"Secrets Of The Jedi (Jude Watson)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Jude)

Star Wars

Secrets of the Jedi

by Jude Watson

source: IRC
uploaded: 09.I.2006

CHAPTER 1

Qui-Gon Jinn couldn't sleep. Every night he spent some time trying,
but in the end he decided to walk off the need for rest.

He didn't understand it. As a Jedi, he was used to sleeping anywhere,
in all sorts of conditions. He had slept in cargo holds and spaceport
hangars and on a pile of droid parts. He had slept four hours in the middle
of a field during a driving rainstorm. When he needed sleep, he told his
mind to empty and his body to unwind, and they obeyed.

But in the past, he'd never had to deal with his heart.

He had done the forbidden. He had fallen in love with another Jedi
Knight. He had pledged himself to her. And she had died. He was paying a
price he was glad to pay, because those few days of loving and of knowing
he was loved were worth it. But how to put his heart back together? Tahl
had changed him. She had made him whole, and she had broken him with her
death. Qui-Gon could not figure out how to reassemble.

So he didn't sleep. He and his Padawan, Obi-Wan Kenobi, had been at
the Jedi Temple for weeks now. Yoda had called them back for what they'd
expected to be a briefing for a mission, but there had been no mission.
"Need your Padawan does days of reflection," Yoda had said. "Important they
are as days of action."

There had been much action lately. Mission after mission. The Senate
was fractured, torn apart by special interests, by warring clans and
alliances.

There seemed to be plenty Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan could be doing, but Qui-
Gon did not want to cross Yoda, so they stayed. But the weeks at the Temple
only made Qui-Gon's sleeplessness worse. He walked the empty halls at
night. The glow lamps were powered down to a soft blue, making it a restful
time to stroll. It seemed that every hall, every room, held a memory of
Tahl, but he didn't court those memories. He tried to allow his grief to be
his companion, not his master. He opened his mind and simply walked.

He found himself, at the end of a long night, back near his quarters.
Qui-Gon hesitated. He was not ready to return to his small room and stare
at the walls.