“Poor things,” said Mayv. “I wonder if—”
She never finished.
The sniffer turned in her direction and struck. She would have been knocked off the tree if the sniffer’s hook hands hadn’t grabbed her. Once they had her, there was no chance they would let her fall.
They held her not with a strong grip but rather with a strange dry stickiness. She could barely move, much less fight back.
“Oktar RUP!” she hollered, half cursing, half praying.
Then she remembered the exo-glove. She thumbed the control and the metal fingers sprang out and jabbed deep into the wormy flesh. But the sniffer didn’t even seem to notice. It was busy grabbing at her with its other hook hands.
“Chewie! Help!” she yelled, but the Wookiee was already leaping into action.
He grabbed her jacket and tried to pull her free, but the sniffer began to retract, calmly pulling itself down and away as if no struggle was going on at all.
“GWAARRGH!” Chewie yelled as he was forced to either let go of Mayv’s jacket or be pulled off the bridge.
He reached for his blaster, then remembered for the hundredth time that it had been confiscated by Alinka Aloo back on Coruscant.
“MRORRGHHHHH!” A Wookiee rage was building inside him.
He reached for the only thing nearby that he could use to smash the life out of the giant worm: K-2.
Grabbing the droid by his legs, the mighty Chewbacca raised K-2 high over his head and chopped down with him like an ax.
Being a droid, K-2 actually had time to think about what was going on while it was happening.
Should he defend himself against the Wookiee or in some way attempt to assist? Neither his original Imperial programming nor his reprogramming by Cassian covered this situation.
But Cassian had just told him to help the girl find what she was looking for. If the girl was eaten by a worm with hook hands, the mission would fail.
So instead of resisting, he stiffened all his joints to become more club-like.
WHAM!
K-2’s heavy upper body slammed into the worm with a force that would have staggered a rancor.
The sniffer worm was knocked sideways. But it wasn’t stunned. It didn’t seem to notice that any more than it had the exo-glove.
It just continued to retract, dragging Mayv down into the depths of the forest, heedless of bridges or heights, as if it was held up by some great strength, which indeed it was…a strength greater than anything Chewie had ever encountered.
But he was about to encounter it.
“MWORRRRRRRRRRRRGH!” doesn’t mean anything in particular, and yet it means a lot.
To Mayv, being dragged helplessly through the forest, it meant that things weren’t hopeless yet. Her new friend was not going to abandon her.
Chewie tossed K-2 aside. Luckily, the droid was able to grab on to the branch; otherwise he would have taken his second fall in a matter of minutes.
Then the Wookiee leapt out into the space between the trees, knowing only that he was following Mayv and the monster but not where or how he was going to land.
The reckless jump became a fall as gravity pulled him downward. Just as it appeared that he was going to smash his brains out on a branch, he twisted in midair and landed on it instead with a mighty stomp that shook the whole tree.
He was about to take another leap when K-2 called “WAIT” at his highest volume level.
Chewie decided to spare one second to find out what the droid wanted.
He looked back. High above him he could see the droid hanging from a branch by one arm. Next to him, Goldie was peering over the edge of the branch yowling.
“You’ll need this,” said K-2 in his unsettling mixture of high volume but complete calm.
A compartment in his torso opened, and K-2 reached inside and pulled out a blaster. With the sort of perfect aim that only a droid could manage, he threw it so Chewie made an easy one-handed catch.
Obviously, Chewie wanted to know where the droid had gotten the blaster and why he hadn’t used it before, but it was not the time. And only much later would it occur to him to wonder why the droid hadn’t used the blaster when the snarler was about to eat Chewie.
“HYYYYRAK,” he called, stuffing the blaster in the pouch on his bandolier.
Then he took another great leap and disappeared into the gloom.
“Now it’s just you and me, cat,” said K-2 to the tooka as he pulled himself back up onto the branch.
The tooka hissed suspiciously.
