Within the approaching fog, figures were beginning to become visible, ten or so. He couldn’t make out details yet, but he knew who they were. He had heard the stories—of impossibly vicious marauders who appeared from nowhere and left the same way, leaving nothing in their wake but terror that they would return.

The Nihil.

Bell reached out to the Force. He knew that, as a Jedi, he could survive this fall. He had seen Loden do similar things many times in the past—most recently on Hetzal Prime, but in training, too. Loden could drop like a rock and then slow himself at the last moment for a perfect landing. It wasn’t flying—no Jedi born without wings could fly as far as Bell knew—but it also was not exactly falling.

Bell knew it could be done, and he knew Loden Greatstorm believed he could do it. His master—probably—would not have used the Force to shove him off that obscenely high cliff otherwise. Bell thought the Jedi Council would frown on inadvertent Padawan murder—but he also thought Loden could talk his way out of it, probably by arguing that the Order had no use for a Padawan who couldn’t master something as simple as a controlled descent.

All of this flashed through Bell’s head in the merest second after his plummet began. With a massive effort, he forced himself to focus, to find the flame of the Force within and fan it into greater life, and through it connect with the air currents rushing past his face and whipping through his dreadlocks. Loden had given him instruction on how to execute this maneuver safely, though he was frustratingly vague in his description of how it was supposed to work.

In general, the idea was to guide yourself to the updrafts, and use them as a foundation to slow your fall. Once you figured that out, you were somehow also supposed to use the Force to push against the ground as it drew closer. The two elements could slow you down enough to land safely. Bell had achieved it easily enough in Temple training when falling from lesser heights, or if dropping onto a repulsor pad that would prevent any real injury.

But now, when plummeting from a cliff, facing a horrendous maiming if he was lucky, he could barely even remember what Loden had told him to do. He knew the real challenge here was not mastery of the Force, but mastery of fear—always the Jedi’s greatest test.

A test he was about to fail. And from this height, he knew even Loden Greatstorm could not catch him. This was it. The end. Bell closed his eyes. The fear rushed in, and he didn’t even fight it. He asked for serenity, and hoped he would just die quickly and not be left in broken agony on the jagged iron rocks at the base of the cliff.