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Chapter Text

The Final Order had broken into ragged flags and small tyrannies, a provisional Republic stitched trade and promise back together one lane at a time. Rey’s new Jedi were learning to listen before they learned to lift a blade and where left in careful hands while she also continued to learn and live with her loss, that was only her own to understand. Finn moved where need was loudest, relief ships, refugee corridors, teaching the younglings about choosing when to act; the Force had begun to answer him in ways that felt like weather turning. Chewbacca and Poe kept squadrons flying and led freighters missions, a commander made of late nights and borrowed luck; his messages arrived with grease on the edges and a joke tucked in. Rose rebuilt what war had taught to break: beacons, relays, the bones of the HoloNet, her schematics traveling faster than rumor. Jannah hunted the lost with Lando at her shoulder, following the ghost-trails of stolen children and the uniforms they’d been forced to wear.

Morning on Ajan Kloss came up blue-green with a faint pink through the canopy, soft and humid after a rainy night. Rey was already moving when the light found the clearing, bare feet in damp leaves and mud, palm wrapped around the training staff she’d carved from a fallen wing spar. She drew a circle in the dirt with her heel and used it as a compass: step, turn, strike, repeat, step, turn, open.

The Force moved with her, quiet now, thinned at the edges. She had learned to adapt to its new shape, hushed, slowed, like a frail and frightened old man. There had once been a second pulse braided through her own, a steadier rhythm under hers. But now with the emptiness, the world had tilted, faintly, to balance with the emptiness replacing where that beat had been. She had gotten used to walking with that tilt. She had trained herself to balance on the absence.

'Again,' she told herself, and the staff blurred though her tears for a moment before she regained her strength with a deep breath. this grief and pain wouldn’t be forevermore. She had to believe that.

When her muscles burned enough to keep her thoughts behind her, she stilled and let the staff rest across her shoulders. The forest held its breath. Birds muttered from high branches. Rey closed her eyes, and the quiet pressed close, the kind that sounds like a tide that pulls back but never comes back. She spun, alert, staff cutting a half-circle through the air- and then she froze.
Because he was there.

It wasn’t a vision. Not a dream. It was him. And it felt sudden just like a breath after drowning.
The Force didn’t whisper his name, it roared it, in her bones, in her soul, in her heart. The bond she thought had gone quiet, dead, dissolved into starlight, surged alive so violently she staggered, clutching at her chest as if to hold her ribs together.

Ben.

He stood just beyond the circle she’d drawn, haloed by shafts of green light through the canopy. No cloak. No weapon. Bare and silent. She hadn’t seen him since he vanished, after their last battle together on one side on Exegol, after he brought her back to life, after their kiss.

Rey’s heart lurched forward before her body dared move. The air between them felt electric, trembling, like the seconds before lightning touches ground.

'Ben?' she said, voice raw with disbelief.
Nothing.
Not even a blink.

The bond rippled again, real, undeniable, but it was different. The living warmth she remembered, the pulse that used to move between them like breath shared, was fractured. The thread was there, but frayed, every strand of it singing with distance and ache. It was like listening to someone call her name across a storm, the sound torn to shreds before it reached her.

'Can you hear me?' she asked, softer now, as if the Force itself might shy away if she shouted.

He didn’t speak. But his eyes, Force, his eyes, they knew her. They held that same searching sorrow she’d seen the moment before he’d vanished on Exegol, when the dyad had gone still in her hands like a heartbeat fading. For an instant, she felt the old rhythm between them start again: two currents leaning toward each other. It almost steadied her.

Then the connection snapped.
The clearing went cold. His outline shivered, edges coming apart in the light.
And before she could take a step toward him, he was gone, like a reflection drowned by ripples.

The Force fell silent again.

Rey stayed very still. The wind pressed against her skin, cool and trembling, as if the galaxy itself was catching its breath. She pressed a hand to her sternum. The bond still hummed there, faint, wounded, but not gone. Not gone!

She whispered, ‘Ben…’ once more, into the quiet. Nothing answered.
But she could feel the echo this time, deep under the silence: the unmistakable truth that something of him still existed, scattered, calling her without words. 

And that was when she knew: the Force wasn’t done with either of them.

Rey let the breath out through her teeth. The clearing was a clearing again. Behind her ribs, something that was missing had returned.

She planted the staff and knelt. Mud dampened her knees. She set the staff across her lap and pressed her palms to the ground, the way Luke and Leia had taught her when seeking guidance. Not to pray- but to listen.

'Show me,' she told the Force. 'If there’s a way to reach him, show me the shape of it.'

She poured everything she was into that plea, the steadiness Luke had taught her, the faith Leia had trusted her with, the ache that had sat on her shoulders like a boulder since Exegol. The world shrank to heartbeat and wind, and she waited for either to answer.

For a long time, there was only quiet. Then a ripple disturbed it, as if a stone had been dropped into a still pool just out of sight. The trees darkened, and a light that did not come from any angle Rey could name gathered three paces in front of her.

He arrived small and sure, not as a surprise but as a memory the forest had always been keeping: Yoda, perched atop a knotted root that hadn’t been there a blink ago. His ears were lanterns of green dusk. His eyes were bright water.

'Hmm,' he said, which was both greeting and diagnosis. 'Not looking for me, you were.'

Rey exhaled a laugh she didn’t feel. 'No, Master. But I’m glad.'

'Gladness, yes.' He tipped his head, listening past sound. 'Also stubbornness. Also fear. Mm. A braid you have made.'

Rey swallowed. 'I saw him. Not a dream. He didn’t speak.'

'Speak, the dead need not, to be heard,' Yoda said, mouth quirking. 'But…silent, he was, because a gate is closed.'

'What kind of gate?' Rey leaned forward despite herself. 'I felt him. Like he’d been… put away.'

Yoda folded his little hands on his walking stick. 'Rare, it is, that two become one in the Force. A dyad, two lanterns that share a single flame. Burn together, they do. And sometimes… scatter together, they can.'

'Scatter,' Rey repeated, tasting the word. 'Into what?'

'Into where,' Yoda corrected gently. 'Pieces, hm? Not the flesh—no. The story that makes a person.' His eyes softened. 'Know the tale of the Weaver and the Dismembered King, do you?'

Rey shook her head. 'No.'

'Old, it is,' Yoda said, and the forest seemed to lean in, happy to be a classroom. 'From Jedha, some say: from the worlds before names, others do. A king there was, proud, cruel, loved, feared. Torn apart by his rival he was, scattered, his crown made a trap. The land withered, because whole, the story was not.'

Rey had the sense that the air had thickened, the way it did before rain. 'And the Weaver?'

'A woman with a needle of light,' Yoda said, amused by his own poetry. 'No army, she had. No throne. Threads she followed, sorrow in one village, silence in another, a hand that did not know how to open in a third. In each place, a piece of the king’s being she found: his Name, caught in a bell; his Voice, caged in a tower of echo; his Hand, bound to a sword that wanted blood. His Shadow, too- ah!- hiding in a friend it did.'

Rey’s mouth went dry. The words felt like they’d been waiting for her to arrive. 'Why would someone scatter a person like that?'

'To make the story safe,' Yoda said, eyes glinting. 'Safe for those who fear its ending. A broken king cannot rise, hmm? A broken story cannot grow. But the Weaver- she knew a thing: that wholeness, not power, brings balance.'

'And she … put him back together?' Rey heard the thread running through the question and didn’t try to cut it.

'Not as before,' Yoda said. 'Whole is not same as untouched.' He tapped the stick against the root. 'Piece by piece, a consent she asked. From the bell, the Name agreed to be spoken truly. From the tower, the Voice agreed to speak and to listen. From the sword, the Hand agreed to act without hunger. Last, from the Shadow, mm. That one chose to belong, or else nothing held.'

Rey saw Ben on the threshold of the circle again, unspeaking, felt the locked box of him. 'If there’s a gate closed, I can open it. If he’s scattered, I can-' She stopped, sudden, because the old fear rose up: that she was about to do something terrible with good intentions.

'Ask yourself,' Yoda said softly, as if he’d heard the thought in her bones. 'Why do this?'

'Because he saved me,' Rey said, surprised at how steady her voice was. 'Because he chose to give me his life. Because he turned. Because he’s not… finished. Neither am I.'

