Solna was alone. It wasn’t a usual thing for her. Despite it’s name, the Silent Enclave was typically abuzz with the various mundane sounds of life, and everyone – literally everyone she often felt – was constantly poking and prodding and judging her.

It was something of a revelation to her when the others gave her space and solitude.

Even Goldie, who Solna still felt as though she was sitting inside the guts of. Goldie had assured her that wasn’t the case – Solna was supposed think of Goldie as a droid sitting in the ship’s central processing room, but given how Goldie was aware of (almost) everything that was going on within the Goldrunner, it was hard to fully accept the “droid in another room” theory.

Despite that though, Goldie did seem to be giving Solna the solitude she’d requested.

“Would it be okay if I meditated for a bit?” wasn’t a request that she’d expected a simple and uniformly positive assent to. In the Enclave there would been offers to join her, and offers to critique her techniques – one could always be better after all, especially someone as young as Solna.

Solna had always bristled at that. She knew she was young but she also knew she was far quieter than most of the adults who tried to show her how to meditate properly. Not that she’d ever been able to express that. Ego wasn’t specifically a corruption of the Xah but the elders seemed to weigh it as heavily against her.

Ravas, Kelda, Lasha and Monfi had all agreed readily though. Not caveats, no requirements, no time constraints. “Take the time you need” and “Finding your center again after an ordeal is important” and “If you have any questions, we are here”.

Rassi had offered to meditate with her, but Rassi didn’t need to recenter herself. Their encounter with the Lich had left Rassi more deeply certain of their path than she’d ever been. Solna could almost feel the glow from the fire which Rassi had kindled inside her heart.

It had been tempting to want to cuddle into that warm, to ask Rassi to stay with her, but that wasn’t a path that would lead to Solna listening to herself and understanding the torrent of emotions that swirled within her. Being with Rassi would offer comfort but also unearth a number of the questions and feelings which would be better dealt with once the future wasn’t a raging storm of uncertainty before them.

And so Solna sat, alone, in her room and breathed.

So much had changed so quickly, and yet, so much hadn’t too.

Her life in the Silence Enclave was drifting light years away, falling into an unrecoverable past.

But she had yearned for that for so long she’d lost track.

In her dreams, she had stood right where her feet had brought her.

Or, not exactly where she was – the Lich had not been a part of her plan – but in broad strokes the path she was on was one she’d been walking towards with each emotional step she took away from the people who had raised her.

Solna could feel the Xah moving through her, could feel the gentle current of it flowing through her life and carrying her onwards towards futures she both desired and feared.

The galaxy was dangerous and she was ill prepared for it. She’d known that and the fear of it had kept her caged in the Enclave for years.

Looking back, she could see the twisting of the Xah that fear represented. Being bound to the will of those ‘above her’ was not the inherent nature of the Xah. It was a construct and a corruption far beyond anything she’d done with the Xah so far.

And she was doing things with the Xah.

From the mind shield to the message she’d snuck out to the Jedi Nix, Solna knew she was breaking the central tenets of the Enclave.

It felt right.

And wrong.

Still.

She’d wrestled with this already, and she suspected she’d be wrestling with the lifetime of indoctrination she had for a long time to come.

But she knew what she wanted to believe, and she knew what she was feeling in the moment.

Far below, on the planet’s surface, the adults were tangling with the traps and tricks with Paralus had left to guard his most secret of bases. Light years away, Nix was racing towards her wife, and the Lich was playing a game to either crush or win their souls to the Dark Side.

Though she was safely in the Goldrunner, in orbit, far beyond the reach of Paralus’ machinations, Solna was a a part of both those endeavors, and it felt right.

The Xah below her was writhing and screaming. Lies echoed into space proclaiming doom, and danger, and emptiness. There was no treasure below, or so Paralus’ wards said. Only death awaits for those who land, just like it has for thousands of unwary other. This place is not on any astrogation charts because it has been condemned.

None of which were true. 

How could they be? Each was a twisting of what was, which was so easy to notice if you simply listened for it.

No treasure awaited? A lie built on truth. No gem, no metals, no precious items of any kind were sealed in the phylactery’s hiding place. The phylactery itself however was priceless.

Only death awaited? Another truth twisted into a lie. The Lich was dead, and had been for lifetimes. He was all that awaited below. He and the last link holding him from the death which should have claimed him.

That the planet didn’t show up on astrogation charts was the best lie though. Every chart on the Goldrunner showed the planet. It was simply shown on the wrong hyperspace lane. With billions of stars in the galaxy there were hundreds of millions of ones which were uninhabited and of little use to anyone. Even after thousands of years of the Old Republic’s assessments and record keeping corrections, there were still more errors in the “Unused Worlds” than anyone cared to think about.

