The Quiet Between
Posted on Sat Apr 18th, 2026 @ 8:44pm by Bomoor Thort & Bruta Thort & Thane
2,644 words; about a 13 minute read
Chapter:
Chapter IX: The First Verse
Location: Dunari's Delight Space Station, Mayagil Sector
Timeline: Concurrent with "Against the Odds", late Day Two
The chamber set aside for Bomoor lay in deliberate contrast to the trauma wing. Where Thane had been taken into light, noise and motion, this space had been dimmed to near stillness, the illumination reduced to a low, even glow that softened edges and swallowed detail. Sound did not carry here in the same way. It settled instead, muted and absorbed by the particular local materials used to construct the station, leaving only the faint hum of life‑support systems and the slow rhythm of breath.
Bomoor lay at the centre of it on a low medical bed, his great frame at rest but not at ease. There was no serious visible injury upon him. No bandaging, no bracing, no outward sign of the violence that had passed through the bond he shared. Yet something in the stillness was wrong. His chest rose and fell with steady, natural rhythm, but there was a depth missing from it, as though the breath did not quite reach where it was meant to go. His hands lay open at his sides, unresponsive, the strength that defined him absent without explanation.
At the head of the bed stood Chocha Blints, son of the current Kalco Herd leader. He held a slender staff of polished rootwood, its surface carved with flowing Ithorian script. With slow, deliberate movements, he traced gentle circles in the air above Bomoor’s brow, each rotation steady and unbroken. His twin mouths parted, and a soft, resonant Ithorese chant filled the room — low, melodic, and shaped by the peculiar harmonics of his species.
"Bomoor, child lost in the jungle, slow yourself and look to Mother’s creation: all life is a route back home. Come back to us."
Three other Ithorians from the Herd completed a circle around the bed, their tall shapes motionless save for the slow, layered cadence of their breathing. Their long necks inclined inward, each angled slightly differently, as though listening to something that did not exist within the room itself. The Force gathered around them not as a surge, but as a pressure, subtle and persistent, threading through the air in overlapping currents as they reached beyond the visible, searching for a path inward that would allow them to follow Bomoor where he had gone. It was a far gentler cadence than the Jedi ever summoned, their raw power lesser and differently drawn.
Standing away, a small group of bystanders watched and waited. While most of them had either not met Bomoor or had not spoken to him since his childhood, all felt an intense connection to the son of Mumin Mozo. After a moment, Chocha lifted one hand and beckoned them forward.
Jiljoo moved in first. She held a Donar flower, its pale petals trembling faintly in the filtered air. One by one, she and the others placed their blossoms upon Bomoor’s slowly rising chest, the flowers settling like soft markers along an unseen path.
They stepped back, joining the loose circle around the bed as Chocha continued, his voice deepening into a more resonant cadence.
"Your friends mark the path for your return. Come to them now."
Then he lowered his staff, planting its end gently against the floor. He spoke to the assembled:
"Now, I must truly focus."
The room seemed to tighten around him as he closed his eyes. His breathing slowed. The Force gathered, adding his will to the circle. It was not a great surge, but in a quiet, persistent pull, like roots seeking water beneath the soil. Chocha reached inward, toward the place where Bomoor’s consciousness had retreated, calling to him with what limited affinity he possessed.
Behind him, Jiljoo glanced over her shoulder toward the door, drawing her lekku towards her in a gesture of worry.
"I hope Mentis comes soon," she whispered, barely audible.
A tear slipped down her cheek.
"I wish Mumin and Yllib were here…"
She folded her hands, bowing her head.
"Mother Mozo, Captain Senob; please guide our lost boy home. We need him back."
The chamber remained still. Chocha’s staff trembled faintly with focus. Bomoor did not stir.
But somewhere beyond the reach of sight, something shifted.
Through the clouds of memory, a rusty transport vessel dipped into the mind's eye. Bomoor's trembling became the little micro bumps of turbulence as the Muddy Mynock descended towards a black cityscape, filled with the glow of a million coloured lights.
Again, he found himself in the ship's hold, familiar viridian blade in hand. He was in motion: feet moving like a practiced dance just as he recalled it. A violet plasma swept towards him, igniting a brilliant flash that lit up the dim interior. The crackling of the plasma was so visceral, so real that it snapped him back to that place and time and he slipped into it without resistance.