'Honest,' Yoda approved. 'Dangerous, too. The dyad- peculiar, hm? Power, it is. But a leash, it can be, if power you seek.' He squinted, measuring. 'What you felt, the silent one? A Name, perhaps. Or a Shadow tugging. Unkind hands, there are, who would keep the pieces apart. Harvest the tether, they would. A Choir that sings the living Force to sleep.'

'The Null Choir,' Rey said before she could stop herself, as if the name had been waiting behind her teeth. The clearing seemed to dim at the edges, the way a room does when the sun is hidden behind the clouds.

Yoda nodded, grave. 'Old songs, they twist. Holes in the world, they make, where stories go to die. If a path you walk, walk it with eyes open you must.'

Rey looked down at her hands. Scarred knuckles. Dirt crescents at her nails. The saber at her hip, quiet as a kept promise. She remembered a boy on a balcony, a man on a ledge, a partner offering her a hand, saying nothing and everything.

'If I go,' she said, 'I won’t be trying to drag him back to what he was. I’ll be asking his pieces if they want to be whole. And if they do-' She lifted her eyes to Yoda’s. '-I’ll bring them together. Like the Weaver.'

Yoda’s smile was quick and young. 'Needle of light, you have.' He tapped her saber hilt. 'Thread, too- the dyad’s thin line. Do not yank. Do not cut. Weave.'

He slid down from the root with the soft, old-cat grace that made Rey’s heart ache. 'A gift, one left,' he said, and set the tip of his stick against the circle she’d drawn. The dirt lifted in a faint spiral, like a map in the air, and settled into six small markings spaced around the ring: a slash like a letter, a dot, a line, a little crown, a handprint, an oval filled with shade.

'Name,' Yoda said, touching the slash. 'Voice.' The dot. 'Hand.' The hand. 'Crown.' The crown. 'Heart.' The line. He hovered his stick over the oval last. 'Shadow. Most talkative, the quietest one is.'

Rey’s mouth twitched. 'I’ll start with Name,' she decided, feeling the rightness of it in her bones. 'Where names go to be true.'

Yoda’s eyes warmed. 'Jedha listens,' he said. 'If you listen back.'

The light around him thinned. Rey wanted to ask a hundred more questions What will it cost? Will I lose the dyad if I do this right? Will I lose myself? but Yoda only tilted his head, pleased and sorrowing at once.

'Remember,' he said, almost a whisper now, 'whole, you seek to be. Not the same.'

A wind chimed in rustling the branches. The root was a root again. Rey was alone in the clearing with the damp circle and the six small signs the wind had not yet erased.

She rose, shoulders squared around a quiet that felt like resolve instead of absence. 'All right,' she told the morning. 'I will find you. I will bring you back. Whole.'

She slung the staff across her back, palmed the saber, and stepped out of the circle. She had a new mission. 

Chapter Text

The first light over Jedha wasn’t gold. It came up white, thin as powdered bone, scalding where it touched the broken ridgelines. Wind slid down from the cliffs in long, dry breaths, shouldering drifts of sand into slow-moving ribs that crossed and uncrossed like the planet’s own fingerprint. Rey set the ship down between two columns of rock the color of old bones and watched dust roll away from the landing struts like surf.

Metal sighed as the engines wound to silence. In the hush that followed, the planet’s sound reached her, no louder than a held breath, no softer than a heartbeat under cloth. She stood in it a moment with her eyes closed and her hand on the ramp control, letting the place introduce itself: stone-salt air; sun already sharp; the faint, hairline tingle of kyber somewhere beneath everything, as if the desert had a nervous system.

“Ready?” she asked without looking back.

BB-8 answered with a bright, clipped chirp that carried better than any human voice in the thin morning. The ramp dropped. Heat climbed aboard like an intruder.

Rey drew up her hood and stepped down into it. Travel gear layered her: sun-bleached scarf, scuffed boots, a jacket that had learned how to be many colors. The staff she’d carved from a fallen wing spar rode her back, the leather-wrapped middle worn dark by use. BB-8 rolled at her heel, treads whispering. Their twin tracks started immediately to disappear.

They had put a city here once, a holy one; now it was bones stitched with newer cloth. Broken spires threw long shadows that ended in scaffolds and pulley rigs. Pilgrims hauled stone in teams, old women with veils pinned neatly against the wind, boys whose laughter bounced off the limestone and came back more solemn, men with sleeves rolled to rope and scar. Between toppled walls, banners moved, their edges frayed but their colors stubborn. Hammer strokes sounded in an easy rhythm that made the ruins feel less like aftermath and more like a body remembering itself.

Rey walked with the slope, letting her weight find the path the wind left every night. The Force felt bright and cracked at once, light refracted through a thousand broken panes. When she reached toward it, it reached back in syllables: not words, exactly, more the shape of words. Beneath that, deeper than the stone’s slow song, something tugged like an undertow at her sternum.

Not a new presence. An old contour.

She kept her breathing even. The desert didn’t care for people who forgot how to breathe underneath the heat of the punishing sun.

Two men passed carrying a lintel between them, they nodded, and Rey nodded back. At a temporary shrine, a door frame set upright and draped with strips of cloth, a girl lit a cone of resin. Smoke climbed in a thin black thread and was shredded clean by the wind. Someone sang two notes under their breath and let them fall.

BB-8 beeped a private commentary on the relative stability of the scaffolding. Rey hummed agreement and touched his dome without breaking stride.

The path narrowed between a flank of crumbling masonry and a dune with a polished face. The dune made a sound as it moved, a hush-hum, like a bell a very long way off. Rey paused there, not because of the sound but because the undertow inside her had deepened. If she closed her eyes, she didn’t, not yet, she could almost feel it in her palms the way you feel a kettle’s rising steam before you hear it boil.

“Here,” she said softly. It wasn’t a declaration, just an acknowledgment. BB-8 gave a curious, rising tweet.

Ahead, the canyon opened on what had once been a plaza. Now it was a field of wreckage and repair: blocks stacked by hand into new walls, ropes looped around the throats of pillars to keep them from leaning farther, a crane fashioned from three boom arms lashed together and counterweighted with a crate of river stones. From the far side came the patient rasp of chisel on rock. People looked up when she stepped into the open and then away again when she did not stop them from their tasks. Pilgrims were interested but not intrusive; a world like this taught you to mind your own devotions.

Rey angled toward a cluster of tarps where kettles steamed. A woman with an old wise face poured water over fistfuls of leaves and handed her a cup without asking for coin. “Traveler,” the woman said. “Seek the path or the prayer?”

“Both,” Rey said, because it was true. “And a bell.”

The woman’s eyes creased pleasantly. “Plenty of bells, not all of them hanging. The one you mean-” She tilted her chin toward the spine of the ruins, where a single arch still held its curve against the sky. It was at the end of the city borders, the arch threw a perfect crescent of shadow on the ground. In its center, suspended from a cracked beam by a white chain, hung a bell carved from kyber so pale it hoarded the light. It was webbed with hairline fractures. Its rim was crowded with glyphs cut by hands. Under the sand, under her ribs, the dyad’s old rhythm stirred, faint, not gone, like the moment a tide turns. Rey set her foot firmer in the sand and felt the hum answer, a heartbeat that wasn’t only hers greeting the one that was. BB-8 looking up at her with curious eye.

“It hasn’t rung in a year. Better for it, some say. Let the Force rest.”

Rey took a sip of the drink and set it down. “Does it want to?”

“Who asks the Force what it wants?” the woman said, amused, and then sobered as if remembering something. “Hush-walkers have come through. Wrap their mouths. Bind their clappers. Say we keep the wound open with our ringing.”

“Do they have a name?” Rey asked.

The woman’s mouth moved but she didn’t say a thing. 

Wind combed the plaza clean ahead of the arch. Sand ran in pale streams down the scarred faces of the stones. Looking at the arch, Rey felt the Force tighten and loosen around her like pulsing heartbeat. The undertow gathered. She recognized its pull. It wasn’t asking her to drown, it was inviting her to wade. 

She crouched down in the sand, under her palm a hum that wasn’t only coming fromthe planet. She flexed her fingers to let it pass through. BB-8 rolled exactly at her heel.

“Do you feel it?” she whispered more to herself than to him.