The thing about Wookiees is, yes, they’re big and strong, but they have a lot more to offer than just size and strength.
If Mayv’s partner on the mission had been, say, a Trandoshan like Bossk the bounty hunter, he would still be standing back there calculating how the loss of a team member affected him personally. His size and strength wouldn’t really matter, because he would still be just standing there.
And honestly, a Wookiee might be doing that, too, if a worm ate someone that Wookiee didn’t like. But Chewie liked Mayv. Part of it was her story about growing up in the ruins and losing her parents, but he had actually decided he liked her before that. Wookiees can usually get a sense of someone right away (except a devious droid like K-2SO, of course). And even though he’d seen through her pretense of being first a tooka keeper and then a bounty hunter, Chewie was pretty sure he knew the real Mayv now. And he liked her.
So that was why Chewie was taking absurd chances, lunging across the wide gloomy spaces between trees with no idea where he was going to land, and sometimes not even landing at all but using a branch to swing off in a new direction.
When he got low enough to see the ground through the mist, he just let go and dropped the rest of the way. It was farther than he should have dropped. He should have slowed down. He should have found a safer route. Wookiees aren’t magic, and they aren’t unbreakable.
But the landing didn’t break him. It hurt him, but it didn’t break him. Whether that was just luck or he knew what he was doing, I can’t tell you, but maybe he did know what he was doing, because he landed on his feet and used both arms to absorb the impact.
The fear flowed into him again. Through his feet, through his hands. It just seemed to seep from the ground itself. And it was much stronger there, farther into the forest, than it had been where they landed the ship.
But neither the pain nor the fear was enough to slow him down.
He had a dim idea which way the worm was retreating, and he chased after it, heedless of any snarlers or unknown creatures he might run into.
In fact he did run into something—a big golden-shelled thing that lay on the forest floor with its meter-wide mouth open, perhaps hoping a glorb would fall in. Chewie saw it too late to dodge it, so he hurdled the mouth, stepped on the nose, and launched himself on top of the shell.
From there he took a moment to look around and listen. The sniffer moved almost silently, but its captive, Mayv, was noisy. “Chewie!” she yelled, and he instantly leapt off the shell and raced after her.
What was strange, he thought, was that the sniffer worm seemed to be carrying Mayv in the direction they had already been headed: toward the chasm.
He kept running and soon saw where the trees ended and the green mist was bright and the fear like a wall.
Again, a Trandoshan—or just about anyone else, really—would have been turned back by that fear. But a Wookiee—and especially Chewbacca—had a different reaction to fear. It was nothing deep or philosophical like a Jedi might come up with. And there was no desire to gain strength from the fear as a Sith Lord might want to do.
It was really just the desire to take a giant Wookiee fist and punch fear in the face until it went away.
And so far that had worked pretty well for Chewbacca; he had smashed fear into oblivion many times on many planets.
But as he passed through the last of the trees, he finally slowed and stopped.
He’d found something too big to p
unch.
It was a living thing. He knew that right away.
But it was bigger than any living thing he’d seen before.
And he was seeing only the top of it. It swam in the sea of thick green vapor that filled the chasm and splashed over the edges in waves of horrid green mist.
The creature had been submerged when they flew overhead but had since lifted its many mouths above the surface to feed.
How many mouths? Chewie didn’t count them. And I don’t blame him. As the old saying goes, when a rancor is chasing you, you don’t count its warts.
You want to know what this thing was, but how can I answer that?
There’s a name for the creature: Vathyr. But the people who once spoke that name are all dead. Long dead. (Many of them killed by the Vathyr.)
Describing it might be better than naming it. The word that comes to mind is hill, although if you could ever see the whole thing, you might say mountain.
So it looked like an island floating in a sea of fear.
And as I said, there were many mouths. Each one wide open with a tongue extended. Very long tongues. So long you might mistake one for a giant worm if it was chasing you through a gloomy blue forest with its hook hands.