He felt the currents of the Force as they had been, danced to their rhythm to outmanoeuvre his familiar opponent. So did he.
Their blades came together again, holding firmly and Bomoor got a good look at Thane's face: pale, smooth and blemished only by a faint scar across his right eye. He could see faint beads of sweat just below the man's brown hued hair and felt the cool, blue eyes locked firmly upon him. The moment held until eventually they disengaged and the pair separated and took several steps back from one another.
Thane grinned, the violet light of his blade catching his cheeks, "Your getting slow again, Bomoor," he chided, but in that light way that he always used to, "Perhaps you need to rest?"
Bomoor's chest rose with a genuine chuckle of amusement, "Oh no, you won't win against me so easily. I've got some fight in me yet!"
He centred himself and drew in the Force - it was a memory of a feeling, yet it still soothed him all the same.
Once more, he was ready.
Springing at Thane, with a giddy pleasure, he brought a two-handed strike at Thane's violet blade, hoping to overwhelm his friend with the surge of energy and tip him off balance. But Thane knew duelling well and he knew Bomoor well, dipping and misdirecting the Ithorian's energy away. But Bomoor kept it going, drawing on more of that power to cast fast, whirling blows in the Ataru form that threatened to strike the walls on several occasions.
He was frantic, determined and, most of all, he was happy. But the energy he drew seemed to change - it became less of the old familiar and began being replaced by a sapping tug that urged him to remember something. He pressed on, catching and throwing strikes against Thane.
But he could not hold it back and he suddenly collapsed to a knee and bellowed, "Enough!"
He threw out his hand and released a shockwave, casting away not only Thane's weapon, but the man along with it. Thane bashed the back wall with a clattering thud.
That was not how it had happened before.
"Thane!" Bomoor exclaimed quickly, "I'm so sorry. I did not mean..."
He was interrupted by the intercom crackling to life and the roguish voice of their transport captain, Skyla Jan, barked through, "What in blazes are you boys doing back there? Can you keep it together for just five more minutes? Thank you!"
Thane brought himself back, slightly uncomfortably, to his full height with some help from the Ithorian, and a half-smile crept across the human's face. "You're getting faster," he said, flicking a bead of sweat from his brow with an easy motion. "Made me break about three more ribs than usual," he joked, patting Bomoor's forearm as he released himself from his friend's grasp. "You've certainly been working on that Force technique of yours!"
He held the expression a moment longer than he should have, something faintly off in the set of it, before turning away. As he did, the light caught his eyes at just the wrong angle, and for a fraction of a second there was a golden glint beneath the blue that did not belong.
Walking over to the pazaak table at the edge of the hold, he did not reach for the red spacer's jacket Bomoor knew should have been there. Instead, his hand found a dark zeyd-cloth cape, rich and heavy, which he drew about his shoulders with practised ease. The material settled cleanly across his frame as he fastened it at the collar, and for an instant the movement exposed the dull gleam of metal at the tips of his last two fingers before the fabric fell back into place.
"But it's going to take more than speed and a few hops to break me properly," he added, the half-smile returning. There was the faintest roughness beneath his voice now, a thin edge where breath did not quite sit as it should, as if he struggled to hold the full breath.
Bomoor pressed his eyes closed, as though trying to forcibly reset his senses back to the pleasant way things had begun. He opened his eyes and, for a moment saw a blurry double vision of two Thanes: one in red, one in black before they collapsed down into something in between.
"Well, uh..." Bomoor continued, his thoughts catching up to the narrative, "Your blade skills are impressive, particularly at close range. But you won't always be armed and sometimes you will have nothing but the Force to keep you alive."
He paused again, wondering why he had phrased it like that. He was again feeling that tug from somewhere, urging him to question. He didn't like the feeling but felt he had to ask:
"Thane, has something happened?" he asked his friend who stood oddly still offering him that same lop-sided smile, head half hanging in the shadow of the hold's light source, "This isn't how I remember..."
The ship's intercom crackled again, interrupting him. It sounded strange though, less like static but more like a rasping choke.
"Like you said," Thane replied quietly, the words coming just a fraction too late, as though they had taken longer to reach him than they should have, his voice little more than a dry whisper. "Sometimes you will have nothing but the Force to keep you alive."
