She focused all her attention on the jagged entrance. She thought she could glimpse a faint glowing from within. If it had crystals, perhaps she—
Another attack pounded her already battered ship. Clearly they were afraid they would lose her, and were trying to knock her off course. They succeeded. Jake crashed into the lip of the hole and knew no more.
Pain...
Sometime later, she blinked awake, pain stabbing her and a humming noise vibrating through her body almost to a cellular level. She was huddled beneath the console, and for a moment she didn't understand why. Then she realized what had happened. Her escape pod was tilted badly, almost vertically. She moved cautiously, aware that she was wounded, but not sure yet how bad it was. Her hand touched her slender torso and came away wet with blood, dark and thick and hot.
She was dying. She was dying and soon it would be lost, all lost....
Jake craned her neck and her eyes widened. Where she had sat was now a huge, glowing crystal. It was so beautiful, its song—for now she realized it was crystals singing, as they had once sung to Khas and Temlaa and others—so exquisite she almost forgot to be shocked at its appearance. Her pod had impaled itself—and, she realized, her—upon it.
Somehow she reached the door, somehow it opened, and she fell down several feet and again lost consciousness as she struck hard. Impossibly, she revived a second time. Somehow she got to her feet and swayed for a moment, staring down at her bloody lavender and white robes.
There was no indication that her pursuers had followed her down, and she knew why. There had been no reason to. They had dealt her ship a crippling blow, and the area in which the pod had crashed would be far too difficult to navigate. There was no atmosphere here, and if they had taken any readings on her physical state, they would know she would be dead within hours. Indeed, she should be dead already. Her injuries were far too great. But in defiance of what should be, the wound was starting to close, and the lack of habitable atmosphere seemed to pose no threat. Something here was keeping her alive. But for how long?
She looked around, the pain receding in the face of the glories that met her eyes. This.. .cavern?.. .was filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of khaydarin crystals. Each one was singing, adding its own tune to the exquisite harmony that wrapped around her almost like a physical thing. They glowed blue, purple, and green, and she felt bathed in that light. Perhaps that was what was healing her and creating some sort of protective barrier against the lack of atmosphere, that, or the powerful residual life force that still thrummed throughout the now-abandoned chrysalis. There was definitely energy here; and Jake, with the memories of every protoss who had ever lived, thought she just might be able to put that energy to good use.
A hand on her lacerated abdomen, she moved carefully around the chambers, looking for an exit. There was none. In a way, that was good, if the plan that was starting to form in her mind was to be successful. But in a way, it was not, for success hinged on someone knowing what she knew—someone finding her.
The pain was returning, and she felt fresh wetness beneath her hand. She still lived, but not for long. Not in this broken body.
Jake threaded her way through the crystals, leaving drops of dark purple fluid as she went. Finally she reached a relatively flat wall and trailed her hand over it. A flash of memory—Temlaa and Savassan, touching the crystals in a precise order—the ara'dor, the perfect ratio. The ratio of the shell, of the hand, found again and again on all worlds the protoss had discovered. Such a pattern had opened doors that were otherwise hidden. Would it likewise permit her to create a door where none existed before?
Jake winced at the pain, but grimly pressed her clean hand to the wall. She could sense the energies in it still, feel it almost physically tingling on her skin. One to one point six, each print touching the other, making a beautiful but invisible spiral on the door. Then she drew the lines of the "door" she hoped to create, again measuring as best she could estimate, tracing a rectangular outline. She lifted her hand and waited.
The chrysalis and the creature it had sheltered had been of the xel'naga. And somehow, it remembered. Somehow, it recognized this timeless ratio. Before Jake's eyes, the spiral created by her hand, hitherto invisible, began to glow. There was a sudden brilliant flash of light, and then Jake realized she was peering into the dark depths of a corridor.
"Please," she whispered, to whom she did not know—the chrysalis, the souls of those whose memories she bore, the unknown protoss who would one day find this corridor. Jake looked around and found a small crystal she could conveniently break off. Holding the glowing source of purple-green illumination, she moved forward, following the corridor until it ended. She repeated the process on this wall. Again the spiral glowed and flared, and again a doorway she had created with nothing but the energies of this place and her own knowledge of the ara'dor's importance to the xel'naga opened for her. She stepped into the corner and turned around. How to close the door? Or rather, cause it to manifest again? On a hunch, she traced the ara'dor in the empty space and stepped back. Sure enough, the wall reappeared. She needed to leave a message, but also had to be cryptic. After all, there was a possibility that an enemy could find this place.
Jake turned to the wall opposite the doorway, dipped a long finger in her own blood, and began to write.
My brothers or sisters who have come this far—within, a secretlies preserved. To enter, think as the Wanderers from Afar would. Think of perfection.
She stumbled and blinked. Away from the energies of the heart of the temple, her wound was worsening. Fear shot through her that she might already have lingered too long. She opened the door, closed it again behind her, then hurried back as best she could to the innermost chamber.
She almost fell before she reached it. Faintness washed over her, gray and soothing; she fought it back determinedly. Not yet. Not just yet.
The energies from the hatchling from a similar chrysalis had turned Bhekar Ro, a harsh world, into a verdant field for kilometers around. Perhaps what was left here would do what Jake wanted it to do. And more than any other protoss, a preserver understood how to use one's thoughts.
She wasn't even able to reach the ship. She would have to do it here. Her body made the decision for her, her legs buckling as she fell hard. One hand reached out to grasp the nearest crystal, pulling its power and that of the temple itself into her.
Life energy was as real as any other kind. She knew that. And now she deliberately pulled it out of her poor violated body, shaping it into a cord, willing herself to live long enough to stop time in this place of deep, deep power. She twined the glowing, golden cord that was her life around the crystal. When the time came, if all went as she hoped it would, the cord would be found and held by another— another to whom she could pass on the vital information she bore.
Despite the emotions pumping through her system, the legacy of the primal protoss who had raged and slaughtered one another in millennia past, Jake calmed her thoughts and concentrated on the khaydarin crystal. It was warm where her hand rested on it, and she felt a slight tingling emanating from it.
I have done all that I could. I can only hope it will be enough.