Across the galaxy, there were many creatures that had long quick tongues that they zipped out to catch screerats or thwips or whatever else was handy.
But this creature had evolved way beyond that. Its many tongues could do more than zip out. They could hunt.
They had nostrils to sniff out prey and hook hands to catch it.
Each tongue searched through the trees until it caught all it could, and then it retracted back into the mouth it started from. There the hooks held on to the food until the brain far, far below learned which mouth had caught a meal and sent a message to the stomach to digest.
As the long hunt wore on, each tongue returned, each mouth closed, and the stomach was at last satisfied.
And then the mountain sank back into the sea.
Chewie didn’t know all that, of course, but one glance at the horrid thing was enough to tell him that Mayv was about to be eaten.
But at last he caught sight of her.
The sniffer (which was really a tongue) had dragged her almost to the edge of the chasm.
“HGRRRWURRRRR!”
“Chewie?” yelled Mayv in disbelief. “Thank Oktar!”
She twisted in the sniffer’s grip, trying to see what was happening.
Chewie raced alongside the hideous tongue, trying to pull Mayv free with one hand while pressing the blaster directly against the sniffer’s pimpled flesh with the other.
BZZZRAP BBBZZZRAP BBBBBZZZZRAPPP!
Each shot of the blaster made a gaping hole in the tongue but did nothing to stop its relentless retreat back to its origin mouth. It didn’t even seem to react to the blasts.
“Chewie! Watch out!” yelled Mayv.
Too late. One of the hooks whipped around Chewie’s arm and held him tight.
“HYARLL!” he yelped as he was pulled off his feet and dragged along with Mayv and the glorbs closer and closer to the cliff’s edge…beyond which lay the many mouths of the great beast.
Chewie took aim at the hook that was holding his arm. If he could shoot it at the base, it should come loose and he’d be free.
But before he pulled the trigger, he thought again. If he got loose, he’d fall behind and might not catch up in time to save Mayv.
So he aimed instead for the hooks that were holding her. BZRAP! BZRAP! BZRAP! And it was done. She fell free from the tongue, the severed hooks still wrapped tightly about both of her arms and one leg.
She was able to look around and orient herself for the first time since being captured.
“Oktar Bakkvena!” she cried in disbelief.
She saw it all. The huge mountainous thing. The gaping, drooling mouths. The tongues dragging in a variety of glorbs and other strange creatures, even a snarler—and most improbably…Chewbacca.
The Wookiee was taking aim to blast himself free, but the tongue dragged him over the edge of the cliff before he could do it.
“Mag nessom!” Mayv yelled in horror, slipping into her native language again in the excitement.
She ran toward the edge, but there was nothing she could do. Chewie was out of reach, dangling by one arm high above the horrid green mist of the abyss.
If he shot himself loose from the hook hand, he’d fall to certain death.
But if he didn’t, the sniffer would deliver him to the gaping mouth just a few meters away.
“I think he’d be better off falling into the abyss.” It was K-2, finally catching up. “Being digested sounds very unpleasant.”
Mayv shuddered. She’d read somewhere about a creature that took a thousand years to digest its prey. Even a single hour would be agony!
“Can you help him?” begged Mayv.
“No,” replied K-2, “but I brought your crate.” He helpfully lifted the crate, with Goldie riding inside.
“Will you shut up about the crate?” she yelled and turned back to watch Chewie and pray for a miracle. “Oktar rup, Oktar rup, Oktar rup…”
Goldie got one look at Chewie in the grip of the huge creature and cowered back inside the crate, already mourning the loss of her big furry friend.
But Chewie hadn’t given up yet, of course.
He waited as the tongue took him closer and closer to the drooling mouth. It opened wide, belching out a terrible stench of rotting glorbs and showing four rows of jagged black teeth.
And then just an instant before it bit, Chewie fired the blaster. The hook flopped sickeningly but didn’t detach. Chewie fired again, and this time he dropped like a rock.