Something in the cadence pulled at Bomoor immediately, and he turned to look.
For a single, impossible instant, Thane was no longer standing there as he should have been. The light did not fall across him correctly. The outline held, but the detail did not. The right side of his face was gone, not shadowed, not obscured, but ruined - flesh drawn tight and broken, the eye absent entirely, the socket replaced by something darker, something constructed. The zeyd cloth hung wrong across him, fused in places where it should have flowed.
The intercom crackled again. Not the sharp burst of static it should have been, but something thicker, closer to breath dragged across a broken grille. The sound rose, layered and uneven, until it resolved - not into Basic, but into the low, harmonic cadence of Ithorese. The same voices that circled Bomoor now, distant and distorted, pressing through the panel in overlapping strands.
Bomoor's attention was pulled to it at once, confusion overtaking instinct as he stepped toward the console, trying to make sense of the sound.
Behind him, Thane spoke again.
"Saved by the bell..."
The sardonic words were correct - but the voice was not, although a part of him thought he had heard this spectre of his friend before. It was still Thane's voice, in shape and tone, but stripped of its natural texture, flattened and carried on something synthetic, as though the sound had been forced through a machine not designed for it. Each syllable landed cleanly, precisely, and entirely without breath.
Bomoor faced the intercom grille, the thudding sound of the Ithorese chanting grew louder and he felt his body becoming heavier as his surroundings grew lighter. Suddenly, he became lucid, realising that all this was a fantasy, a dream. He still did not remember events before he had entered this state but he had a deep sense of foreboding. He had been angry and in pain - a greater pain than he had ever experienced. A deep, pain of the flesh and a choking down his four throats into his lungs.
He felt the pain seeping back now as he heard his native tongue. He did not want the pain, or the fear and anger that accompanied it, but somehow he knew it was his only option. Now fully in control of his body, unbound from the whims of the fractured memory, he reached out a slender finger towards the intercom.
He flinched as he saw the flesh on his hand was melting away before his eyes. The pain intensified with every beat of his heart. There was only one option: he continued forwards and pressed the button on the intercom.
"Chu kaba!" he reflexively answered in Ithorese, I'm here!
There was a pause and, for a moment, the pain stopped.
Then he heard a violent snap-hiss of a lightsaber igniting behind him and the room lit up in a blood-red hue.
Carefully, hesitantly, Bomoor turned.
The last thing he saw was a blinding flash and a crimson cybernetic eye descending upon him.
He awoke.
Before him, a dim room with species of various shapes settling into view. Thane was no longer there and Bomoor's eyes darted this way and that searching for a sign of where he might be. But his body refused to move. Not yet.
A slither of lime green approached from his left: someone was embracing him. He felt the contact and could not resist. As his senses adjusted he could taste machine oil lingering upon the person as they pressed their warm body upon him.
"'Chu kaba' indeed!" a light feminine voice blended imitated Ithorese with Basic, "You are back with us, Bomoor!"
He still could not see the person properly, but he did not resist as the sensation dulled the violent ache that tore at his other side. He felt a little strength returning to his hand and he raised it up, feeling from his eye stalk, curving down to his lips. Everything was intact. Then why did it burn with the fury of a supernova?
His thoughts were distracted as his eyes were hit with a brighter light as a doorway at the far end of the room slid open and two figures entered. One humanoid and one unmistakably Ithorian.
The Ithorian paused a moment in the doorway before hurrying over and bending down towards him. The face came into focus and a deep, core memory was awakened from his childhood. His father was now looking down upon him. Across all the years, he was certain - it could be no one else.
"Bomoor," his father said simply, hesitancy holding him back before he determined it right to reach out his hands and cradle his only offspring, "Oh, my boy. Welcome back to us."
Still groggy, processing the balance of numbness and pain, Bomoor could only stare up as the figures around him slowly resolved. Behind his father, the face of Mentis became clear. The man looked relieved and troubled all at the same time - nothing new for him. He looked to the green-skinned woman who had been embracing him and was once again surprised to recognise someone from his past and also from the dossier NX-02 had presented them: his childhood companion Jiljoo.
He breathed deeply, in and out, before he could form a single word. In spite of all the love and attention in this room, there was only one thing he could say:
"Thane."
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