A few days after the slaughter on Geonosis, the galaxy ignited.
Thousands of clones, led by Jedi, rushed toward CIS worlds in a futile attempt to force the latter into peace.
It didn't happen without a scandal.
The moment the Order's Council announced the mobilization of Knights and Masters for command positions in the Grand Army of the Republic, the Temple went into real shock.
Nearly a thousand members of the Order refused to obey a direct order. Disagreeing with the Council's position—and the Grand Master's in particular—they reminded everyone that the Jedi were keepers of the peace, not warlords, not generals, and certainly not pawns in the Senate's political game.
This group expressed its disagreement through total, voluntary exile. Demonstratively renouncing their lightsabers—the symbols of belonging to the Order—they left the Temple in groups or alone, under the gaze of hundreds of bewildered younglings and Padawans.
The behavior of the Jedi came as a complete surprise to me. I had never heard of anything like it. Of course, it was possible I'd simply missed this information, but still… It was all so sudden.
"Where are they going, Master?" a girl's voice sounded beside me—one that felt very familiar.
Ahsoka Tano. A little Togruta girl, no more than three years old, with disproportionately large eyes and a cute face that the Clone Wars animated series captured perfectly.
She stood half a meter from me, watching a group of exiles—around thirty people—with obvious interest. Master Plo Koon was speaking with them. Probably trying to talk them out of it, but judging by how many lightsabers the exiles had already handed over to the Temple Guards standing nearby, he was failing miserably.
"I'm not a Master," I corrected the little girl. "Knight Dougan, Padawan…"
"Youngling Tano," the Togruta corrected. "Not a Padawan. Not yet."
"Strange," I thought. "Wasn't she assigned as Skywalker's Padawan at the start of the war? Or did that happen later?"
It's worth noting that while I was interested in the Star Wars universe, I was nowhere near the level of fans who know exactly what's what in this galaxy—who's related to whom, who's whose friend, matchmaker, brother—and can list every ship in Darth Vader's Death Squadron from memory.
"Even so…" I stroked my chin. "Well, I think not all is lost yet, Padawan. For you, and for them." I nodded toward the departing exiles.
"Do you know why they're leaving?" she asked curiously.
"Who knows," I shrugged. "Everyone is free to choose their own fate, Padawan. But these men and women decided that the true Jedi path isn't to wage wars, which is what the Council is asking of us now. They"—I nodded again—"believe that the Jedi path is peace and calm."
"Isn't that what it says in the Code?" the girl asked, raising her huge blue eyes to me.
"And is it?" I answered in the Jewish manner.
The child looked at me in confusion, then stared at the exiles again.
"They're wrong," the little girl declared with firm confidence. "We must not avoid war! We must end it as soon as possible and return to peace."
"Golden words, Youngling Tano," Secura said as she passed by.
The Twi'lek, as before, wore anything but Jedi clothing, irresistibly drawing attention to her figure.
"Knight Dougan," she greeted me with pointed politeness. "Vokara Che asked me to remind you that you're expected in the Halls of Healing. I'm headed there as well. Would you care to keep me company?"
"Knight Secura," I answered in the same manner. Winking at Ahsoka, I stepped away from the column. "I'd consider it an honor."
Together with the blue-skinned Twi'lek, we headed toward that very Temple institution where rehabilitation was carried out.
After Geonosis, the Halls of Healing were overcrowded. Not only bodily, but spiritual traumas had to be treated by Jedi healers in those days. Even though it hadn't been in my plans, I still ended up in the Temple medcenter. After spending two days without leaving, floating in a bacta tank, I begged and bribed the Jedi healer overseeing my recovery, Kiala Omas, to let me wander the Temple in between procedures. And it must be stated as a fact: on the very first day I managed to miss my prescribed meditation.
"Is Vokara Che keeping an eye on me?" I asked Secura.
"What makes you think so?"
"I missed a meditation by only an hour, and she's already sending you to look for me. Admit it—do you have orders to bring me back to meditation even if I resist?"
"Oh, no," Secura smiled. "Actually, Kiala Omas asked me—your Jedi healer. She's concerned that you're missing. And your comlink is off. It just so happened that I found you on my way to the Halls."
"There are no coincidences—only the Force," I said in a didactic tone. The girl snorted with laughter.
Floating in the bacta tank helped me finish the process of integrating my consciousness into the body. I can't say it went smoothly—memories returned in extremely painful flashes. It felt like someone was tickling me under the skull. It made me angry, and horribly irritated. But it helped, too. The headaches and accompanying symptoms vanished, and the body responded actively to the medication being pumped into it. By the end of the first day in bacta, my wounds were no longer life-threatening. Just a couple of blaster burns, a punctured lung and intestines. A trifle—people live without them.
