Being “Captain Alyi’wensha” had always been a mark of pride. “Padawan Wensha” on the other hand was something Ayli was struggling to come to terms with.

“I’m not a child. I can do ‘sitting quietly’. But this is going on three hours and I’m starting to wonder how much of this is training and how much was your former masters just needing a break from a bunch of toddlers,” she said without descending to the floor of the empty adobe room she was hovering in the center of.

Kelda flickered into view in front of her, just as translucently blue as ever, wearing her usual jedi robes and an unusually amused grin.

“I’d say you were just like Ravas, except her record for this exercise was twelve minutes as a Padawan.”

“Wait, she got to be a Jedi and she only had to do twelve minutes of this?” Ayli asked, refusing to give into the growing temptation to let herself flop down onto the floor. Her irritation bolstered her resolve and made the load of lifting herself three feet into the air lighter than ever. At least until she exhaled away the motes of anger that were gathering in her.

Channeling the Force wasn’t hard. Once she’d felt how to do it, it was almost more challenging not to reach out to it. The real trick was learning how to use the Force without drawing it through her negative emotions. 

Hate, fear, sorrow. Those were powerful tools for her, and so, so very easy to use in calling on the power that flowed around her. For most sapients, a punch backed by rage drew on their bodies reserves with far less limitations than one thrown with a calm heart. Drawing on the Force wasn’t exactly the same but it was definitely possible to drink much deeper of it when anger removed your ability to care about the repercussions. 

Ayli had come dangerously close to losing all sense of self to that a year earlier when she’d been pushed to the limits of her anger and fear. Faced with an unbeatable foe, and confronted with a fate worse than death, she’d been willing to cast away everything she was in order to save the woman she loved.

Despair isn’t typically a solid emotional state to make wise decisions from, but she had unlocked a tremendous amount of power when she’d decided to burn her future to ash, and at the time that had seemed like her best choice.

It hadn’t been.

Not even a little.

“As tests go, I think you’ve passed this one,” Kelda said. 

“This was a test?”

“Everything is,” Kelda said. “Float quietly for three hours? Test of your skill with Force. Test of your ability to focus. Test of your ability to sit in a place of calm serenity.”

“Doesn’t seem like a terribly fair test,” Ayli said. “I know plenty of people who can’t sit still for more than twelve seconds, much less twelve minutes or multiple hours.”

“Indeed. When I started I lost focus around three minutes into the exercise,” Kelda said. “Ravas was up to around six minutes then, so you can imagine how gracious she was in her victory.”

“She literally never let you live that down until you finally beat her did she?” Ayli kept herself floating but bobbled a bit with the laughter she was suppressing.

“And then she sulked. For days. Oh stars that was such much worse,” Kelda said.

“Your old masters seem like they were jerks for pitting you against each other like that,” Ayli said.

“Oh, they had no idea what we were up to,” Kelda said. “Well, looking back with adult eyes, I’m sure they could tell how competitive we were. They certainly didn’t judge us by the results of the tests though.”

“Why bother with testing you then?” Ayli asked. As a Rebellion brat, the people around her had tested her constantly. Was she quick enough to get out of sight when a Storm Trooper appeared? Could she handle a blaster without blowing off her own appendages? Could she hit a target at the end of an alley. From a rooftop? From two feet away when they were helpless to resist? Could she hotwire a speeder before it’s owner found her? Could she disarm security cuffs? Or arm a ship breaching bomb? On and on, so many tests to see if they could rely on her in a crisis, and, she had to admit, to teach her what she could do if things went wrong.

And things went wrong a lot.

For all the glory the Rebellion gained after their victory, the truth of it was that most of its members weren’t great heroes. They were normal, desperate, terrified people who, being people, were just as deeply, deeply stupid as everyone else in the galaxy. The average Rebellion operation succeeded largely due to the few decent bits of planning that people didn’t manage to screw up and the lucky breaks they got from the inevitable screw ups of their Imperial opposition (who being people too were also deeply, deeply stupid).

“Tests can serve many purposes,” Kelda said. “Padawan tests aren’t meant to reject or diminish the learners but rather illuminate the areas where they’ll benefit from instruction the most.”

“The tests I’m familiar with are ones that you don’t necessarily get to walk away from,” Ayli said.

“Those sorts of tests our master never subjected us too,” Kelda said. “Not even the test for Knighthood, which was our graduation of sorts, came with that sort of penalty.”

“So they weren’t jerks after all then?” Ayli said, unable to fully brush aside the worm of jealousy that nipped into her at the thought.

“Oh, some of them were,” Kelda said. “Our training was focused on many things but making us pleasant and sociable was certainly not one of them.”

“That seems odd for a group of people who were trying to avoid negative emotions at all costs,” Ayli said.

She and Kelda had worked together for months. Initially Kelda had been as reserved as Ayli had expected a Jedi Master would be. Very focused on discussing how the Jedi viewed the Force, and what the “Jedi-way” was for training in its various uses.

That had been good since it was about all Ayli could initially handle. After her experiences on Praxis Mar, she’d been tempted to swear off ever touching the Force again. With the memory of raging out of control and blasting everything with Force Lightning, rejecting the Force had seemed like the safest option, for herself and for everyone around her. 