He whistled a sequence that meant: I feel you feeling it.

Rey smiled at the sand before looking up and squinting back at the arch glowing in the sun. She then looked around her to ask the woman more questions, but she was gone. She ground herself back in the present. The market gathered where three alleys widened into a knot of shade. Canvas tarps snapped like tired sails, heat pooled under them in a way that felt familiar to her, from her time on Jakku. The air smelled of boiled grains, solder, and the faint copper of old blood baked into stone. Rey let her steps slow. She knew markets, how to be smaller than her shadow, how to move unnoticed.

She traded a fistful of coins for a flask of water, a pouch of salted dates, and two squares of flatbread still warm from the griddle. The vendor eyed the coil, tapped it with a thumbnail, and gave her a look that said this doesn’t come from this side of the galaxy. Rey didn’t answer his look and moved forward. BB-8 chimed thanks and tucked a date under his dome with proprietary satisfaction.

A row of prayer flags strung between broken pillars marked the edge of the market proper. Beyond them, a low structure had been raised from stacked blocks and driftwood, open to the air on three sides. In its shade, an old woman sat on a woven mat with a bowl of polished stones and a bundle of thin reed sticks at her knees. Her hair, braided into a crown, was gray-white; her eyes were clouded—the kind of cloud that didn’t shift when the light did. A small bell, no bigger than a teacup, rested beside her hand. Its clapper was wrapped in red thread.

“Keeper,” someone murmured as they passed.

Rey stopped. The Force tucked itself closer around the little shelter, attentive as a bird on a rail.

“May I sit?” she asked.

“If you can do it without making a sound,” the woman said, smiling toward Rey’s voice.

Rey smiled back before she remembered the woman couldn’t see it. She knelt without her joints clicking (thank you, training), and set the bread between them by way of greeting. BB-8 rolled into the shade, powered down one whirring fan, and tried to be inconspicuous. He failed in a cheerful way.

“You seek something,” the woman said, fingertips finding the edge of the bread. “Or perhaps someone.”

“Both,” Rey said. “I’m looking for a bell.”

“Aren’t we all,” the woman said, amused. She traced the tiny bell with the back of a knuckle. “The bell you mean hangs under the old arch. The Bell of True Names. It remembers well, when it wants to.”

“When it wants to,” Rey repeated.

The woman tipped her face as if toward a sound only she could hear. “It does not answer lies. Many shout their names to it; few listen for the answer.”

Rey let herself breathe once before saying, “I’m not here to shout.”

“No,” the woman said softly. “You’re here to find someone whose name you can still feel.”

Rey’s throat tightened. “Yes.”

“Good.” The woman’s hands moved through the bowl of stones, sifting for one by texture alone. “Names are not trophies. They are doors. You do not beat a door down and expect it to keep the rain out afterward.” She found the stone she wanted and pressed it into Rey’s palm. It was onyx black, smooth and oval, warm from the shade. A single red line ran through its center, a seam so fine it felt like a healed cut. Like Kintsugi. Like Kylo Ren’s mask, Rey thought.

“Carry that,” the woman said. “When you speak, hold it the way you would hold your breath, gently. And if the bell stays quiet, listen for what in you is talking too loudly.”

“Thank you,” Rey said, because there was nothing else to say that wouldn’t be noise. BB-8 peeped a question at the tiny bell. The woman’s smile widened.

“You may ring it,” she told him. “It makes no sound.”

BB-8 nudged the thread-wrapped clapper. The bell did not ring. Still, the small motion made something in Rey’s sternum thrum in friendly answer.

The woman added, as if remembering a courtesy: “If the Hush-Walkers come while you’re listening, keep your feet where your breath is. They will try to move one or the other.”

“Hush-Walkers?” Rey asked, though she knew.

“The ones who bind their clappers.” The woman’s clouded eyes turned toward a sliver of light. “They’ve been collecting silences. Imagine a net. Imagine a sea.”

Rey did, and didn’t like it. She stood, slipping the stone into a pocket inside her sleeve. “Thank you.”

BB-8 trilled a polite farewell that he hoped sounded pious. Rey inclined her head. The market rustled and breathed around them, indifferent and kind. She walked out from under the flags with the salt taste of the dates in her mouth and something steadier than hunger in her chest.

The arch waited, black against the bleaching sky.

“Come on,” she told BB-8.

He beeped: I was already with you.

Rey laughed once, small and unguarded, and crossed the plaza toward the bell.

---

Night on Jedha arrived by subtraction: the color leached from the sky, the heat folded itself up and slid away under the stones, and the wind forgot to carry sand for a while. The arch went from black to darker; the bell didn’t change at all, which made it brighter by comparison. 

Rey waited until the last of the pilgrims drifted back toward their shelters, until the kettles under the tarps stopped steaming and the market’s lanterns winked out one by one. She had always liked places when they remembered how to be quiet. Not silenced, quiet. There was a difference.

BB-8 settled a few meters behind her with his dome low and his ports dimmed. Rey slipped her staff from her back, set it across her knees, and went to the ground. The sand held the day’s stored warmth. She put her palms to it and felt the ground say here. 

Rey closed her eyes. “Show me,” she told the Force. “If there’s a way to reach him, show me the shape of it.”

She didn’t hold her breath. She didn’t count. She let her focus widen until heartbeat and wind were not interruptions but instruments steadying each other. The stone the priestess had given her warmed in the pocket against her wrist like a living thing.

The bell vibrated. The sound happened inside her bones first, then in her teeth, then far away in the arch where the kyber hung. The air tightened the way it does before lightning.

The question wasn’t a word. It arrived as a pressure that matched the shape of her chest exactly. Who are you?

Rey’s first answer occurred by reflex, the muscle memory of a lifetime. “Rey,” she said under her breath, and felt the way the name fit, clean, spare, true as water. The bell did not ring. Not yet.

The second answer rose like a bruise. “Palpatine.” Saying it tasted like iron. It did not sit in her mouth the way the first had. It pushed. It insisted. She didn’t spit it out; she set it down deliberately in the space she’d made and waited for the ache to stop flinching into anger.

Wind moved sand in a skin-sound. BB-8’s tiny fan whirred, paused, whirred again.

“Rey of Jakku,” she said next, because the scavenger hadn’t stopped existing just because she’d learned other ways to survive. “Rey Skywalker,” she said after, because names could be chosen, and promises, too. She held both in her hands, palms up, the way she would hold two birds that didn’t trust her yet, and didn’t try to close her fingers around either.

The bell’s resonance changed. It found the seam in the stone the priestess had given her and ran along it like a thread through a needle’s eye.

Who are you? the pressure asked again, gentler now, less a demand than an invitation.

“All of them,” Rey said, and for once her voice didn’t tremble on the word all. “Rey of Jakku. Palpatine’s granddaughter. Luke and Leia’s student. Rey Skywalker. The one who loved him. The one he loved.” That last confession scraped coming out, not because it wasn’t true but because truth could still be tender where it had been cut. She breathed into the ache until her breath didn’t snag anymore. “I’m listening.”

Something like relief moved through the arch. The bell drew breath and gave it back, and this time it rang.

The tone slid under the plaza, through the old cistern, down cracks in rock that remembered being riverbed. It traveled up the arch and into the empty air. Rey felt it ring through her sternum, along her spine, out to her fingertips where her hands rested on the sand. The glyphs crowding the bell’s rim seemed to shift -not because they- did but because the light did, and she read without being close enough to be reading: names blowing over her skin like dune sand.

Then one settled.

Ben.

Not a title. Not a mask. Not even the full weight of Solo, although that, too, had a place in the sound. The name under the names, the one the Force had breathed over him when his mother carried him, the one that had not stopped being true even when he had been most lost.

Rey’s breath left her in a broken sound. Heat slicked her lashes. BB-8 chirped a tiny, strangled exclamation of triumph from where he sat pretending not to listen.

She didn’t say the name back right away. She let it fill her, the way you let water rise so you can float. When she spoke, it was a promise and a greeting and a memory in one:

“Ben.”

The second tone blossomed out of the first, harmonic and inevitable. The bell wasn’t louder now; it was deeper, as if it had found a frequency the world had been saving. Somewhere under the plaza, something answered, a reply out of rock and time. Rey felt herself smile without deciding to.