By the end of the second day, they had already taken me out of the bacta tank. The Order's chief healer—the Twi'lek Vokara Che—inspected my wounds with a picky look, then handed me over to Jedi healer Kiala Omas: a young, pretty girl who had only left the Padawan ranks a few weeks earlier.
Negotiating with her to let me slip out of the Halls during the time not allocated for procedures turned out to be fairly simple. Even in a galaxy far, far away, girls—even Jedi—have a weakness for candy and flowers.
During the time I spent in the bacta tank, I thought about Valkorion's words.
And once I left—if only temporarily—the Halls of Healing, the first thing I did was find Secura and apologize to her for a long time, almost tearfully, for my behavior aboard the gunship.
I didn't emphasize destroying the missile. Only that my moral exhaustion and long stay in the Unknown Regions had made me unaccustomed to the company of fellow Jedi. So I had shut myself off from her uncontrollably when she was nobly trying to help me, to support me with the Force.
Intellectually, I understood I was spewing pure nonsense. So I backed up my apology with a bouquet of plants from Secura's homeworld, Ryloth. Hell if I knew what kind of plants those were, but she accepted my apology.
I can't say we became friends, but out of Valkorion's proposed options—kill her or recruit her—I preferred to start by working the second option.
After all, if it doesn't work, the clones can always kill her later.
"Blaster bolt through the right lung and intestines. Three broken ribs," the young black-haired girl in Jedi robes began listing as soon as Secura and I crossed the threshold of the Halls of Healing. "And that's not even mentioning hemorrhaging in the brain. Knight Dougan, you are going to be dead if you don't stop violating the treatment plan we developed for you!"
"Healer Omas," Secura bowed ceremonially. "Your patient is delivered. I'll leave you two—I need to prepare for my own meditation."
With those words, the girl smiled at us both and headed toward the halls for healing meditations.
"Glad you're confident in my recovery too, Kiala," I winked.
"You won't recover if you keep skipping meditations!" the girl wrinkled her nose. "At the very least because if Vokara Che finds out about your truancy, you'll earn yourself several new fractures. Come on!"
She shoved me unceremoniously toward a spacious hall planted around the perimeter with unfamiliar, but unbelievably beautiful trees. Several Jedi were already seated inside—some alone, some with a healer, like me. Aayla Secura, settled on the opposite side of the hall, saw us and gave a restrained nod.
"Kiala." The girl sat down across from me, folding her legs beneath her. "I'm fine. I've been out of the bacta tank for almost three days, and I feel great."
"Rik, don't bullshit me," she narrowed her eyes. "Don't forget I can see your aura. You're like a shattered puzzle. If physical pain has stopped tormenting you, emotionally you're still thrown off balance."
Taking the same position opposite her, I groaned mentally.
Do you know anything about Jedi PTSD? Neither did I until they pulled me out of bacta. By some method unknown to me, the chief healer, after a couple of meetings, assigned Healer Omas to me with a clear task: bring my mental health back to normal.
And here I was being offered a healing trance that was supposed not only to eliminate the last traces of hemorrhage in my brain, but also to return to me the control over feelings and emotions appropriate for a Jedi. As a result of the trance, I was supposed to receive a posting to the front. But since a coma wasn't appealing, I managed to talk my healer into replacing the trance with periodic meditations.
So this forced meditation tedium was entirely my own fault. While I floated in bacta, thinking about the galaxy's fate, going through the synthesis of my memories with Dougan's, Vokara Che sensed traces of the dark side coming from me—aggressive emotions and something else besides.
As luck would have it, at that time the ever-present Yoda was in the Halls of Healing. The true reason for his visit was to supervise the healing trance of the Chosen One—Anakin Skywalker, whose hand the local experts had replaced with a prosthetic. He looked in on me as a side matter.
According to Omas, Yoda soaked in the emanations coming from me for a long time, and still did not consider me fallen to the dark side.
"Serious wounds, of body and of spirit, he has suffered," the Grand Master concluded. "In confusion and searching, he is. Help return him control over himself, we must."
No one argued with the Grand Master, so they prescribed a course of PTSD treatment.
I understood that in the bacta tank I'd almost had a real slip-up.
As the Jedi liked to say, I had lost control of my emotions. In a kind of medicated coma, I unconsciously projected into the real world the feelings and emotions born of the painful diffusion of memories. In other words: "I blew my cover."
I obediently followed all of Omas's instructions. Deep inhale, long exhale, inhale again. Find the point of equilibrium inside myself…
Although Dougan's memory was like a sieve to me, the returned memories related to my time as a learner in the Temple. I could control and direct the Force. Many simple techniques—telekinesis, pulling, enhancing the body with the Force—I performed almost automatically. I hadn't yet moved on to more complex things, or to dueling—first, it felt a bit scary; second, I didn't even have a saber.
