In the Night Market of Fargrave, a merchant thought he had an easy mark: a blue-skinned stranger, penniless, standing before a Bearer's skull he could never afford. Thrawn didn't haggle.
He watched the onlookers drifting around the stall, spotted a woman in a green coat who avoided the skull's eye socket to stare at the strongbox instead, and whispered: "She'll rob you before midnight." The merchant laughed.
At midnight, he stopped laughing.
The next morning, the skull sat on the stranger's table, along with the merchant's thanks.
Ten years of exile in another galaxy had taught him that objects lie less than people, and this one carried long, even grooves that neither sand nor wind had carved: the signature of the void that had torn him from his world, the night a kid named Ezra Bridger called star whales to take his ship away.
The Psijic of Artaeum heard of the stranger who read people, and invited him to their island to ask the only question that mattered to them: could he see the future? "I see nothing," Thrawn answered. "I read what peoples leave on their walls."
The elder led him before a fresco of the Bearers, colossi marching along an endless road.
Legend says they perished after forgetting why they walked.
Thrawn studied the fresco for a long time, then pointed at the colossi's heads, all turned backward. "They forgot nothing. They weren't walking toward something, they were fleeing." He closed his notebook. "The whales too, incidentally. They carried me here fleeing the very same thing."