Ezra's Duel with Danger Page 4

  “Nothing and everything,” Kanan said.

  “That doesn’t help,” Ezra said, his voice growing distant.

  “I know,” Kanan said. The door to the tunnel shut and he knew Ezra could no longer hear him. “But that’s what my master told me.”

  He wished Master Depa Billaba was still around to give him advice. She had been a Jedi Master of great wisdom and would know how best to teach Ezra.

  Kanan sank into the Force to calm himself. Meditation, at least, gave him peace.

  Even on his glowrod’s brightest setting, Ezra could barely see a meter ahead of him. The tunnel’s darkness was like a shroud, concealing everything. It wasn’t until he had stepped into a junction that he realized the tunnel was splitting.

  From there, many tunnels went off in different directions, none that he could see down. He started toward one tunnel, then moved toward another. Usually he had a hunch about what to do in situations like that. There he was in the dark. So he did what any normal kid would do. He recalled a rhyme his mother had taught him.

  “Loth-rat, Loth-cat, Loth-wolf, run. Pick a path and all is done—”

  Before he moved his finger to the last tunnel, Kanan emerged from the darkness behind him. “Really? That’s how you’re choosing? What happened to using the Force?”

  “What happened to having faith in me?” Ezra asked.

  “Second thoughts.” Kanan turned and marched down a side tunnel.

  Ezra scowled. First the autopilot, now this. When would his master actually trust him?

  Kanan walked fast, not waiting for Ezra. Ezra increased his pace, yet so did Kanan, disappearing around a corner. “Kanan! Slow down!”

  Then he heard the hiss of a lightsaber and a cry of pain.

  Ezra sprinted around the corner. Kanan was on his knees, clasping a wounded arm, at the brink of a deep chasm. The Inquisitor stood over him, his red blade illuminating his yellow eyes. “I felt a disturbance in the Force the moment the Jedi decided to bring you here, Padawan. Now, who dies first?”

  Ezra stood petrified. The fear that iced his veins wasn’t from some unresolved emotion. This was the pure, unbridled fear that he was going to die as the Inquisitor came toward him.

  “No!” Kanan roared. He ignited his lightsaber and swung, blocking the Inquisitor’s blade before it chopped Ezra in two. “I’ll die before I let you have the boy.”

  The Inquisitor spun to strike back. Kanan parried the Inquisitor’s relentless attack, but as in the other two duels, he was forced to give ground. Unlike those duels, however, this third one had a different outcome—a fatal one.

  The Inquisitor slipped a quick thrust under Kanan’s guard and into his chest. Kanan dropped his lightsaber and, with a whimper, fell into the chasm.

  This time, Ezra knew Kanan was gone for good. Not even a Jedi would be able to survive a fall like that.

  “I’ll make you pay. I swear you’ll pay,” he snarled at the Inquisitor. Harnessing the same focus he’d used to levitate the stone, he called his master’s lightsaber to his hand.

  He was relieved when it came to him—and crushed when the hilt split apart into two pieces.

  The Inquisitor laughed. “Apparently someone’s not quite ready to become a Jedi. And never will be.” He swung his lightsaber.

  Ezra leapt away, avoiding the blade but not the chasm. He slipped and fell backward, spiraling down into what seemed to be a bottomless pit.

  The pit did have a bottom. A cold, metal one Ezra landed on so hard he felt his eyes bounce in their sockets. Yet despite the pain of the impact, somehow, he had survived.

  He stood and looked around. The floor was metallic for a reason. He was in his bunk aboard the Ghost.

  Zeb’s voice boomed from elsewhere in the ship. “How you figure the kid’s doing?”

  Ezra snuck across the corridor. Through an open doorway, he saw the crew lounging inside the common room.

  Chopper answered Zeb’s question with a dismissive beep. “I have to agree with Chop,” Hera said. “I don’t think we’ll be hearing from Ezra again, which is too bad, because he had skills useful to our cause.”

  “That’s pretty cold, guys,” Sabine said, glancing at the doorway.

  Ezra side-stepped against the corridor wall to remain unseen. But he was happy she’d defended him. Maybe in a few years, it’d work out between the two of them. Ezra and Sabine—

  “After all he’s just a little kid. Scared. Alone. I pity him.”

  Her words had the impact of her detonation charges. Ezra shrank against the wall, his heart blown to bits.

  “Well, look who’s here!” Zeb reached through the door and yanked Ezra into the common room.

  Chopper, Hera, and Sabine stared at Ezra as if he were an Imperial spy. Ezra turned away. He dried the tears from his eyes with his arm.

  And that was when he knew this wasn’t real.