And then, at the edge of the resonance, a thin scrape. A hand on a clapper that wasn’t this bell’s. A thread tightened with the intent to cut.

BB-8’s dome snapped up. He emitted one flat warning tone. Rey lifted her head, palms leaving the sand, and the bell’s sound moved with her.

Figures stood just beyond the arch’s shadow, the same pale wrappings as the market woman had described. Cloth bound across their mouths and around their wrists. Bells at their belts, clappers tightly tied.

“Hush-Walkers,” Rey murmured.

The lead monk raised empty hands, palms outward. Their eyes were calm, pitying, the way water sometimes looks when it’s about to take you.

“Pilgrim,” they said, voice low with practice. “Let the bell rest. Every ring keeps the wound open.”

Rey rose without her joints popping, staff in one hand but not lifted. The bell’s aftersound nested in her ribs. “It isn’t wounded by being heard.”

“You are,” the monk said gently. “You’re bleeding yourself out through a name.”

Rey thought of the stone in her sleeve, of its seam healed by time and pressure both. “No. I’m stitching.”

The monk’s gaze flicked to her hands, as if they could see the thread. They gave the smallest sigh. “We can take the weight for you. Give us the silence. We will hold it.”

“Silence isn’t a thing you hold,” Rey said, still cordial. “It’s a choice you make.”

“Then choose to leave.”

Wind moved a veil. If the monk had smiled, Rey didn’t think they had, but the feeling was the same, it would not have been kind. “We’ll help you.”

They stepped forward as one, very gently, hands extending as if to lead her away from a cliff’s edge.

BB-8 rolled fast and put himself squarely between Rey and the lead monk, dome lowered like a shield. He beeped a single syllable that needed no translation.

“No,” Rey said, and did not raise her voice.

The first monk reached for the bound bell at their hip. Rey moved before the motion completed, staff a blur that intercepted the wrist and turned the momentum down into sand. Two more slid in at her flanks. Rey stepped into the circle she’d drawn at dawn on a dozen worlds in training, breath and feet making the compass complete. She took space when they tried to narrow it and gave it back when they tried to overwhelm.

“Please,” one murmured, genuinely distressed. “You don’t have to hurt.”

“I’m not,” Rey said, and tapped their calf just enough to make the knee bend and the body kneel. “And neither do you.”

BB-8 shot a precise, corrective jolt into a shin and chirped mind your ankle with practised indignation. The monk yelped, more surprised than harmed, and hopped backward, clutching at an offended limb.

The lead monk came in close then, hands raised not to strike but to cover- a movement meant to blanket sound. Rey felt the bell’s tone falter around the edges. She inhaled like a diver and let the note in her chest carry the line the big bell had started. She didn’t need the kyber now. She had resonance.

“Let us end it,” the leader said, and Rey wondered who had taught them to speak like that.

“It doesn’t end.” Rey rotated her wrists, the staff a fulcrum, and pried the leader’s hands apart as if opening shutters.

For a heartbeat the monk met her eyes, and something like grief went through their calm. 

The leader staggered a single step, the pity in their eyes cracking to show something like grief.

A voice called from the market edge. Then another. Lanterns bobbed as people hurried toward the arch, pilgrims with shawls thrown over night-shirts, stone haulers with dust on their arms, the blind priestess walking straight as if led by a thread.

“What’s happening?”

“The bell- listen!”

“It’s ringing- by the Whills, it’s ringing-”

The Hush-Walkers stilled. Their heads turned as one toward the murmur swelling at the plaza’s rim. Witnesses. Names. Unbound mouths.

The leader looked back at Rey, something complicated flashing once across their face- frustration, calculation, a flicker of fear the size of a blink.

Then they stepped back and made a small gesture that meant enough or later or we will try another way. The others fell away with them, the wind filling their absence like water returning to a groove in rock. As they turned, the last of them paused and looked over their shoulder. Their voice carried: 

“This mission you seek, will make you lonelier than you know.”

Rey let the words slide down the outside of her and into the sand. “I’m not alone,” she said, not for them, and heard BB-8’s prompt, smug chirp as if to underline the obvious.

Silence returned, the kind she trusted. The bell’s glow faded to sky-light, but its tone didn’t disappear so much as nest deeper, like a coal under ash deciding to be patient.

Rey lowered the staff. Her pulse eased. The pressure that had asked Who are you? now felt like a hand resting, companionably, on her back, as if proving to her that she is not in the wrong, that she is not alone. She placed her palm against the kyber’s cold curve and bowed her head at the engraving.

“Thank you,” she told it. “For giving it back.”

If bells could nod, this one would have.

Light from the first lanterns reached the arch. The crowd pressed nearer, faces upturned, eyes shining the way eyes do when they remember they were made to see. Silence followed- not absence, but that true quiet the priestess had spoken of, the kind that makes room. Then the bell rang again, sweet and certain, and the listening people breathed as if they’d been underwater a very long time and had just remembered air.

Rey’s throat tightened. She touched two fingers lightly to the kyberin gratitude one more time and then to the place under her ribs where the name had settled.

“Ben,” she whispered, and the bell’s aftersound agreed.

---

Dawn found the plaza the way dew finds grass on worlds that still remember rain. The light came up thin and silver, drawing edges on stones, laying a soft blade across the arch. Rey sat with her back against a fallen block, BB-8 tucked in at her hip like a cat that had decided she was furniture. She’d slept in stitches, three breaths, wake, four, wake, never fully letting go of the resonance nested in her chest.

It was still there. Not heavy. Not sharp. A warmth, exactly where she used to press her hand when she had to remind herself to keep breathing. She touched the place now out of habit and felt the answer rise to meet her palm.

“Ben,” she said into the new light, voice scratchy with sleep.

No voice answered. Not yet. But the bond shifted, a small, undeniable pulse, once, like a heartbeat returning after a long breath held.

BB-8’s dome pinged up as if he’d been waiting to see if she’d say it. He made a pleased chirrup that he tried -and failed- to make sound casual.

“I found your name,” she said, not whispering now. “I’ll find the rest.”

She let herself sit in the promise until BB-8 nudged her ribs with a careful bump and a hopeful chirp that meant: food?

“Negotiable,” she said, and pushed herself upright. She brushed sand from her knees and gathered what little they’d scattered the night before. The market was waking: kettles began to steam; a boy yawned so extravagantly it seemed to rearrange his bones; someone struck flint against steel to coax a stingy spark into being.

The blind priestess was where Rey had left her, as if night had passed around her like a river around a rock. Rey placed the stone back in the bowl and pushed the bread close by way of exchange, the last square, wrapped against dust.

“It rang,” the woman said, smiling into the air.

“It did.” Rey hesitated. “It gave me a name that was already mine to hear.”

“Those are the best kind.” The woman’s fingers patted the bowl until they found the stone Rey had returned and then rested there as if on a sleeping animal. “Take care.”

Rey hesitated. “They came. The Hush-Walkers.”

“They always come,” the priestess said, as if noting the weather. “They will come again. People who love silence fear witnesses.”

Rey glanced past the priestess to the market’s edge. A boy with a tray of tea wove through the stalls. A pair of masons argued amiably about leverage. A thin man in clean white wrappings- not monk-white, pilgrim-white- studied a rack of prayer flags much too intently. Her shoulders set themselves without asking.

BB-8 gave a low burr. He’d seen him too.

A shadow fell across the mat. Rey’s hand found the staff by habit, then stilled. It was only a child, wary and proud, holding out a wrapped parcel the size of a fist.

“For you,” the child said. “From the white mouths.”

Rey took the bundle. The cloth was clean and rough, bound with a narrow strip of dark leather. BB-8’s dome dipped, lens narrowing. Rey loosened the tie. Inside lay a small bell clapper wrapped in gray thread, a smear of black resin sealing the knot. Someone had painted the resin with a thin white line in the shape of a closed eye.

Under it, a strip of parchment: LET THE FORCE REST. SILENCE IS MERCY.

Rey let the words pass through her and out again. “Who gave you this?” she asked the child.

“A man,” the child said, practical. He pointed toward the prayer-flag rack where the too-clean pilgrim had been. The rack held only flags. Whoever had lingered there was gone.

Rey folded the cloth back around the clapper, re-tied it with the dark strip, and placed the bundle on the mat between them as if it were a question that could wait for a better day to be answered. The priestess’s mouth went thin.

