Walking into an enemy encampment wasn’t something Nix did every day. Or ever before if she was being honest. Primarily that was because, spaceship mechanics didn’t tend to build up enemies – assuming one didn’t count the spare parts dealers most mechanics dreamed of throttling for selling junk refurbs as ‘factory new’. As a result that, Nix had to admit that she didn’t have enough experience to judge her present circumstances well, but the complete lack of interest shown about her by the other members of Honored Jolu’s encampment was a bit puzzling.

The Force wasn’t offering much help either. For all that Nix had seen a full dance troupe of them performing with a precision that suggested a deep awareness of the Force, the encampment was like a hush in the Force.

Not a Dark Side nexus. The Force didn’t seem to be twisted or snarled up in the encampment. The people all hummed with the same life as the ones she’d walked by in the market or waited in line with at the customs terminal. Unlike those people though, the Force wasn’t being churned up anywhere near as much in the encampment. 

“Does everyone here practice meditation?” Nix asked, curious if this was what the Jedi Temples might have felt like when they were fully populated.

“Not as you understand it,” Julo said. She didn’t seem inclined to expound on the answer, which Nix could understand. Julo was already taking a risk given that Nix was apparently “unclean” and “possessed” in the eyes of her people.

It was somewhat patronizing that Julo had decided that Nix was instead merely ‘mislead’, as though Nix hadn’t arrive at her present state entirely through her own (sometimes foolish) choices. On the other hand, given that the whole purpose of the trip was for Nix to learn about other Force traditions, she couldn’t think of a better method of discovering what Jolu’s people believed than by allowing Jolu to rant about everything the Jedi had gotten “wrong”.

“I hope you’ll have a chance to show me then,” Nix said, not precisely lying since she was interested in what Jolu and her people could teach her, but also not quite as willing to discard the understanding she’d spent her entire life developing of the Force as her words and tone might have indicated.

“That will be the Prelate’s decision,” Jolu said.

“Is that who we’re going to see now?” Nix asked.

“No. You will need to be purified first,” Jolu said, her expression again discouraging further inquiry.

Jolu’s encampment was located just outside the city on an unused fairground. While it was technically a ‘tent village’, the tents were not the sort common to low-tech nomads. The Hyvlar walls of the tent were lighter weight than animal hides and natural fabrics while also being substantially more blaster proof. 

Many of the tents were two story affairs, with open areas on the ground floor and, what Nix guessed to be, living quarters on the second floor. 

“Do your people need to move around a lot still?” Nix asked. She knew asking a barrage of questions wasn’t doing her any favors, but even if her curiosity could have been satisfied with simply observing the environs and customs of these people Nix had Ayli to think about. The anthropologist in her wife would take any answers Nix could bring back about a fascinating new culture of Force sensitives as the best present ever.

“Not since the Jedi fell,” Jolu said.

Nix frowned at that, wondering if Jolu’s people had struck some kind of deal with the Emperor. Except that the Emperor, from all reports, was not the sort to strike non-aggression pacts with other Force users.  When Nix’s brain finished translating Jolu’s Galactic Basic into general Galactic Basic though her meaning became clear. 

To Jolu the Jedi and the Sith was essentially the same thing, so she wasn’t speaking with the sort of precision someone familiar with the two groups would. With the fall of the Empire the ‘Jedi’ were finally gone in Jolu’s eyes. That at least a few handfuls of Jedi were still wandering the galaxy wasn’t important because they no longer carried the same renown and cultural weight that they once had. Most importantly, the Jedi were no longer going to come and snatch their children away, assuming they’d ever really done that in the first place. Similarly while there had to be some Dark Side users lurking out there, the threat of the Sith waiting in any and every shadow was a thing of the past.

Jolu stopped at one of the tents with a closed off first floor. She raised her hand to the flap and paused for a second, closing her eyes.

“He is ready for us.”

No mention of who ‘he’ was, or what ‘he’ was ready to do.

Nix checked in with the Force, but it wasn’t warning her of danger, so she shrugged and followed Jolu into the tent to find a well stocked medical facility within.

“Is this the P’shadu?” an older man with close cropped white hair and deep brown, weather wrinkled skin asked.

“Are the purification tools ready Barso?” Jolu asked.

“Of course Honored Jolu,” Barso said, gesturing to the countertop beside the examination table.