  His friends wouldn’t say such things. They had risked their lives for him countless times, as he had for them. He—and they—were family.

  “No, this isn’t you talking,” Ezra said. “I’m not back on the Ghost. I couldn’t be.”

  He heard a lightsaber igniting and knew who held it before he turned. The Inquisitor had appeared behind the crew, ready to strike.

  “No, no, this isn’t real,” Ezra said.

  The Inquisitor responded by stabbing Chopper. The droid shrilled a death rattle as his mechanical innards sparked.

  Ezra ran toward his cabin. Behind him, his friends shrieked and cried for his help. He reminded himself that this wasn’t real. If what they’d said before wasn’t real, then their deaths weren’t real either. This all must be an illusion.

  He opened the door to his cabin and dove inside.

  Ezra fell onto a stone floor. He looked up to see he was back in the outer chamber of the Jedi temple on Lothal.

  The two skeletons lay untouched, but there was no Kanan. Had he really followed Ezra into the tunnel? Had his death been real?

  Ezra couldn’t reenter the tunnel to check. A door with no handle closed it off.

  He pounded on the chamber wall. This test made no sense. Kanan had told him the Jedi were the guardians of peace and justice throughout the galaxy. Why would they create a test so difficult—so horrible—that it killed both master and apprentice?

  Unless those skeletons were also illusions, designed to pressure the test-taker to face their ultimate fears.

  Ezra turned toward the inner tunnel door. With a sudden whoosh, it slid up before him. He stepped back, startled. Had he somehow opened the door through the Force?

  The Inquisitor spoiled that hope. “How perceptive,” he said, striding out of the darkness.

  No. This was impossible. This couldn’t be the Inquisitor. Not the real one. “You were on the Ghost. And that—all that—was definitely an illusion,” Ezra said.

  “It may have been. But I assure you, I am not.” The red blade that sizzled out of the Inquisitor’s hilt seemed to confirm that. Ezra backed away, bumping into the chamber wall.

  “No way out,” the Inquisitor said.

  “There’s always a way out, if I follow my training.” Ezra scrunched his brow, trying to focus—trying to convince himself that none of this was real.

  “Are you afraid to face your demise?” the Inquisitor said, coming closer.

  “No. Afraid of being alone again? Sure. Afraid of letting down my master? Absolutely.”

  The Inquisitor chuckled. “Your ‘master’ lies dead and rotting in a forgotten tunnel. You could hardly have let him down more.”

  Ezra couldn’t take those words to heart. Because he knew Kannan had believed in him. Kanan had sacrificed his own life so that Ezra could escape. Ezra would be disgracing Kanan’s memory if he believed the Inquisitor’s lies.

  “I’m not afraid,” he said.

  The Inquisitor snarled and swung. Ezra closed his eyes. He didn’t feel the blade slice into him. He felt nothing at all.

  “Big fears have you faced, young one
,” said a voice that sounded like a mischievous old-timer with an amphibian in his throat. “Come, see more clearly what you could not see before.”

  Ezra opened his eyes. He had all his limbs and wasn’t wounded. Best of all, the Inquisitor was gone. In his place floated a point of light that reminded Ezra of the will-o’-the-wisps travelers had reported in Lothal’s marshes. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “A guide,” the voice said.

  The light moved into the tunnel. Ezra pocketed his glowrod and followed.

  Kanan couldn’t meditate. His mind kept racing. He was worried about the kid. Might this have been a mistake? Might Ezra be too old for this test? When Kanan was trained, Jedi younglings were schooled at a very early age, so that fears from the outside world couldn’t corrupt them.

  Kanan opened his eyes. The temple’s outer chamber was as it had been, empty of everything but the two skeletons. The door to the tunnel remained closed. Ezra must still be in the inner temple. What was taking the kid so long?

  “Patience,” said a familiar voice. “Remember you nothing of your own training?”

  “Master Yoda?” Kanan peered around the empty chamber. “I must be losing it.”

  “Lost, yes. But what lost, hmmm? The question, that is,” the voice answered.

  It was Master Yoda. No other Jedi talked like that.

  Kanan dropped to his knees. “Master, how can this be?”

  “Be not concerned with how. Know I am here, because you are here. Changed something has.”

  Kanan mustered a false bravado as he spoke. “I have taken on an apprentice.”

  “Apprentice? And now master are you?”

  Kanan bowed his head. Master Yoda was right to reprimand him. He’d been imprudent to believe he could teach a Padawan, when his own training had been cut short when he was Ezra’s age.

  “I’m not sure of my decision,” Kanan said. “Not because of him or his abilities, but because of me, because of who I am.”