All of those deceptions, all of the corruption in the Xah, woven by one person. Solna wanted to reject everything that the Enclave had taught her but faced with something like the Lich Paralus, it was impossible to pretend that evil didn’t exist. That it was fine to do whatever one wanted with the Xah.

And so she meditated, searching within herself for the lines that would divide her from something like Paralus if the ones the Enclave had taught her weren’t ones she could believe in anymore.

Rassi.

It was as simple as that.

Not that Rassi would define Solna’s moral compass. Solna was young, not stupid. She knew placing another person as the center of her universe was too big a thing to expect anyone to stand up under. 

Rassi was the line, or one of the lines, in that she was someone Solna cared about. It hadn’t taken much observation to see that Paralus cared about no one but himself, which was the first subversion of what the Xah was meant to be.

Life connected with life in many ways. Not all of them were kind or gentle, but not all of them were cruel or harsh either. What Solna landed on for how she would differentiate herself, from Paralus, and how she would prevent herself from becoming an abomination like he was, was respect.

Respect for those who supported her was easy, and the bare minimum of what was required to be a decent sentient being. Respect for those who stood against her, or who tried to hurt her? That was more complicated, but she felt like a path would be there.

She could picture taking up one of the Jedi laser swords to protect herself. She could picture cutting down someone who wanted to hurt her, or hurt someone she cared about. Those actions could be driven by necessity, but if she kept her respect even for the people who opposed her, she would treat them like people – offer them mercy if there was a chance to, defeat them and help them rise to be better if that was possible, or, if no other path was open, end them without malice or cruelty.

As her mind settled on those thoughts, it also became ravenous to read and discover if anyone else had reached those same conclusions.

Had she independently invented the Jedi Code? Or the dogma of the Horizon Knights? Had people thought like she did, and could she discover how that had worked out for them? Find any failings she wasn’t aware of?

She breathed.

And laughed.

Hadn’t Nix been looking for the same thing?

Oh stars, Rassi was going to insufferable when Solna told her about wanting to study other Force traditions.

Solna felt a deep warmth bloom within her.

She was so happy that she was going to get to see Rassi being insufferable.

“Uh, I hate to interrupt, but we have a problem,” Rassi said over the room’s intercom.

Because of course they did.

Solna groaned, but she was ready for this.

“I’ll be there. Where are you all?” she asked, knowing the rest were on the bridge, but to used to hiding the extent of her awareness to give up the reflex quite so easily.

“Like you need to ask?” Rassi said.

Insufferably.

Solna rolled her eyes.

Stupid friends who know her better than she knew herself. Or friend really. It wasn’t like there was another Rassi in the galaxy.

“What’s the problem?” Solna asked when she arrived on the bridge.

“We need your help,” Lasha said from the comms.

“No, we would like to ask for your help,” Kelda said.

“What’s the difference?” Rassi asked.

“This isn’t something we should be asking of you,” Kelda said. “You need to know the danger and you need to be able to say that you don’t feel comfortable with it.”

“What will you do then?” Nulo asked.

“Find another option,” Kelda said.

“There likely isn’t another option though,” Monfi said.

“There are always other options,” Kelda said. “Some of them simply have costs we’d rather not pay.”

“What is it that you need us to do?” Solna asked, suspecting that the adults would dance around the questions for hours if given the chance.

“Ravas is currently stuck in a trap,” Lasha said. “We need you to come down here and see if you can free her from it.”

“Wait, how did she get stuck?” Rassi asked. “I though she was able to impersonate the Lich’s shadow?”

“She can. She’s still doing so in fact,” Monfi said. “We’re deep into the complex now and Ravas has gotten us past easy three dozen checkpoints so far, and maybe twice as many traps.”

“What do you mean she’s still doing so?” Solna asked. “Did Paralus design a trap for himself?”

“Apparently so,” Kelda said. “Or at least a trap for someone utilizing this stratagem. At the moment my dear Ravas is inside a crystal which is engulfed in a field of Force Lightning.”

“Can that zap her?” Nulo asked.

“Most definitely,” Kelda said.

“She’s a ghost though, it can’t kill her deader can it?” Rassi asked.

“It could disrupt her to the point where she’d unable to reform and probably be lost into the Force forever,” Kelda said. “So, yes, it can make her deader than she is. In fact, the emitters seem to be capable of sending the lightning through the crystal itself but since she is mimicking the Lich’s shadow, it’s holding off on that.”

“What can we do? How can we help?” Solna asked, her mind already made up on going.

“There seems to be a control panel with a charging port,” Monfi said. “We need someone who’s quiet enough to avoid the rest of the sensors and reach that panel and given that they caught Ravas pretending to be a shadow, you two seem like our only hope here.”