“Climb onto the table then,” Jolu said, addressing Nix directly.

Not ‘if you’re ready, climb onto the table’, or ‘if you’re still sure’. Which made a degree of sense if Jolu was convinced that Nix was a danger of some sort.

Which Nix was. Even without her lightsaber. It was unusual for someone to notice that though.

“What does this purification entail, exactly?” Nix asked. She was mostly willing to play along with the traditions of Jolu’s people but there were limits.

“It’s a two fold process,” Barso said. “First we fit you with a training stud so that you won’t disturb the Xah. They’re very safe, in case you’re nervous. We use them with our younglings all the time to help them maintain proper posture with the Xah as their skills are developing.”

“Can the training studs be removed?” Nix asked.

“Yes, but we will know if you do,” Jolu said, the warning in her voice crystal clear.

Nix wasn’t sure how she felt about gaining a pair of Force dampening earrings but she was curious enough to see how the devices worked that she nodded her approval of the process. In the worst case, she expected she’d get some interesting trinkets to take apart and analyze along with the animosity of an entire tradition of Force users. Since she had gained a fair degree of animosity with Jolu’s people simply by existing, she didn’t view that as a terrible trade.

“What’s the second part of the process?” Nix asked.

“Covo Juice,” Barso said, gesturing to pitcher which waited on the counter.

“And what is Covo Juice?” Nix asked, imagining a variety of horrible things cultures across the galaxy ingested.

“It’s a wine made from the Covo Lutrus flower,” Jolu said.

“Not toxic for humans?”

“Less toxic than most alcohols,” Barso said. “It forms benthine chains you see and…and you’re not interested in the chemistry.” Which was the furthest thing from correct he could be. Nix didn’t count herself especially well trained in chemistry or any other science, but she’d picked up some from understanding things like fuel mixtures and had a general fascination with learning things that listening to an expert expound on their area of competence sounded like a delightful passtime. Honored Jolu disagreed with that with a glance though and hence the lesson was cut abbreviated to, “Too much will make you drunk, but in moderate amounts it will serve to sharpen your awareness of the Xah.”

That…Nix was puzzled.

“You’re going to suppress my connection to the Xah and sharpen it?” she asked.

“No, no,” Barso said. “We are not changing anything about how the Xah flows through you. We’re not an Unclean practice.”

“You will understand after the Purification,” Jolu said.

Which was the sum total of the explanation Nix was going to receive. She considered demanding more, but that was only going to lead to a brick wall or a fight and neither would yield the answers she really wanted.

“Lay down on the table,” Jolu said.

“The studs hurt that much?” Nix said, hopping on the table without hesitation.

“This should be painless,” Barso said. “The Covo Juice has a bit of a kick though.”

True to his word, the new earrings he popped into her earlobes went in without even a twitch of pain after he swabbed a bit of anesthetic on each ear.

Also true to his word, the Covo Juice was just a mite stronger than Nix had expected it would be.

Also sweeter.

And if it hadn’t made her drunk with the first swallow, the first swallow was still all it took to send her mind reeling.

The Force, which had been so silent in the encampment swelled like a roaring tide until Nix was sure her head was going to split open.

By the end of her third swallow, she had to reach out her hand to calm the Force down. It yelling at her about everything. The entire galaxy was crashing into her mind and she had to push it out if she was going to survive.

That was when the studs cut in.

Nix tried to press the cacophony away and she felt her arm go numb. She pushed harder and flopped down bonelessly onto the table she’d been sitting on.

“Just a like a little kid,” Barso said, clearly amused by the whole process. His inner laughter swirled around Nix spinning her in its mirth until up and down were the barest of suggestions.

“She is not a child, and you would do well to keep that in mind,” Jolu said, her repressed anger burst over Nix, scorching her and making her fight back even more.

As choices went, that wasn’t a particularly wise one and she held onto consciousness more because the world was simply too loud to sleep through than due to any resiliency on her part.

“Give it a bit,” Jolu said. “You’ll adjust in time.” Nix heard her turn to leave the medical tent though Jolu paused at the tent flap. “I’ll be back in an hour. If she’s still fighting the Covo Juice then, we’ll need to make the proper arrangements.”

Nix had no idea how she was ‘fighting’ anything, since everything below her neck was too numb to move, and everything above her neck was too numb to feel.