BB-8 angled himself so his lens took in more of the alley mouths. He pinged Rey a list of sightlines and exits.

“I have to go,” Rey said. It felt like leaving a table with a story still being told. “There’s more to find.”

“There always is,” the priestess said. Her hand found Rey’s wrist with unerring gentleness and squeezed once. “You’ll know where.”

Rey stood and walked to the end of the square. The market had filled while they talked. People were careful around her, curious, bright-eyed, not intrusive, they had probably heard by now about the woman who made the bell chime. A mason raised two fingers in greeting and went back to his wall. The thin pilgrim in white had not reappeared, but Rey felt him in the air like a rubbed place on skin.

“Come on,” she told BB-8. “One more listen.”

They didn’t go back to the bell. Instead Rey stopped at the plaza’s edge where the wind came clean off the dunes. She set the staff upright in the sand, slid her palms to the ground, and let the market’s noise fall through her like water through mesh. 

“Show me,” she said into the hush under the clatter. “If there’s a way to reach him, if he wants to be reached, show me the shape of it.”

The world narrowed, heartbeat, wind, the kettle’s thin whistle three stalls away, and then narrowed again, to just the space in front of her where the light thickened as if deciding to be visible.

He was there.

Not the shivering outline from the clearing- more anchored, edged in morning. Ben stood a few paces off, inside the angle of her staff’s shadow, as if he’d chosen the shade because it touched hers. No cloak, no weapon.

He didn’t speak. His mouth shaped nothing. But his eyes found her and stayed, and she felt the old rightness of being seen by someone who recognized the whole sum of what he was seeing.

“Hi,” she said.

He glanced to her left. Not a twitch. Adeliberate, precise invitation: look.

Rey followed the angle of his gaze. It landed on a vendor’s cloth strung between two poles: a printed star chart, cheap and inaccurate. The Mid Rim sprawled across it in faded ink. Someone had annotated the map with chalk: trade routes, warnings, a child’s drawing of a womp rat in the corner. E-7 Relay.

Ben’s eyes shifted back to her, then returned to the chart. He lifted his hand, only that, and held two fingers close together, the way you’d show a small gap. A beat. A second. A third. Then stop. And another. And one more. Then he put his arm down.

His eyes slid again toward the star chart. Then he looked back at her and let the smallest question live in the space between them: do you hear it?

Rey stopped trying to hear with her ears. She let the market fall through her like water through mesh- voices, kettles, BB-8’s hum- and cupped the hush beneath. There, under the plaza’s old stones, three soft taps and then two, like a heartbeat remembering a rhythm: tap-tap-tap, tap-tap.

BB-8’s dome snapped toward the same rhythm, his internal speaker answering with a barely audible hum. He modulated it. The taps replied, aligning with his pulse. He threw a faint projection onto the back of the stall: coordinates resolving shaky, then cleaner E-7 DERELICT RELAY / THE TOWER OF ECHO in someone else’s forgotten font.

Rey breathed out. “A tower that listens,” she said, so quiet no one heard it, not even BB-8.

Ben’s mouth did not move. His gaze warmed. The light around him began to loosen. He held her eyes long enough to place a promise there, then thinned into daylight as if the morning had reclaimed what it had loaned.

“I’ll find it,” Rey told the space he’d been, the bond, herself. “I’ll listen.”

The air shivered once, then went still.

She was halfway through the breath that comes after revelation when BB-8’s dome snapped toward the alley mouth behind the spice stall. He warbled a warning pitch she’d learned not to ignore. Never underestimate a droid. Isn’t that what Leia had taught her?

The man she’d noticed earlier- the one studying the prayer flags too intently, was back. Only now he wasn’t pretending to be a pilgrim. The wrappings around his throat were gray, the color of ash after it forgets the fire that made it. His right hand hung heavy inside his sleeve, shape wrong for a hand.

Rey’s grip found her staff before her thoughts did. She pivoted, scanning. Two more figures detached from the crowd: same pale cloth, same deliberate quiet.

The Hush-Walkers hadn’t left. They’d only waited for the witnesses to look away.

“Move,” she told BB-8.

The first monk lifted his covered mouth. “You’ve called something awake,” he said, voice sanded down to calm. “Let it sleep again.”

Rey backed toward the plaza edge. “No.”

“Then we’ll help you forget the way.”

The sleeve came up; a pulse of blue static cracked against the stones where she’d stood. BB-8 shrieked, rolled hard left. Rey vaulted a crate, staff blurring. She caught the next strike on the metal haft, it burned through her palms, but she held, and swept the attacker’s legs. The hush-cloth slipped for a second; a face young and tired flashed behind it before vanishing under another layer of discipline.

More of them, six now, closing a ring.

“BB-8, smoke,” she snapped.

He fired a small charge into the sand. A hiss, then a bloom of chalky dust veiled the square. Rey darted through the haze, hit one Walker’s wrist with a sharp crack that sent the static rod flying, spun, and caught another across the ribs. The bell’s tone from last night lived in her bones, guiding her through the pattern, strike, pivot, breathe.

The world narrowed to rhythm. Her staff met each whispering move with an echo of its own. Still, they pressed closer, their silence heavy as pressure in the ears before a storm.

A net of bound clappers came out, hurled low to tangle her legs. She leapt it barely in time, the cords grazing her boots and leaving a frostbite chill.

She flung the staff down like a lightning rod. The shock from the impact sent a hollow boom through the plaza, a resonant thud that stole their balance long enough for her to sprint past them. BB-8 was already rolling toward the alley that led back to the landing flats, beeping frantic intervals: now-now-now.

They followed. Of course they did.

Blaster bolts stitched sparks along the walls as she ran. She jumped a fallen arch, landed hard enough to jolt her teeth, kept going. Behind her, the hum of their weapons modulated like a conductor bringing a choir to pitch. The air itself began to vibrate with wrong sound, a frequency that made her thoughts blur at the edges.

The Conductor, she thought. Listening through them.

“BB-8!” she shouted. “Cut their channel!”

He swerved sideways, fired a pulse from his internal welder into a metal support. The resonance rebounded, short, sharp, disharmonic. The vibration in the air hiccuped, broke, left only wind. The Walkers faltered mid-stride, shaking their heads as if a weight had fallen off.

That was all the time she needed.

The Falcon’s ramp was already down. Rey sprinted the last stretch, grabbed BB-8 with the Force and flung him up the ramp ahead of her. She dove after, slapped the panel. The engines woke with a bellow that sent dust scudding in waves across the flats.

Through the closing ramp she caught a last glimpse of the plaza, white-wrapped figures regrouping, the leader lifting their face toward her, eyes lit not with rage but with intent. The Conductor’s intent. A promise: We will follow your noise.

Rey didn’t look away until the planet fell beneath them.

She collapsed into the pilot’s chair, breath ragged, pulse syncing with the ship’s hum. BB-8 chirped a diagnostic, one minor scorch, three dented panels, nothing fatal. She laughed, sharp and breathless.

“Remind me to thank you later.”

He beeped something smug and threw the coordinates she’d seen on the market chart onto the nav console: TOWER OF ECHO.

Rey’s hands steadied on the controls. Outside, Jedha disappeared as the stars stretched. Her reflection in the canopy glass looked back at her, dust-streaked, eyes too bright, alive.

“I’ll find it,” she whispered again, meaning the ower, the voice, the man who had looked at her through light and silence alike. “And I’ll listen.”

The ship leapt into hyperspace, stars dragging into lines.

Chapter Text

Hyperspace thinned around them like torn silk.

The stars stretched, shivered, and fell back into themselves, leaving only black water and lightning. BB-8 gave a low, uneasy trill. The nav screen flickered with static. Out the cockpit window, something immense loomed, not a planet, not exactly, but a structure, a silhouette half-devoured by storms. Solar fins jutted from its spine like broken wings; a long transmitter dish hung at an angle, cracked and glinting whenever the lightning struck.

The Tower of Echo. It was built by the Jedi Signal Corps during the Republic. Its job was to record and transmit. The system captured transmissions and filtered them to the core intent of the speaker. Words could be false. Tone and intent were harder to fake. After the fall of the Jedi, the station was jammed, damaged, and abandoned. Its dish is cracked, its solar fins broken, and much of its memory is fragmented. The array still powers intermittently when storms pass through.

