Whenever she thought the sound was close it would become fainter, and whenever she thought it was far away it got louder. Still her eyes remain shut, a combination of tiredness and desire to maintain her meditative state.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

  It started small, but the sound began to change, finally deciding that it would be loud while also morphing from the sound of tearing fabric to that of a tree cracking and snapping. It was only when the ball of condensed Force began to rapidly shift and shrink, followed by a blue light beginning to breach through her eyelids that Kandria opened her eyes.

  It burned.

  It wasn’t the brightness, although that in itself would be reason enough. What she was seeing was something that she wasn’t supposed to see. She knew it, deep in her soul, that it was wrong. It wasn’t supposed to exist here. She couldn’t comprehend it, didn’t even know how she knew this. This sense of wrongness was different from when she was surrounded by the Dark Side or when the Force was absent. This was primal, something built into her core.

  A vertical crack was outside the control room, in the very centre of the ball of condensed Force. It wasn’t a straight line, more so like the crack you’d see in a stone if you hit it hard enough. It radiated a brilliant blue, the beams of light casting shadows throughout the control room. Kandria felt it pierce through her, as though she wasn’t even there and bringing an involuntary shiver to her.

  The entire galaxy seemed to grow silent, the frantic alarms in the control room having silenced. The crack expanded, a small piece branching out only a few inches.

  The Force screamed.

  Communications Officer Mera was still, her mind reeling from the shiver which had just run through her body. For a brief few seconds something had rushed through her. Her mind blanked for a moment, something usually damning for someone of her position, yet the countless waves of radio chatter which had previously been blasting through her earpiece had silenced as well.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t last. Mera’s ears exploded as cries, screams, for help drowned out everything else. This itself disoriented her and the rest of the communications officers aboard the bridge of the Venator Class Star Destroyer ‘Pathfinder’ for another few seconds. Her thoughts reeled as she struggled to organise and determine what was going on.

  Before she had been frozen into a state of shock the amount of chatter had been large, but still maintained some form of orderliness. Now though, it was as though the entire Republic Fleet above Celanon had gone mad. The communications that she had been receiving at her station were mostly from the fighter wings the Pathfinder had deployed. Now though?

  “This is the Scimitar, shields are down to 20%, major casualties on board, requesting immediate aid!”

  “Acclamator Class Equinox reporting, we’re dead in the water taking focused fire from two Munif-“

  “The Stargazer is at minimal operational status, what the hell just ha-“

  “OUR SHIELDS ARE DOWN, JEDI-GENERAL DURLING IS INCAPACITATED, WE NEE-“

  “Arrow Squadron is down to 20% strength, we've got a pack of Vultures on our-”

  A tremor travelled throughout the ship as it took a particularly hard hit, the force great enough to throw her and a few others from their chairs. She grunted as she collided with the floor, her ear piece detaching and scattering over the ground and away from her.

  What was happening?

  Struggling to her feet she turned and looked up towards the raised platform above her where the command staff directed things. They had a Jedi-General, even one who had a fairly decent military record from before the start of the war. Whenever the going got tough, the crew of the Pathfinder knew that they had General Cenware to look to for leadership.

  The colour drained from Mera’s face as her eyes landed on their vaunted commander, collapsed to his hands and knees as vomit poured from his mouth and blood dripped from his eyes.

  Leopold stumbled and dropped to his knees, his stomach emptying itself onto the muddied ground outside the capital city of Contruum. The Force, an incomprehensible amount of it had violently pushed itself through him. It wasn’t just him though. From what he felt the entirety of the Force had just pushed through him and the clone troopers surrounding him. In fact, wherever he managed to reach out his dazed senses there was nothing but movement from the Force, all heading in a direction he couldn’t determine.

  Someone clasped him by the shoulder, probably a clone, but he was far too disoriented to really register it. He vaguely noticed another come to help, the both of them working together to wrap Leopold’s arms around their shoulders as they dragged him away, the muffled sounds of battle restarting.

  That’s right, he was in a battle. Leading a battalion of troopers even. If his master could see him now…

  Even in his disoriented state however he recognised that things were going horribly wrong. The once blue and red bolts which danced through the air were now showing a clear numbers superiority for the red blaster bolts. He looked to the side, watching an explosion send a group of clones taking cover behind a wrecked walker be sent flying away, mostly in various pieces.

  One of the clones carrying him fell limp, causing Leopold and the remaining clone to fall to stumble to the ground. The Jedi Knight groaned as his face smeared across the muddy ruined ground beneath, trying and failing to will his arms to move. The clone above him yelled some words he didn’t understand before falling silent, his corpse falling over top of Leopold, the Jedi sure that if he had any air left in his lungs it would have been driven out of him.

  The sounds of battle raged on for a few more minutes before falling silent. The ground trembled as battle droids marched forward, their metal forms nothing but beige blurs. Yet they were also accompanied by distinctly alien figures

  Leopold’s breathing came out in ragged bursts, the fallout from the sudden and violent shift in the Force still ever present. Apparently, these small sounds had been noticed, as soon enough a black boot filled his vision.

  Using all the strength he had left, Leopold tilted his head upwards, eyes staring down the barrel of a blaster.

  Kavir stirred as the Force rolled around her in its entirety. There were occasional moments where the Force would do something strange, usually in moments of great importance. This was different however. She couldn’t tell much, but she knew that it was being pulled somewhere, somewhere far away.

  What interested Kavir was that it wasn’t just a large portion of the Force, it was all of it. All converging on one point like a floodgate had been broken.

  Curiosity got the better of her and she sent out a small tendril of herself, following the direction of the movement. Her curiosity grew into concern as she made it over a quarter of the galaxy. Still not there. Halfway across the galaxy. Still not there.

  The farther she got the more she realised something. The behaviour of the Force wasn’t that of a something pulling it, it was more like someone pulling the plug in a bath and the water draining away. Her mind wandered to a possible explanation for such a concerning and wild reason… but she pushed it away. It was impossible after all.

  After travelling three quarters of the way across the galaxy she felt it. Something that shouldn’t have ever happened. Something she thought she would never experience again. While she had travelled three quarters of the galaxy in a leisurely few minutes, she travelled the final quarter in seconds screeching to a halt directly above a derelict space station.

  This far out her senses were stretched to their very limit, but she recognised what she saw. She recognised it far too well. At the sight of the tear in reality itself, Kavir had only one thing to say.

  "??????????????????????.??????????.????????????????????????.????????????????????F?????????????????????u????????c???????????????????????????k??????????????????"?????????????????