Rassi had always thought that Solna was a genius, a prodigy of Silence, but hearing her speak so profoundly via the Force dispelled that notion. Solna wasn’t a genius of Silence. She was simply a genius.

Without words or violence of any sort, she’d undone one of the Death Shadows. She hadn’t killed it. That was impossible because the Death Shadows weren’t alive to start with. They were screaming voids left where a life had once been.

What Solna had given it was peace. And restoration. And a place in the Force.

Looking out at the stunned faces of the Silent Enclave, Rassi could hear nothing from them but could feel the swell of disbelief.

They’re world was shifting under them. They’d been told, everyone one of them, since birth, to only every listen and never speak to the Xah, never commune with the Force. They’d been lied to. At every turn. Whenever the Elder’s needed something, the Force had been turned against them and the act scrubbed from their memories. 

That couldn’t have been the life they had. None of them wanted to believe that. No one wanted to be a victim like that. Or have their beliefs they rooted themselves in crumble away.

Many in crowd were pushing back, grasping denial like a cudgel to beat back the truth that threatened to destroy everything they depended on.

None of that was surprising to Rassi. She couldn’t imagine the Silent Enclave believing the news of what had been hidden from them. Not when it had worked so well for some of them so long. She’d been unique, in a sense, in that the Silent Enclave had never worked for her. Even so though, there were parts of her, voices of doubt and fear which questioned what she was doing and warned of dire consequences.

Being afraid was never enjoyable, and it didn’t matter that she’d had a lot of experience with it. None of the times she’d been afraid while growing up made the fear in her any less. Where fear had chipped away at the bedrock of her heart, she was still as wobbly as ever.

What let her stand and face her former people wasn’t experience or raw courage.

It was Solna.

And Nulo. And Muffvok. And Lasha. And Kelda and Ravas.

And Nix.

They’d shown her what a better future looked like.

And they’d believed in.

She could face the crowd before her, because she wasn’t alone, and never had been.

And the surprising part, the part she hadn’t been ready for at all, were all the people in the crowd who started moving to stand with her.

“I don’t want to die,” Jilla, a girl only a few years older than Rassi said. Jilla had been mean to Rassi a few times, but not so exceptionally that Rassi could recall even the general details of the encounters. The Jilla who walked up to Rassi did seem to remember though, each step which brought them closer together driven as much by sorrow and shame as it was by hope at Rassi’s words.

“Good. Let’s get out of her together then!” Rassi said holding up her hand for a fist bump.

Jilla did not fistbump her.

She cast her arms around Rassi in the sort of hug that precisely one person had ever given her in her time in the Silent Enclave.

The look on Rassi’s face must have been priceless. Rassi knew this because of the insufferable grin Solna shot her direction.

Before Rassi had time to figure out if she was supposed to hug Jilla back, Jilla pulled away, took a step back and said, “Thank you. But how? I can’t do what she did.” She nodded over towards Solna.

Solna whose answer was interrupted by three more of the Death Shadows breaking through the ranks of the Praxis Mar Dead whose protective perimeter was shrinking steadily under the onslaught of the Death Shadows.

“Trust the Xah!” Solna shouted, throwing herself in front of one of the Death Shadows.

That was definitely the first step, but Rassi knew it wasn’t going to be enough. There was one far more vital action they needed to take.

“Let the Xah help you!” she screamed as a tumult of sound erupted from the formerly ‘Silent’ Enclave.

“How…how do you we do that?” Jilla was trembling with fear, but she wasn’t leaving Rassi’s side, which saved her life.

The second of the Death Shadows came directly for her and it was up to Rassi to stand before it.

That was somehow easier than speaking to the Enclave had been though.

“Like this,” Rassi said and felt the rivers of the Force around her.

There was so much life within her, so many reasons to live, and so many people she was connected to.

The Death Shadow represented the end of all of that. It’s mere existence spoke of lives broken and ended, reason turned to horror and tragedy, and the fragility of all connections.

Rassi opened herself to the Death Shadow’s pain. She couldn’t deny it, the violation of a life it stood for was too real and too present to pretend it had never happened, or that she could simply ignore it.

Rassi couldn’t deny what the Death Shadow was and what it meant, but she could encompass it. Draw it in and show it how it was only a part of an even greater truth.

Lives end, but that is only one moment in them against so many others. Against the shattering final loss stands every moment of joy, of wonder, of hope, of humor, and love. 

And not only those. 

Holding out her hand to Jilla, Rassi invites the older girl to join her.

Rassi and Jilla had never been friends, had never even been kind to one another, but even so there was a still a bond there. They shared a sense of what a community was, and what people should do for each other. They knew both believed what had been done to the Death Shadows was unforgivable, and that what the Death Shadows were doing was wrong and had to be resisted. 

