Rassi shouldn’t have been able to  feel the crowd’s mood shifting. She’d been around ‘loud’ Force users for long enough that her sense of the subtle, shifting currents of the Xah which the Silent Enclave wasn’t quite able to suppress completely should have been lost to her.

The bone deep revulsion which swept over the Enclave in response to Solna saving Rassi’s life was just as hidden as it ever would have been. If anything, the Enclave was being more silent than usual, given the unifying threat of the Death Shadow’s impending arrival. 

So why could Rassi feel not only their disgust and horror at Solna’s use of the Force, but the terror which lay underneath it?

There was too much there to process in between one breath and the next. Too much for Rassi, and too much for Solna.

But Rassi understood.

“It would be best if no one else tried to kill me, I think,” she said in a steady, even voice.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t afraid too. There was fear, and anger, and pain within her, but she was bigger than any of that and strong enough to keep herself open to the world.

After so many years of trying to cram herself into a mold she was never going to fit, and a lifetime of denying the biggest part of herself, Rassi found that the lines she was trespassing beyond had never been for her protection, and beyond them lay the ally she’d been pushing away as hard as she could.

“Leave. You are no longer part of this Enclave,” Honored Jolu said.

And Rassi felt the emotions even Jolu wasn’t able to hide from her.

Fear of a truth long hidden coming to light

Fear of the oncoming tragedy which was inevitable and absolute.

The same long practiced and societally mandated disgust as the rest of the Enclave.

And in a tiny corner, concern for Rassi and Solna, who stood in a unique sort of peril in the midst of the impending apocalypse. That one would have been nice, but it was so small and easily swept aside by other emotions that it was expended in the offer to allow them to leave.

Still, it was oddly comforting that at least one her primary mentors had harbored some love for her.

“No, we’re not,” Rassi said. “And neither are the rest of you. The Enclave ended when the Elders betrayed you.”

Her words weren’t enough to hold back the crowd. They’d never respected her, must less loved her. To them, the loss of her from the numbers was either a relief or of no consequence whatsoever. Under the circumstances, they should have broken free from the gossamer thin social restraints and torn both Rassi and Solna to pieces.

But restraint held.

Not because Rassi was bigger than they were. For all her physical size, she was still only one person, and a child at that.

The Force however was her ally, and no matter how tightly the members of the Silent Enclave closed down their senses, none of them could miss that.

Rassi wasn’t invulnerable, or omnipotent, but in that moment everyone in the Enclave could sense the Xah was moving as fast as a crashing river and that Rassi was the one at the apex of its wave.

“The Elders have gone to seek our allies,” Jolu said. “So that we will not stand alone against the corruption which menaces us.”

Rassi noticed Jolu’s careful word choice. Jolu could have used any number of convenient shadings of the truth, or even outright lies. She could have explicitly branded Rassi and Solna as corrupt – the crowd already unquestionable believed that. Jolu could have dispensed with all of the and simply ordered the crowd to expel Rassi and Solna if that was what she wanted, either via her authority as an ‘Honored’ Elder or through the more typical means of a Xah-assisted command.

“The Elders have gone to hide alone,” Solna said. “The allies they seek are allies for themselves. They know the Death Shadows are here. If they’d meant to defend you they would have stayed.”

Rassi felt another, much more subtle killing intent rising.

From behind a door in a building off to the side of the crowd.

And another from the back of the alleyway they’d come down.

And another from within the crowd.

The older assassination team.

The one which had already lost one member, but that wasn’t why they were hesitating.

They needed the crowd to break in their favor.

Because they were guilty.

Oh so very guilty.

Rassi smiled.

The crowd was going to break, but it was going to break them if she had anything to say about it.

Part of what gave her hope in that regards was that Solna was speaking the truth, and the Enclave knew it. The Elder’s leaving them in their time of deepest need had sent the entire community in denial but it was all too clear what the Elders were doing since there’d been no speeches explaining the plan, and no command to hold out until reinforcements arrived.

The root of the Enclave’s true terror wasn’t the presence of some unwanted children, or even the attack which was sure to come from the Death Shadows. It was that after centuries of the society being shaped into utter dependence on the central figures of their Elders, they had been abandoned.

Rassi had felt the despair Tovos and his crew were drowning in when they believed they’d become ‘Lost’, and a similar lake of misery was washing away the underpinning which everyone, even ‘Honored’ Jolu, had built their lives on.

Rassi knew she could save them from the Death Shadows.

But she couldn’t save them from the change that was to come.

And that was going to be her best revenge.

She didn’t want to kill the people who’d made her life miserable, or even watch them die. She wanted them to live, and understand what they’d done, and do the hard work it would take to become better people. It wasn’t going to be pleasant for them but it was going to be a chance, and that was what they deserved.

