Yaddle spoke to Yoda. “The land,” she said simply.

	“The water,” he replied.

	Together, they reached forward. Yaddle felt the ground in all its beauty and consequence. The tiniest grain of clay, dissolved in so much liquid, and the great stones beneath the surface of the ground that moved only with centuries of past glaciers, formed in magma, cooled into stones as everlasting as hope.

	She gathered them, pulled them from the water, and felt them as if molded clay in a child’s hands—pulling. Pushing. Thrusting tons of dirt and stone up and away. Peeling it from the bodies, now nearly lifeless, deep below.

	She opened her eyes. Master Yoda was twisting his clawed hands, and the water was emerging from the widening hole in the ground like a piece of carved glass, a bloom opening and spreading outward from what was now a large crevasse.

	“Gella!” a voice cried. Jedi Enya Keen had rushed forward from a nearby rescue tent. Despite the cries of warning from others, she ran forward, knee-deep in the muck and glancing only for a second at the walls of water and soil, like enormous giants of glass and flowers of clay, ever growing, and being manipulated by the two Jedi Masters. A thick wavy mass of clay peeled out of the crevasse, and a human hand appeared in the bubbling water, covered in mud.

	Enya reached for it, grasping the wrist, pulling with all her might. Gella, covered in mud and with an open mouth full of dirty water, emerged. Gella’s hand was fixed tight to something deep in the ground, and Yaddle exhaled, dropping enormous twin clods of soil to the side, and reaching in deeply with the Force.

	The body of Axel Greylark, similarly obscured in mud and limp as wet leaves, emerged from the watery hole. Gella’s hand held fast to the back of his jacket.

	Yoda let the water fall in an enormous wave several meters away. Master Yaddle lowered her arms, the torturous structure of extracted mud falling with a boom at a distance. She exhaled.


Star Wars The High Republic Cataclysm Chapter 31 page 372