And standing together, the veils between Jilla ands Rassi  were tearing away. Jilla had never understood that Rassi wasn’t the person or the problem the Elders made her out to be, and Rassi had never imagined that Jilla might possess the courage to rise beyond the life she’d been forced into.

“You can’t keep doing this,” Jilla said.

It’s time to go. Time to rest. We’ll take care of things from here. It’s not your burden anymore, Rassi said, speaking only through the Force and enunciating each word loud enough that the Death Shadow couldn’t deny them.

It’s time was done, and was yet to come again. The pieces it once held belonged together again. They could be part of the cycle of the Force once more. It didn’t need to hold them apart. That was causing it more suffering than taking the risk that it might live again once more someday.

On the other side of the crowd, a very different encounter with a Death Shadow played out however.

“No. You don’t get to take him. He’s mine and I’ll kill you first!” Elgonu, one of the older members of the Enclave yelled. Rassi knew him largely because it was assumed he was only a year or so away from the joining the Elders. He was an unremarkable man, who Rassi tended to avoid because he spent most of his time lecturing people about obscure (and Rassi suspect largely imaginary) tales of crimes against the Enclave by the Jedi, the Galactic Empire, Wookies, and whatever other group or people he felt like railing against.

As the Death Shadow she was dealing with faded away into the Force, Rassi felt the surge of anger rising within Elgonu and started to yell a warning to him.

But it was already too late.

Elgonu lashed out with the Xah. Not Force Lighting. And not an Expunging ritual. Just a wild and uncontrollable surge of anger and force to destroy the Death Shadow which had been heading for his adult son.

The Death Shadow switched course immediately, the blast of power doing precisely nothing to it.

The people around Elgonu were not so lucky though. The clumsy attack hurled the  six people closest time him away, sending three of them crashing in a wall and the other three (including both of his sons) into the dias the crowd was gathered around.

That left Elgonu alone in the middle of a small clearing at the edge of the crowd.

He lashed out again, but it again did nothing, despite the growing anger behind the attacks.

His third attempt was cut short when the Death Shadow reached him. Each of Elgonu’s attack had been in blatant violation of the norms of the Silent Enclave – he was clearly corrupting the Xah – but Rassi hadn’t understood what that really meant until the Death Shadow poured itself into Elgonu and he continued to fight.

In place of being brutally murdered, something much worse happened.

Elgonu managed to truly corrupt the Xah, just like the Elders had always warned them could happen.

From Elgonu’s perspective, Rassi was sure the difference was hard to see. Where the assassin who’d been killed by a Death Shadow had died a gruesome death though, Elgonu lived. 

Sort of. 

The assassin’s Xah, the spirit which was who and what they really were, had passed immediately into the Force on the destruction of his body. Rassi wasn’t sure if the assassin was ‘at peace’ exactly, it felt like it was probably possible to carry regrets into the Force, but the assassin’s spirit was at the very least no longer connected to any suffering or pain.

Elgonu was not so lucky.

He lived, but only in the sense that his shattered and ruptured body was still shambling around with something that had once been a person’s spirit torn and twisted up in it.

From what Rassi could sense, any spark of personality had been as shredded as the Xah was around the Death Walker. All that remained was a twisted, raging monstrosity which was devouring itself and a moment from devouring everyone else.

“I think this one’s mine,” Monfi said, leaping from the building where he’d taken down one of the assassin’s who’d been lining up for a shot on Rassi the lifetime of two minutes previously. “Also, don’t do what this guy did. It’s not what Rassi and Solna are doing.”

Rassi appreciated the support, but saw the problem before them. The one she could have solved. Except that she didn’t have time.

She could give the Enclave an example of how they could live. She could even convince some of them to listen to her.

But they weren’t going to be able to do what she could.

They hadn’t spent their lives with so deep a connection to the Force that their biggest problem was that they simply had to speak to it sometimes, despite that meant ‘being loud’ and getting punished for it. 

That meant that even if the people of the Enclave were willing to throw away the prohibitions they’d lived under, and only some of them were, they simply didn’t have the skill with speaking to the Force to bring enough of it into the conversation with one Death Shadow, much less the army of them that was about to break through the rapidly collapsing ranks of the ghosts who were trying to protect them.

“We need to call for help,” Solna said, at Rassi’s side again, along with more and more of the Enclave.

“Who else is there?” Jilla asked. “The Elders deserted us. Do you have more friends like that one?” She pointed towards where Monfi was battling with the Death Walker and preventing it from devouring the retreating members of the crowd.

“Not like that one,” Rassi said before raising her voice and calling out, “Kelda! Ravas! We need you!”