Nix hadn’t pushed her on that. She had simply started her own training early enough each morning that when Ayli woke up it was to the sight of her wife softly and slowly dancing through a series of katas meant to harmonize mind and body together. 

It had taken a week before Ayli felt like joining her, and two week more before she admitted to herself that she could feel the flow of the Force as Nix passed it to her in their dance and drew it back as she stepped away.

Ayli’s negotiations with her fears had been a step-by-step process from there, first admitting that she enjoyed feeling the Force as it simply moved through her, to embracing the energy the katas generated to help throw off the fuzziness of sleep, to finally admitting that the parts of the dance Nix added where they spun into the air and danced on the wind were too delightful to not draw on the Force to join her in.

From there she’d (somewhat grudgingly) started her training proper.

She’d imagined she would train with Ravas, since between the former-Jedi and the former-Darkside user, Ayli was sure which of the two she was more closely aligned with. That would have been a disaster though, and Ayli was fairly certain everyone knew it, so it wasn’t terribly surprising when Kelda had begun showing her how to the Jedi used the Force.

Simple explanations of the Jedi’s philosophy and tenets have given way to steadily more in depth accounts of what it had been like to train with other Padawan’s from as early as Kelda could remember.

Most especially with Ravas.

How the two of them hadn’t seen they were desperately in love with one another while they were together boggled Ayli’s mind. Granted, she had been somewhat obtuse about how her feelings for Nix had grown, but in her defense, she and Nix had started out with a drunken affair, gotten married and then fallen truly in love in the space of less than a month. A month during which they’d been haunted by a Dark Side ghost (Ravas), passed several grueling tests, and discovered a fabled city (which was also haunted). 

In Kelda and Ravas’ case, they’d been together for years. Pining, fighting, comforting, fighting some more, until, finally, the tenets of the Jedi order had finally broken them apart for the rest of their natural lives.

That they’d managed to hold on across the centuries until they could enjoy an unnatural life together was a testament to something, though Ayli wasn’t sure if it was a sign of great love, great idiocy, or both.

“The Jedi weren’t about avoiding emotions,” Kelda said. “Or, not the ones who grasped the distinction between ‘not being controlled by your emotions’ and ‘not feeling them’.”

“I can see where that’s difficult when you’re fighting for your lives all the time,” Ayli said, thinking back to how often her anger had pulled her through situations where her fears would have frozen her into fatal inaction.

“We weren’t though,” Kelda said. “The time when Ravas and I lived was generally peaceful. As a Knight, I sought out trouble, but in most cases I was able to arrive early enough that a conflict could be resolved before the lightsabers came out.”

“Was that a you thing or did all of the Knights do that?” Ayli asked, wondering as she did how much the Force would expect her to toss herself into danger once she had a better handle on it.

“It wasn’t uncommon for the Jedi to act as roaming peace keepers,” Kelda said. “With the Force to guide us, we were able to find problems and resolve them that others had overlooked. Plenty of Jedi followed other paths too though. Many had no stomach for conflict and focused on building and sustaining instead. Our archives were once among the most comprehensive in the galaxy, and the support networks we coordinated gave whole worlds voluntary access to the resources of the galaxy.”

“So what happened? How did all that come crashing down? I mean there’s, what, a handful of Jedi left in the galaxy now?” Ayli asked, not at all bitter that the failure of the Jedi seemed to have been the precursor to the Empire taking over.

“Well, I was dead for most of it, so I can’t say for sure,” Kelda said. “If I had to guess though, I would imagine it was a case of complacency backed by a calcification of following the letter of the tenets and not their spirit. That could have been all it took for the selfish who sought power to successfully target them and bring them low.”

“Shouldn’t the Jedi have sensed that though?” Ayli asked. To her the future was an unreadable blur, but she knew that others were able to feel where it was flowing far better than she was.

“Selfishness, cruelty, greed, everything we’d label as part of ‘the Dark Side’ involves twisting to see only inside yourself. You become all that matters, and other people cease to be people at all. They become ‘the Other’ who you lose all connection to,” Kelda said. “People like that may still have immense support from backers who have a similar lack of compassion, but they’re an abyss. They give nothing back, existing only to consume more and more. It’s possible to detect what they’re doing by the effects they have on those they trample under their feet, but their lack of real connection to others can make them hard to perceive in the Force. Couple that with the patience to strike when the Jedi were weak and even just one evil man would have been enough to unmake a democracy which stood for generations.”

“That’s pretty depressing,” Ayli said. “Like nothing we build will ever really last.”

“It won’t,” Kelda said. “Everything changes, but that doesn’t mean everything is doomed.”

“Standing on this side of history, I have to admit it’s not easy to believe that,” Ayli said, allowing herself to be honest mostly because Kelda had never once scolded her for saying things like that.

“Perhaps another vantage point might be helpful then,” Kelda said. “Let’s take a little trip.”

“Where?” 

“The Shadowed Cave,” Kelda said.

Ayli squeaked. 

The Shadowed Cave was the one place she wasn’t supposed to go on their island training home. It was the one place on the island where the Dark Side pooled. The one place she would again be tempted like she was on Praxis Mar.