For half a heartbeat Vernestra hesitated, but then she closed her eyes and reached out to the half-dead woman. The woman reached back, the connection like and unlike a Force bond. For a moment nothing happened, but then Vernestra began to see flashes of the old woman’s life: a childhood spent on an idyllic planet, her first trip through hyperspace, and then something different—the blue of hyperspace, seeming less random and more deliberate, diverting and flowing in the same way Vernestra perceived the Force, a rushing, branching fluid thing that could be charted and mapped and explored.

And then Vernestra saw it—the Path, a proper thing to be named and followed and remembered. Vernestra felt the memory of it being carved on her mind. No matter what happened, she would know how to get there, the place beyond the edge of the galaxy, a place where no living thing should go and no one had gone for a very, very long time.

And then Vernestra was alone, all by herself, and the presence of the old woman was fading, retreating across a distance where Vernestra could not follow. But the Path to that far-off place was within Vernestra, and she finally understood why Master Stellan had been so enraptured with the idea of Vernestra’s hyperspace visions. Traversing hyperspace the same way a Jedi traveled through the Force was a difficult thing to do, and this frail old woman had spent a lifetime making her way across the hidden paths of the galaxy.

A talent exploited by the Nihil in all the worst ways.

“Thank you,” Vernestra said, placing her hand against the glass of the medical pod as the old woman inside collapsed in on herself. There was no longer the dual perception of the woman—of her body and her spirit. There was only her corpse, long dead, the physical form that had kept her prisoner until she could offer up one last Path to Vernestra.


Star Wars The High Republic Out of The Shadows Chapter 37