“If our doom is inescapable, then it’s better that some part of us is preserved,” Jolu said.

That rallied the Enclave a bit. Rassi could feel a thread of defiance rise in the hearts around her. If the Xah had sealed their fate, the Silent Enclave could still choose how they would meet that fate.

It was noble.

And brave.

And just what they’d been taught to do all their lives.

Accept what someone tells them to do, with no thought of their own. 

Except people are funny. Rassi had developed a capacity for independent thought mostly because she’d had to question every order that was given to her, since she didn’t seem to be able to carry out any of them like people wanted her to. From the swirl of emotions in the Enclave, she wasn’t the only one who was able to think on her own either.

Some, far fewer than was apparent, really believed and shut off all thought. They were the most fragile and terrified of all the Enclave’s people. And the ones Rassi doubted she’d be able to reach. They’d chosen to be what they were willing.

The rest though, the majority of the Enclave in fact? They wanted to live.

A noble, brave end might have seemed better than dying as the terrified victims they actually were, but they were ready to accept a different fate.

All she had to do was make them believe.

Well, make them believe and survive the assassins who had a vested interest in keeping the Enclave docile and ready to sacrifice themselves since the tension coming from the people with a killing intent towards her suggested that they knew the best time to make an escape was when the Elders had taken off and since they’d missed that window they were going to have to settle for the second best option of fleeing while the Death Shadows were busy ripping apart the rest of the Enclave.

How shocking it was that the ‘Defenders of the Enclave’ who’d only been unique in that they took the lives of sapients had managed to lose their empathy for anyone else. Certainly no one could seen that coming.

“The Elders are coming back,” someone in the crowd called out. “They told us they would!”

“Did they?” Rassi asked, the Force carrying her voice into the hearts of everyone present. “What did they say – exactly? Do you remember speaking with them? Or is it just the ghost of a memory? An impression they left you with?”

She waited a moment, letting her words and the truth behind them seek out the cracks in the shields of denial which had been raised against her.

The assassin in the crowd twitched. He’d been taken in by the Elders too, in his heart, despite his head knowing all too well that the Elders would never make it back in time.

Unfortunately for Rassi, that did not awaken a community spirit within him. If anything, it made the killing intents she felt grow sharper and more urgent.

“No. No. I spoke with them?” a woman near the front asked more than asserted.

“Look at those memories,” Solna said. “Are those words you heard through your ears, or through the Xah?”

<The Xah does not lie to you>, Rassi said, reaching out with the Force to speak directly into the minds of the crowd. <But the people who use it can.>

Everyone, even Solna, flinched at that.

There was ‘corrupting the Xah’ with an instant’s reflexive action, and there was using the Force with a sustained intent and a communion with it so deep that no one who’d been raised in the Enclave could ever mistake what Rassi was doing.

It wasn’t the Evil Jedi’s ‘Mind Control’ they’d been warned about. When Rassi spoke to them through the Xah, her words and the Force were in harmony the way few of them had ever been with the Xah in their lives.

“What…what was that?” a children asked.

“You deserve to know the truth,” Rassi said.

“You do not know the truth,” Jolu said, desperation leaking past her shields like in torrents.

And she did have shields.

Rassi had never known that before.

But it made sense. The Elders weren’t the perfect bastions of self control they claimed to be. They didn’t need to be. What they needed was to be secured against the manipulations of the other Elders, and that control in turn allowed them to simply shut off their emotions from the Xah.

“I know why the Death Shadows are coming for us,” Rassi said. “And I know what we’ve done that drives them, and what we did that created them.”

That was the line she shouldn’t have crossed.

At least from the assassin’s point of view.

Five spikes of killing intent snapped from believing they needed to kill her, to knowing they had to do so immediately.

Solna erupted with a killing intent of her own and stepped in front of Rassi, bringing her hands up in a warding gesture.

Rassi let the Force flow through her and offer her the guidance she needed.

Killing the assassins wasn’t in harmony with the Force. It arose from life, to kill with it was to turn the Force on itself.

She wasn’t going to need to do that though.

And Solna wasn’t either.

Rassi could feel the paths before them, and could feel how many there were which ended with them in a better place.

All she had to do was choose which guidance the Force offered which aligned with her heart.

One of the killing intents vanished.

Another startled in surprise, panicked and went silent as well.

From the second floor of the building on her left, she caught a glimpse of the Horizon Knight Monfi slipping into the shadows as an assassin crumpled unconscious but still alive to the floor.

Rassi’s ally was the Force, but it wasn’t the only ally she’d brought with her.