Rey eased the Falcon’s throttle. “Easy,” she murmured, though the ship shuddered like it wanted to bolt. “She’s holding.”

She’d expected silence out here. Instead, the comms whispered, snatches of sound too quick to belong to the storm.

“…master, we are surrounded-”

“…remember, a Jedi’s strength flows from the Force-”

“…tell my Padawan-”

Voices. Thousands of them. A choir of ghosts made of static and rain.

The Force hummed faintly, as if braced against interference. Every breath smelled of salt water. Somewhere beyond the storm’s roar, she felt the dyad’s echo pulse once, small and patient. BB-8 squealed a warning as a bolt of ion lightning grazed the port thruster. Panels flickered; alarms wailed. Rey cursed softly, rerouting power. “You’re all right. I’m all right. We’ve flown through worse.”

The droid’s indignant warble translated roughly to name one, which almost made her smile.

She set the Falcon down in a docking ring half-buried in cloud. The hull groaned, protesting centuries of neglect. When the ramp opened, wind punched through the cabin, wet, metallic, alive. Rey pulled her hood up, grabbed her staff, and stepped out into the rain.

The Tower rose above her like a cathedral abandoned by its gods. Lightning ran through the antenna arrays, outlining miles of rusted frame. Water streamed off conduits in sheets, each droplet humming with faint residual charge. She could taste it, the electric tang of old transmissions. As they approached, the hum of voices multiplied. 

“Stay close,” she told BB-8. The little droid rolled beside her, projecting a wavering cone of light across the floor. It caught on symbols etched into the plating- Old Republic script, half-washed away: LISTEN BEFORE YOU SPEAK. 

Inside, the air was warmer, but no less haunted, there were voices humming in the background steadily, so many she couldn’t differentiate them. The sound of her footsteps was barely heard underneath the blabber through long corridors ribbed with cables. Doors sighed open on rooms filled with dust and frozen holoprojectors. Faces flickered into being, blue and half-formed, Jedi knights mid-sentence, reports from forgotten wars, laughter cut off in static. The Force around each echo felt thin, like parchment ready to crumble.

Rey paused before one projection that stabilized just long enough to show a young Luke Skywalker smiling into a transmitter.

She exhaled. BB-8 answered with a low beep that also meant a long exhale.

They moved upward, following the throb of residual power. The Tower seemed endless, a spine connecting storm to sky. As they climbed, the air thickened with more voices at a low-frequency hum that made the railings vibrate. Rey laid her palm to the wall; it pulsed under her hand like a slow heartbeat.

The hum carried emotion. Regret, longing, awe, thousands of impressions layered so densely that words lost meaning. It wasn’t malevolent, just full. Too full. Like the Force itself trying to speak all its memories at once.

At the top, a door opened onto an observation deck. The storm raged unbroken around it, a sphere of lightning and cloud. In the center stood the main transmitter: a circular platform suspended above the void, its metal ribs intact. A single column of light climbed from its core, pale and trembling. Rain sliding down its surface.

Rey approached the edge. The wind whipped her cloak against her legs; rain blurred the horizon. Somewhere beneath the thunder, she could almost make out Ben’s rhythm, three pulses, then two, like a heartbeat.

Her breath caught. He’s near.

But the feeling wasn’t simple warmth; it came braided with something darker: dread, guilt, anticipation. The bond wanted to open, but the Force around it was… still distorted. 

BB-8’s lamp made coins of light on the floor plates as he rolled, mapping without being asked. His scanner chirped a jittery rhythm: power here, none there,…

She touched the transmitter console. It thrummed beneath her fingertips. “This is it,” she whispered. “Where the voices go to be heard.”

The comm crackled in answer. A dozen Jedi voices spoke at once, overlapping, then falling into eerie harmony:

Who are you?

Who listens?

Who remains?

Rey swallowed. “Rey Skywalker,” she said, and her own voice came back through the speakers a second later- warped, uncertain, louder than the other voices:

Rey… Sky… liar.

She stepped back. BB-8 beeped, worried. She steadied herself, exhaled through the fear, and looked out at the churning sky.

“This place doesn’t echo words,” she murmured. “It echoes truth.”

Her pulse steadied. She could feel Ben’s trace in the static, not speaking, not yet, but listening back.

BB-8 whirred softly. Rain drummed on metal. Rey lifted her chin. “All right,” she said firmly to the wind, to the voices, to him. The Tower silenced the voices, so that only hers was heard. In the new silence, everything felt too loud and BB-8 moved soundlessly to lay at her heel.

“I seek a voice lost to me.” 

The answer did not come through the speakers. It slid up through the lattice from below, as pressure more than sound:

A voice?

“I am here to learn how to hear him.”

Him? the room echoed, tasting the word, then tasting whatever lived behind it. The keypad warmed under her hands. The dish below caught a bright seam of lightning and held it. The hum around her shifted, curious now, less wary, more like a teacher leaning forward.
BB-8 tilted, listening with his whole round being.
“Ben Solo.”
The room flinched. There is no room for a Knight of Ren in a tower of Jedi.

Rey didn’t move her hands. The warmth under her palms threatened to drain away, but she kept her weight there as if holding pressure on a wound. “He was a Jedi first,” she said, unflinchingly. 

The resonance slats along the walls shivered, skeptical, a chorus of old cautions. The Tower tried another angle, the way a strict master might test a claim for hidden splinters. Ben Solo did violence against our Jedi, this tower remembers the messages of fear, it suggested, not with words, but with a press of sound that tasted of scorched corridors and breath fogging on metal. Your mouth speaks of mercy.

Rey let the memory rise, the bridge on Starkiller, the throne on Exegol. She didn’t swallow it. She held it up between them like a lamp. “He saved my life. He helped defeat Palpatine. I’m not asking you to forgive him because I care for him,” she said. “I’m asking you to tell the truth because you’re a library.”

That earned a small, inadvertent hum of approval, an indicator glyph blinking once, amused with itself for enjoying her cheek. Then the tower went to its work.

Speak, the plate by the door breathed, ancient letters brightening as if from within. 

Rey’s mouth was dry. She swallowed against it. “I am Rey Skywalker.”

The echo that returned did not belong to her throat. It wore her cadence and her breath, but the pitch slid wrong, as if a hand had pressed on her larynx: Rey… Sky… borrowed.

Heat crawled her neck. “I chose it,” she said, too quick.

Chose it to hide, the room offered, gentle and devastating. Chose it to belong. Chose it to be loved.

BB-8 made a soft distress sound. Rey exhaled through the hit. The worst thing about honest instruments was how little they cared about your feelings.

“I am Rey of Jakku,” she tried, changing her footing. “Scavenger, nobody.”

Scavenger, the echo agreed, and added the weight she’d meant to avoid, hoarder of names. The word nobody came back with a cracked edge: no one- but not- to- him-

The memory of that moment hit her like a slap. “Enough,” she said, not to silence it, but to keep from sliding down the same slope too fast. She thought of the bell, of the way the kyber had seemed to breathe with her, of all the names that had not stuck because they were wrong. “I am Rey,” she said simply. “I’m listening, lead me to him.”

This time the echo returned almost unchanged, Rey. Listening., but beneath it came a small, ugly scrape that had been hiding under the floorboards for years: and you seek to save a boy that the Jedis before you couldn’t save.

The slats hummed like a throat clearing.

“He is saved. He has turned. And I need him back.”

Need him back? Oh- A dyad. How rare. You have lost your other half, have you? 

“Yes, you have to help me find him.”

Curious case indeed. The room replied and the board flickered with lights and scripts and voices coming in and out fast, so fast Rey couldn’t understand any of them, it turned into a hurricane inside of the room. BB-8 squeaked. Rey held on to the panels looking at the holocrones showing faces of old Jedis, waiting for Ben’s to appear.
Ben’s name passed through them like current through a wire: every projection turned to look at her for the length of a heartbeat, then blurred into interference.

The sound changed. No longer many voices, but her own, multiplied and offset, layering over itself until it became unbearable.

“You couldn’t save him.”
“Does he deserve to be saved.”
“He killed his father, he would’ve killed you.”