  “And who is that?”

  Kanan knelt in silence. Hera had asked him that same question in different ways. It was the one question he feared answering.

  “I’ve lost my way for a long time, but now I have a chance to change things.” He looked at the door to the inner temple. “I won’t let Ezra lose his way, not like I did.”

  Their exchange brought Kanan to a realization. This test was not designed solely for the apprentice. It was also a test for the master, for facing one’s fears was a lifelong struggle.

  The point of light brought Ezra to a junction of three tunnels. But its voice refused to tell him which one to travel down.

  “Your path you must decide.”

  Ezra considered the tunnels, right, left, then center, sensing nothing in the Force. Picking one seemed arbitrary. But maybe that was the point. It didn’t matter which tunnel he chose, as long as he remained committed to his choice. Just like he should be committed to his training.

  He headed down the center tunnel because it gave him a sense of balance. The path of the Jedi did not twist and turn—it was clear and consistent, with no shortcuts for its challenges.

  Ezra entered a cavern so massive it had its own night sky, sparkling with constellations he didn’t recognize. One resembled a round face with long, pointy ears.

  “Tell me,” the voice said. “Why must you become a Jedi?”

  Ezra gazed at the stars. “Well, I’ll become stronger, powerful—and I’d make the Empire suffer for everything it did. For everything it took. For my parents.”

  “Jedi way is revenge?” the voice inquired. “Teach you this, your master did?”

  “No,” Ezra said. “Kanan’s a good master, a great master.” The stars started to revolve in the sky and the cavern floor disappeared, except for a silver ring around Ezra’s feet.

  “Then why seek you revenge?”

  “I don’t,” Ezra insisted.

  “Inside you, much anger. Much fear.”

  The voice was right. But Ezra had other qualities, positive ones he’d only recently discovered. “Before I met Kanan, I only ever thought of myself,” he conceded. “But Kanan and the others don’t think like that. They help people, they give everything away. I see it, I see how it makes people feel.”

  “Feel, yes, how?” asked the voice.

  “Alive.” Ezra recalled his first trip to Tarkintown, when Zeb and Sabine handed out food and lifted the spirits of the starving refugees. “They feel alive. Like I do now.”

  Ezra was awash in stars. The constellations spun above him, around him, and even beneath the silver disk on which he stood. Then one point of light descended from the rest.

  “Ahead of you a difficult path there is,” said the voice. “A Jedi you may yet be.”

  Ezra stretched out his hand. The light landed, in the form of a crystal.

  When the door to the inner tunnel slid open and Ezra walked out, Kanan couldn’t mask his relief. “How are you?”

  “Different, but the same,” Ezra said.

  “I know what you mean.” And Kanan did. While Master Yoda had helped him accept that he was the right teacher to train Ezra, he still had doubts as to how best to instruct the boy. But that was natural. He wouldn’t be a good teacher if he didn’t question his own methods.

  “I found this.” Ezra opened his hand. A small, shiny crystal rested on his palm. “It’s good, right?”

  “That’s a kyber crystal.” Kanan had never seen one so beautiful.

  “Oh...wow!” Ezra stared at the crystal, then looked at Kanan. “What’s that?”

  Kanan rewarded his pupil with a sly grin. After he told Ezra what the Jedi used the crystals for, the kid couldn’t have been more excited if he’d won ten million credits.

  The effort to levitate the boulder was child’s play next to the concentration required to tune the kyber crystal. But once Ezra got back onto the Ghost, he maintained his level of focus. He spent days and nights in his cabin, tinkering with the spare parts the crew had given him. Every component had to work in perfect order with the crystal, else the whole device would be scrap.

  When he had finished, he went into the Ghost’s common room, where his friends waited. He gave the object that he’d constructed to Kanan for approval.

  “Well, it’s different. But that seems right for you.” Kanan returned the cylindrical object to Ezra. “Go for it.”

  Ezra took a breath, then pressed the activation button. A bright blue blade sprang to life and hummed as Ezra swung it gently through the air.

  Kanan, Hera, Zeb, Sabine, and even Chopper, with his dome lights, glowed with pride. Ezra had aced Kanan’s lesson. He had made his connection to the crystal.

  He had built his own lightsaber.

  MICHAEL KOGGE has written in the Star Wars galaxy for a long, long time. He penned the junior novelization for Star Wars Rebels—The Rebellion Begins, along with many other books in the Rebels series. His graphic novel Empire of the Wolf, an epic tale of werewolves in ancient Rome, was recently published by Alterna Comics. He lives in Los Angeles, residing online at www.michaelkogge.com.