an illustration to the fourth part of the "Mirrors of the Force" StarWars fanfiction story written by my dear talented versatile friend Sebastian (in order to comment on the story itself go to Sebastian's submittion of the text alone [link])
as you'll easily figure (when you read the text what i sincerely hope you'll do) my illustration portrays one delirious dream the Jedi hero is having... I won't add anything more not to commit unpurposely some spoiler of what happens next)


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Sebastian Buchner

Mirrors of the Force
Part IV


The Jedi's Dream

Lost…stranded…dead…those were thoughts that ran through my head. I saw my brother’s questioning face and thought that it was him, him and Tach, who sat with me in the tiny elevator. There were periods of wakefulness and periods when the pain became too much to bear. I couldn’t move. Li was telling me stories of the birds that he had watched on the shore in front of our house and behind the pain I saw them, the sun behind them, the drops that their wings scattered flying like the jewels of a broken necklace. Li and I, we ran down the steps, ran across the sand and we turned into birds like those he had seen and described and we flew across the sky, calling to the sun like to a mother.
Then I was back and was staring at a broken panel, at damaged metal walls. Something was leaking but I could not say whether it was a machine next to me or myself. I felt the leak, I felt some fluid dripping on the floor, but during all this it was curiously difficult to say which of these manifestations, the fluid, the act of dripping, the floor getting gradually wetter or the being who perceived all of this was me. I grappled with that question until the pain overwhelmed me again.
Li and I, we were slowly turning into flames. We shed the part of us that was bird and became flame. I felt grand and noble and these feelings lasted until I, suddenly, realized that I was become the flame that Tach used to light one of his cigarettes.
There was a smell of burning unlike tobacco. The leak had gotten worse. Some alarm was going off. I felt aware of the boy next to me, but it was too difficult to tell myself that it wasn’t Li…
…and so I was breath or smoke mixed with breath and I slowly dissolved as Tach exhaled me. I spread across the entire room and felt myself rolling like the mist of early morning that was gently blown past our hut…
…which was now a tiny room of metal. I felt some urge, some nameless, purposeless urge that I knew had no release. My entire being was contracted, tensed and I felt I would never relax again…
…we sit together playing a simple game. The stake is the other’s life. As the elder brother it is my turn to begin the game. The game is played without dice, without board – it is played by thoughts and every thought is loud and clear to the other. Nobody can win in this game. If I win, he dies. If he wins, I die. We try to play for as long as we can…

I awake again and the urge has gone. My body feels numb, but it can hold my mind again. I am no longer inside of the elevator. Everything is dark and something strange is feeling its way through my body. I sense nothing. There is a noise and it is as loud as an explosion. Light and two shadows against the light…



The Azad Boy dreams...


The people came about when god looked into a mirror. Bored with his own image, he went away but his reflection stayed inside the mirror. Now this reflection is forever caught in the mirror, able only to see and touch what comes into their mirror. There may be an outside world, but the people are completely ignorant of it. This ship is mirror and map and people who live here lead lives but those are not lives but copies of them. We all copy our fathers and forefathers but often we move and so we meet people with different tales and different songs that live in their mirror-mind. Those people make our mirror world richer, almost as rich in taste as the world of gods, the world beyond the mirror and the mind.
The people on the ship live lives of poverty, like mirrors looking into mirrors, seeing nothing but what they know.
There are people who make mistakes. They think that life outside the mirror is better and they step from it. Few people will recognize them if they do and everywhere they go they will upset the balance of things. I am one. The man I brought with me is another. I watched him as he lay dying. I sought for the moment life would leave him and as it did, I told it that it could live in me, for a while. I studied his life for a day and he has seen things I have never dreamed about. I sought for a way inside. One can enter memories, they are like smudges of dirt patterned on the mirror. Find the right shape and you can become memory.
The man had lost someone. A younger sibling. We played a game for the memory-spirit of his younger sibling. He was distracted and I won. I will stay with him. He will know me.
I spend most of the time inside my mirror-mind, seek nutrition in the memories we now share. Sometimes one of the poverty people comes and there is much pain about her that pulls me from my thoughts, demands my concentration. I like it better if it is just the man and me. His memories are good and he knows how to leave the mirror-mind.
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part I [link]
part II [link]
part III [link]
part V [link]
part VI [link]
part VII [link]
PartVIII [link]
Part IX [link]
Part X [link]