Rey pressed her hands to her ears, but the words came from inside. The Tower wasn’t accusing, it was translating the fear she brought with her. Lightning split the clouds above; the strike ran down the antenna into the floor, flaring white through the seams.

“Enough!”
Her shout cracked against the walls, came back softer, almost kind. Everything stilled. Rain hissed down the open shaft like sand through a glass.
Rey sank to her knees, breath ragged, palms on the trembling deck. BB-8 whirred close, his dome pressed against her arm. She shut her eyes and let the Force draw out the noise until there was nothing left but her pulse and the low hum of the tower’s heart.

Show me, she thought. Show me the truth behind the noise.

At first: only static. Then the static learned rhythm.
Three pulses. Two. Three again.

A voice came with it, broken, low, familiar enough to steal her breath.

“Rey… stop shouting.”

Her head snapped up. The transmitter column glowed, the light thinning to a silhouette that flickered in and out of shape. Not solid, not spirit, memory given vibration.

“Ben?” She took one step forward. The floor plates resonated underfoot like strings struck by wind. 

And then the signal fractured. The hum became a shriek. BB-8 spun, projecting a warning glyph: INTRUSION SIGNAL DETECTED.

From the walls, an insignia unfurled in pale light, a closed white eye, and a new frequency poured through the chamber, low enough to vibrate bone. A human shape resolved inside the storm’s heart: a figure in gray robes, face veiled, hand raised as if conducting.

“Noise begets noise,” the Conductor’s voice rolled through the metal. “You keep the wound open.”

The static thickened into forms, humanoid silhouettes made of distortion, advancing. BB-8 fired a cable into one, and it tore apart with a sound like glass breaking underwater, only for two more to crawl from the floor. Rey drew her shaft close to her.

The Conductor’s tone climbed; the air trembled. Her own heartbeat faltered in the interference. Every instinct screamed to fight back, to shout, to strike, but she remembered the voice through the static: stop shouting. 

Beneath the cacophony, another rhythm pulsed, steady, human, alive. The Force around her shifted; the phantoms’ movements slowed, each one preceded by a ripple in the sound field. Rey moved with those ripples, not against them, redirecting a blow, sliding past another, each motion finding harmony instead of impact.

The Conductor’s staff struck the floor, releasing a shockwave of silence so deep it hurt. Rey dropped to one knee, hands braced on the wet deck. She felt the Tower’s heart faltering, the chorus of Jedi voices choking into nothing.

“No,” she said, but not loudly, soft, measured, matching the pulse beneath the silence. She laid her palm to the metal and gave back a single tone, the same rhythm she’d felt since Jedha: three, then two. The frequency wove through the dead air, caught on the Tower’s ribs.

Lightning answered it. The antenna blazed. The Conductor’s projection fractured into shards of light that fell like glass rain and vanished.

Rey stood inside it, drenched, shaking, her hands glowing faintly with reflected energy. 

“Who are those people?”

“Null Choir,  those are” said a cheerful voice behind her.

Rey turned. Yoda stood there on a damp conduit, small and bright, a smile tucked into the corners of his mouth.

“And who is that?” Rey asked, nodding toward the veiled figure at the center of the storm.

“Their Conductor, mm.” Yoda’s ears tilted. “Keep you apart from young Ben Solo, they would. Strong, your bond is- your dyad. To wake the living Force it can, which quiet has kept since Palpatine you unmade.”

“What do they want, then?”

“Rest- or so they say.” He tapped his stick once. “Not peace. Not balance. Stillness. A world where no song rises to be broken. Fear pain, they do; fear change, they do. End stories before their endings, they try. Close the door your dyad holds open.”

Rey’s jaw set. “They sent a warning. ‘Silence is mercy.’”

“Mercy without listening, cruelty it becomes.” Yoda’s eyes warmed. “Shout at you, the storm will. Shout back, you must not. Listen for the truth under words, hmm? There, your path is.”

“They’re corrupting the tower. I can feel them tugging at the frequencies.”

“Conduct silence, the Conductor does, with nets of quiet and fear.” Yoda’s head tipped toward the humming dish. “But a net, hm? Holes it has. Through the intervals, pass you can. Three, then two- you feel it?”

“I do.” Rey’s hand found the railing, steady. “If I listen instead of forcing it, I can thread the voice past his interference.” Rey swallowed. “And Ben?”

“Silent, he may be. But seeing, he is.” Yoda’s smile turned quick, young. “Guide you with what you already know, he will. Yours to choose, always, the next step is.”

Lightning crawled along the far struts. The dish shivered; the echoes thickened.

“If I fail,” Rey said, “they’ll close this door for good.”

“Close one door, the Choir can,” Yoda murmured. “But lock the Force, no one can. Open another, you will.” He hopped down lightly, stick clicking. He pushed the stick toward BB-8, who then followed a silent command. BB-8 connected to the tower. And Yoda disappeared while giggling. The Tower’s core light steadied. Rey felt the pressure shift, the resonance cleared just enough for a shape to gather in the column.

He stepped out of light the way a swimmer steps out of a lake. His mouth was already trying not to smile and failing.

“Rey,” he said, like he was testing his voice.

“Ben.” Her laugh came out on a broken exhale. All the clever things she’d meant to say, about towers and threads and choices, fell through the grate of her ribs. “You’re-”

“Not here,” he answered gently, saving her from the lie. “But looking at you.”

She wiped her cheek with the heel of her hand as if the rain had gotten inside. “You said to stop shouting.”

“It helped,” he said, amused. He breathed, a small, incredulous sound, as if he could not believe he’d earned the right to laugh in her company. “You found my name.”

“Jedha’s bell remembered it,” she said.

The smile hitching at his mouth faltered. “I don’t-” He looked past her shoulder, as if into a memory so bright it hurt. “Rey, I don’t deserve this.”

“Don’t decide that for me.” She stepped closer to the railing, as near as she dared. “This isn’t about deserve. It’s about you being whole again.”

He flinched as if she’d touched a bruise he’d been ignoring. Before he could answer, the light in the column thinned to a wire; the air ahead of it shifted from breath to pressure. The closed-eye sigil crawled up the console like frost.

“Noise,” said the Conductor, stepping back into the Tower as if he’d only taken one thoughtful pace away. “You are disrupting the silence. Silence is safe. Silence is disciplined.”

Rey didn’t look away from the Conductor this time. “I’m finished being polite in your language,” she said, low. “Let’s try mine.”

He tipped his veiled head. “Your noise?”

“My listening.” She flicked a toggle, then another. The Tower’s ribs answered with a low, round note that seemed to have been waiting for permission. The Conductor raised his staff to cut it down. Rey didn’t fight the note louder; she changed it- three beats, then two- and the Tower caught the interval and wove it through itself like a warp thread. The Conductor’s silence swept in like a tide and found itself braided instead of drowning. Like waves meeting a shore. Three beats then silence. Two beats then silence. 

His hand twitched, the baton-gesture of a man used to obedience. “End it.”

“BB-8,” Rey said, “mirror him.”

BB-8 threw the Conductor’s own carrier wave back at him at half-strength and half a measure late, a polite, infuriating echo. The Tower amplified the returned copy and fed it into the Conductor’s spine frequency. His broadcast stuttered, only a beat, but enough. Rey slipped their line under his and lifted.

The Conductor felt it. “You think this is clever,” he said, and for the first time his calm was effort, not nature. “You think your story deserves to go on.”

“I think the Force does,” Rey said, and flipped the last switch: a simple loop that routed control from her console into the ancient, redundant backup system engraved with Old Republic script. LISTEN BEFORE YOU SPEAK. The Tower obeyed the instruction most written into its bones. The Conductor’s false quiet flooded the room a final time and broke itself on a shore of sound of old Jedi transmissions.

His projection guttered, then tore. The closed eye on the panel brightened once, as if in surprise, and went out.

He was gone. The frequency he’d used bled harmlessly into the storm and sizzled into nothing.

Silence followed, the right kind. Rey let go of the console and only then realized her hands were shaking. BB-8 warbled victory and spun in a circle that would have been undignified if anyone but him had done it.

“Ben,” she said, turning to the column of light. “Are you-”

“Still here,” he said, softer than before, a little awed. 

She wanted to step inside the light and let it braid itself around her bones. She settled for wrapping her arms around herself. “I needed to hear you.”