He landed on the mouth’s lower lip, almost slipping in the drool, but his huge Wookiee feet dug in and then he jumped clear just as the tongue disappeared into the mouth and the black teeth snapped shut.
The mouth stayed shut. It had a few glorbs to digest, and that would do for now. The creature would remain forever unaware of how close it had come to a delicious Wookiee dinner.
No longer in danger of being eaten, Chewie was still in very real danger of falling off the creature into the chasm.
He shoved the blaster back into his pouch and used both hands to cling to the scaly surface of the worm. But it was slimy as well as scaly, and he felt himself slowly sliding down. He had to do something before it was too late.
There was no hope of jumping back to the edge of the chasm; the distance was too far even for a Wookiee. And he could hardly throw the cable across while clinging to the creature with all four limbs.
He looked down to see what he was sliding toward. Another mouth! But this one still had its tongue extended deep into the forest sniffing out glorbs.
With the same remarkable skills that had served him high in the trees, he dashed across the disgusting fleshy bridge to rejoin Mayv and K-2 on the side of the chasm.
He’d barely touched the ground before Goldie was leaping from the antigrav crate to his shoulder, mrowr-ing happily.
“Wow!” said Mayv, jumping up to hug him. “I can’t believe you did all that to save me!”
“YARRHH RRRRRRRUNNNN MMONNRGH!” which is a very old Wookiee expression about being there to catch a young Wookiee who slips out of a tree. It’s something Chewie had said many times to his own son, Lumpawaroo, and the whole thing was very, very sweet.
“Can I have my blaster back?” asked K-2.
Chewie reached for the blaster in his pouch but found only the pouch. The blaster was gone.
“HRRRUMK?” Chewie said regretfully.
K-2 just stared. He was actually speechless. His processors were too busy recalculating his chances of completing the mission without a blaster. They weren’t good.
Plus, eventually he’d have to explain to Cassian why he gave the Wookiee his weapon.
He had a lot to process.
They all did…and surprisingly, they had a moment to do it. Things were actually pe
aceful.
True, they were standing on a planet that seemed to be made of fear, next to a chasm that was filled with fear, in which swam the biggest, scariest monster any of them had ever seen.
I don’t think it even knew they were there. Its great eye—well below the surface—was closed. And its tongues were all busy hunting in the forest or coming back with the food they had already captured.
For the moment at least, nothing was trying to kill our heroes. So they walked to the nearest tree and leaned their backs against it, letting the peace and hope that flowed from the tree try to counteract the fear that was drifting up out of the chasm and lapping at their feet.
“I bet my treblixes got smudged, didn’t they?”
“MWUFF?” said Chewie, unsure what the polite answer was.
“Time to repaint them anyway,” said Mayv, pulling the cap off her paint tube. She rubbed away the smudges and began stamping a long double row all the way across her forehead: gratitude.
“I’ve got a theory about this place,” said Mayv as she worked. “Remember what I was saying about the Force?”
“YHGARRR…”
“Well, I read some books about it once. About Jedi and Sith and the light side and the dark side of the Force. And the two sides are supposed to be in balance, but sometimes they’re not.”
“YHHHGARRRR…”
“I think that’s what happened to this planet. It’s like the actual ground here is strong with the dark side. But the trees grew to surround all that dark with the good parts of the Force. That’s what we felt when we touched the trees.”
“YHHHGRARRR…”
“So the planet was in balance. And people lived here and everything was okay, especially if they stayed high up in the trees. But then the ground cracked open and the dark side couldn’t be contained. It just oozed out of that crack, and the trees couldn’t hold it in. That’s when the people on this planet were doomed.”
“MYUUURGGGG…”
“And what is really bothering me is that Alinka sent us here to this place that is so strong in the dark side to find a temple with a sacred book. What if it’s a Sith temple? Or some other dark side cult?”