The breathing exercise helped me renounce the outside world. I seemed to slip into a trance. The world around me—and Omas's whisper, guiding me in meditation—vanished. Or rather, it reached me as if through water.
Then an image appeared before my eyes.
A bright sky.
Tall grass, up to the waist.
A little boy, about three years old—no more—standing in the middle of an ocean of that tall grass, staring at a starship landing ten meters away. A moment—and a Jedi wrapped in a cloak steps out. A Zabrak, with an ashen-brown tint to his skin. At the sight of him, the boy steps back, falls, tries to run. But the exotic being catches up in a few quick steps. I feel the Zabrak use the Force to put the child to sleep, then remove his lightsaber from his belt and walk unhurriedly toward a wooden hut, on whose threshold stands a figure invisible to me.
Flash.
The boy is ten. He is a diligent youngling, with unremarkable but solid average knowledge. Not the best, not the worst. He has moments of luck, and he has mistakes. But he doesn't give up. He is stubborn, persistent, determined. Finally, his gaze meets the Jedi frozen in the doorway. A Zabrak, with an ashen-brown tint to his skin.
Flash.
He is fifteen. He and his teacher, the Zabrak Abhir, move through the jungles of an unknown planet. He can't see the sky, hidden beneath an impenetrable canopy of plants. His feet sink into soil turned soft and sticky by the morning rain. He tightens his grip on his lightsaber. His teacher is more relaxed, but his saber is in hand as well. A moment—and they step into a clearing, and in its center stands an enormous temple, comparable in size to the Jedi Temple itself.
I recognized it. The Great Temple of the Massassi on Yavin 4. The place from which the Rebel Alliance struck at the Death Star. But now the temple is empty. There are only wild animals and jungle all around.
And inside the temple something dark was roiling—something tied to the dark side.
"Come on, Rik!" my teacher commanded. We stepped under the Temple walls, going deeper into the corridors beneath stone vaults.
Flash.
A Zabrak writhing in pain, his body pierced by hundreds of blue-violet bolts of lightning. Me watching it all with indifference. And Valkorion's laughter as his ghost torments the Zabrak's flesh. Abhir twisted, and with his last strength hurled his ignited lightsaber at me in a spiral. In that same second I raised my hand, letting the cold rage sleeping in me flow through it. Like water through pipes, it ran along my arm, carefully controlled by the mind. No more, no less than necessary. The blue blade chopped into the unseen shield around me, lighting it for a moment with a pale glow…
Flash. This time I returned to the Halls of Healing, but the world still didn't move.
"They're trying to fix you like a malfunctioning mechanism," Valkorion's ghost stepped out of nowhere behind Omas. Looking at me kneeling, he slightly tilted his head to the side. "Crude work."
With that, blue-violet masses of Force gathered around the Sith's hands, and he sent a thin stream of it into my head. For a moment I went rigid. Images began flashing before my eyes—scenes so fast I couldn't grasp their meaning. It lasted only a couple of seconds, after which Valkorion dispersed the masses.
"What was that?" I sprang to my feet. "What were those flashes? Memories?"
"Oh, that," the ghost said without a hint of emotion. "Fragments of your body's past. They are not important. This Jedi never reached mastery." He pointed at the frozen Kiala. "Your predecessor's personal memories are not important. I helped you remember what you truly need."
"Why aren't they important?"
"Because it isn't your life," the ghost shot back. "Focus on yours. These meditations are a good way for you to regain memories of your abilities. Don't waste strength on the emptiness of personal emotions," he advised. Though by the tone it sounded more like a demand.
"What's on Yavin 4?" I asked. "What are you hiding from me?"
Valkorion fell silent for a moment, studying me. Then I felt a mountain drop onto my shoulders. With a groan I dropped to my knees.
"You need a lesson, apprentice," he said in an icy tone. "Find a ship. Go to Yavin 4. And sharpen your skills properly before you do."
With that, the ghost dissolved as if he had never existed.
Without warning, the world resumed moving.
My head rang lightly. As if someone had finally set the gears correctly and tuned a broken clock.
For the first time since I'd ended up in the galaxy far, far away, I felt like a complete Jedi. The Force flowed through my veins like a raging river, strengthening my body, feeding it.
Along with the Force, memories of the previous owner of the body poured into my mind. My training with the Force, with the lightsaber, physical exercises… They spun before my eyes like a kaleidoscope. The moment I lingered on one, it settled into my memory. Then I moved to the next.
I came to just as the kaleidoscope ended.
I had absorbed into my mind everything Valkorion had awakened from the body's memory. Down to the last drop.
"Meditation did you good," Kiala remarked, still watching me with narrowed eyes. "I didn't expect the result to be so fast…"
"That's because I ended up in reliable hands," I said ambiguously. And somewhere in the back of my mind I heard Valkorion chuckle.