He glanced toward the wall of dead projectors.

She followed his look. One by one, the holoprojectors spun up, stuttering, respectful, aligning themselves under the Tower’s new hum. Not the chaos from before, no overlapping mouths. A single feed stabilized: a young man in a dark tunic, the blue flicker making him look thinner, more boy than knight; and opposite him, a woman with the poise of a general and the humor of a sister.

Luke and Leia.

BB-8 made a sound that was almost a prayer. Rey’s throat closed.

“…if this works,” Luke was saying, half-grin tucked into the corner of his mouth, “you’ll owe me a better birthday gift.”

Leia rolled her eyes. “I already gave you a galaxy.”

“Truly terrible at wrapping,” Luke said gravely.

“Luke,” she said, softer, and the teasing drained but not the love. “When this is over, when the fighting is done, we’re going to need people who can listen to more than their own fear. You’ll have to teach them.” Her smile crooked. “Try not to get in your own way.”

“I learned from the best,” he said, and didn’t smile when he said it, not with his mouth. Rey felt it anyway.

The feed clicked and went dark. Rey stood very still. The Tower’s hum stayed soft, like a hand at the back of her neck saying breathe.

Ben was looking at the floor, jaw tight, eyes bright in a way she’d learned meant a feeling too large for words. “Its been so long since I last heard them like that,” he said. “Together. Smiling. Joking.”

A thunderhead rucked at the edge of the storm. BB-8’s danger-ping cut across the quiet: incoming signatures. Starfighter drives, fast, angry, many. The Tower’s external sensors- newly obedient- drew contrails of light in the air over the console: a squadron punching through the weather like a fist through paper.

And below that, a secondary alarm: bulkheads opening on lower levels. Footfalls. Hush-Walkers, no longer hushed, flooding up the stairwells.

Rey swore. “They called friends.”

BB-8 spat out a quick map: three stair shafts, two choke points, a service ladder that ran the length of the dish column. He pinged the Falcon’s remote and got a tired, loyal groan in answer.

“Go,” Ben said. He stepped closer to the edge of his light, the way a man does when he wants to touch your face and cannot. “I can’t-”

“I know.” She swallowed the ache.

Footsteps hit the deck. White-wrapped figures poured into the observation ring, visors down now, shock-batons humming. Behind them, the wind ripped open as starfighter cannons fired a warning burst that turned part of the lightning into glass. The lead Walker lifted a palm.

“Mercy,” they said, and the batons rose like a benediction turned blade.

Rey planted her staff, let the Tower’s new song slide down her bones, and met the first baton mid-swing, turning it so the charge traveled harmlessly into the railing. BB-8 tucked and fired a cable that snagged the ankle of the second Walker, yanked, and sent them skating into a third; two bodies went down in a heap.

“Go left,” Ben said urgently, and before she could wonder at directions from a man who wasn’t standing in the room, two more Walkers surged from the right, blades raised, and the left stairwell gave her half a heartbeat of open floor. She slid into it, staff snapping a baton out of a grip, turning another’s strike aside with the easy geometry of listening first and moving second.

Another burst from outside hammered the outer struts; rivets popped like hail. The Tower groaned. The Walkers staggered and recovered.

“Now,” Ben said, sharper, and she dropped without thinking. A baton sizzled over where her head had been and cracked into the console, frying the panel where the closed eye had been burned. The mark shorted and died for good.

“Thank you,” she told the timing.

“Don’t thank me yet,” Ben said, and something like a smile rode the words that weren’t wind. “Stairwell.”

She spun toward it, too many bodies, not enough path, and then the tower’s dish tilted four degrees without anyone touching it. The floor shifted just enough to spill the front line of Walkers into each other. They went down like a polite wave.

“Ben-?”

“Not me,” he said, sounding surprised and pleased. “The Tower likes you.”

“Flirt with me later,” she said, and leapt for the service ladder. BB-8 magnetized and zipped after her, a bright, brave bead. The nearest Walker lunged; Rey kicked the baton aside and slid, hand over hand, the ladder’s cold rungs burning her palms raw. Above, the hatch to the maintenance crawl whined open of its own accord.

Starfighters screamed past the open lip of the ring, close enough to rattle teeth. One rolled, aligning weapons. Rey felt the target lock, She reached with the Force on instinct, meaning to shove the shot aside-

-and the dish rang. A high, clean overtone split the air. The fighter’s cannon misfired; the bolt sheared wide and punched blue daylight through a wall of storm.

“Ben!” she shouted over the shriek.

“Still not me,” he said, laughing, breathless. “The tower is listening to your needs.”

She laughed back, ridiculous under fire. “Then listen: get me a door.”

Something clicked three rungs above her. The hatch swung fully, then banged against its stop in invitation. BB-8 shot through first, turned, extended a clamp for her wrist. She took it. The little droid hauled as if he weighed a star, and somehow it was enough.

She rolled into the crawlspace just as a baton blade hissed past and carved a bright line in the rung where her shin had been. A hand grabbed her boot, warm, real, human, and for a terror-flat second she thought the Conductor had learned to be flesh.

It was a Walker, visor up. She saw their face in the strobing light, young, terrified, convinced. “Please,” they said, not begging for mercy but offering it like a weapon. “You don’t have to hurt.”

Rey twisted, caught their wrist, and pushed. She let the Tower’s tone ride through her palm and into their skin. Their grip loosened. Their eyes widened as if something they’d always wanted to hear had finally spoken and told them to let go. Their hand slid away.

“BB-8,” she said, crawling backward, breath uneven. “I need a path to the ship.”

Maintenance chute he squeaked immediately. Port side, two levels down. It vents to the docking ring. The latch is-

“Sticky,” Rey and BB-8 said together, because of course it would be.

They moved. The crawlspace groaned around them. Below, boots hammered metal. Outside, the fighters wheeled, confused by instruments that suddenly refused to find a tone to lock onto. The Tower had decided it preferred harmony to obedience and would not be told otherwise.

At the chute, the latch was, in fact, sticky, fused with age and salt. Rey threw her shoulder against it. It didn’t care. She set her palms to the seam and closed her eyes.

She exhaled, found the frequency in the metal that wanted to be itself, and sang to it under her breath- three, then two. The latch sighed. The panel opened like a held breath released.

Below, the ring glowed with lightning. The Falcon crouched with the feral patience of old ships that know how to survive hubris. The chute ended ten feet above the deck. Rey didn’t think about it. She jumped. BB-8 launched after her, hit the ramp at speed, skidded, recovered, whooped.

Boots hit the ring behind them. “Noise!” the lead Walker cried, and if Rey had had time she might have told them it wasn’t an insult anymore, it was a compliment.

She didn’t have time. The Conductor’s voice rose from every grate and seam, raw now, angry. “Enough.”

Ben’s voice cut across it, only for her, steady and close: “Go.”

“I’ll come back,” she said, already running, already up the ramp, already slapping controls. The Falcon’s engines grumbled awake. The Tower’s dish hummed a farewell that sat under her sternum and promised more.

“No. I will find you.” Ben said. Where the ground bleeds and the bladeshines a voice followed after him.

The ramp lifted. A last baton sparked against it and slid off useless as rain. The Falcon tore free of the docking ring, rolled under a fighter’s belly, and punched hard for open sky. Lightning clawed at her sides and missed, or maybe chose to miss. The Tower’s hum followed them into the cloud and out the other side, where space opened like a cool hand on a fevered brow.

“Hold together,” Rey told the ship, told the Tower, told him, told herself.

Stars stretched. Hyperspace thinned around them like torn silk.

Behind, the Tower of Echo stood in the storm and sang.

Rey leaned back, eyes half-closed. “Bleeding ground. Blade.”
She thought of every place she’d seen the Force warped toward violence: Dathomir’s red fogs, Malachor’s broken plains… and one world whose name still burned at the edge of every Jedi record.

“Mustafar,” she murmured.

BB-8 gave an uncertain beep.

“The ground there bleeds, lava rivers,” Rey said, tracing the memory on the nav display. “A planet built on a wound. Vader forged his blade there once.” She looked at BB-8. “Let’s see if the Force still keeps its forge.”

The little droid chirped a firm ready.

Rey smiled, a flash of determination through fatigue, and pushed the lever forward.