“I’ll keep an eye on her,” Barso said.

And he would. Nix could feel the pride Barso took in the care he offered. He sincerely wanted her Purification to proceed well and he intended to be diligent in ensuring that Nix didn’t experience any unforeseen complications. She was not going to be hurt, not on his watch.

How he was able to match that outlook with what was happening to her even at that moment seemed beyond belief to Nix, but from Barso’s perspective this was something everyone went through. No more traumatic than trimming fingernails.

Nix wondered if it was worse for her because she was already adept with sensing the Force, but Covo Juice seemed to be something adults in their culture drank regularly, so that didn’t make sense either.

With the Force battering her senses unrelentingly, Nix turned inwards, seeking to manufacture silence there if everywhere else was denied to her.

“Your vitals are all doing fine,” Barso said. “I should be recording this though, so give me a minute or two. I need to get the scanners from upstairs. They’ve got holonet links so that we can back the data up.”

And with that he scampered up to the second floor of the tent leaving Nix alone.

Or mostly alone.

“Hey Mom, you doing okay there? That data burst you just sent me seems a bit worrisome,” Goldie said.

“Doing great,” Nix managed to wheeze out.

“That sounds like a lie. You wouldn’t lie to your daughter would you. That would set a bad example.”

“Got slightly drunk, I think. Just wanted you to know what was up. You know, in case things get worse real quick.”

“I’m going to prep the engines and take the firing locks off the laser cannons. In fact I think I’ll go for a little cruise. You know just patrol those coordinates that were in your data burst.”

“Don’t shoot anyone. That’s not why we’re here.”

“Gotcha. Massive property damage only. I’m on my way.”

Stepping in the Shadowed Cave did not come with the sensations Ayli had expected. There was no shiver of cold to it. No mounting sense of dread. If she hadn’t been told it was a place where the Dark Side pooled, she could have had a nice picnic in it watching the waves crashing on the reefs beyond itself mouth.

“It holds what you bring in with you,” Kelda had said, but that simply didn’t seem to be the case. Ayli carried so much darkness inside her. She’d seen it and had reveled in it. For all that she hated how out of control and sick it made her feel, she also couldn’t deny just how good it had felt in the moment.

The raw power that had coursed through.

Feeling the shackles of civility fall away leaving her free to act on all the pain and rage she carried.

Had she ever been as fully her true self than when she gave in to the Dark Side? With no restraints in place, who else could she have been?

She felt the heat of the red lightsaber passing by her face a millisecond before it did.

The howl came next.

The Dark Side was strong within the Shadowed Cave, but it was not absolute.

Ayli let the Force guide her as she dodged backwards and ignited  the blue bladed saber Kelda had given her. It wasn’t hard to tell the counsel of the Force from the distractions of the Dark Side. Ayli had listened to whispers of self destruction all her life and tuning them out was a skill she’d had far too much practice at.

The shadow wielding the red blade had backed off for a moment when its first attacked missed, but whatever fear had stayed it’s hand was short lived as Ayli barely had her blade raised into a guard position when the shadow struck again.

Red and blue blades crashed together at head height, Ayli blocking her opponent with an ease derived from the attack being the most obvious one the shadow could have made.

She hopped back away from the knee the shadow tried to drive into her gut for the same reason.

The opening in the shadow’s guard was a trap. Ayli teased at it with a feint, and parried the expected riposte. She tried to step in to the opening she made, but the shadow was already retreating as she did. 

As though it knew her moves as well as she knew its.

That was all it took for Ayli to work out what she was fighting.

On the next exchange, she made sure to lock their blades together and with her free hand blew the tattered cloak of darkness off her doppelganger.

She stared into her own face across the cavern from her. Her own face, but not her own eyes. Not any more.

Since losing herself to the Darkside on Praxis Mar, Ayli’s eyes hadn’t regained their original hue. Every time she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she found the yellow and red marks of her failure staring back at her.

Her doppelganger – her Dark Side spawned doppelganger though – she had Ayli’s eyes. Her real ones. 

Ayli’s next slash wasn’t gentle and it wasn’t a feint.

It was met by an opposing slash that was every bit as powerful though and the lightsaber blades briefly locked together as Ayli and her foe struggled against one other, each growling at the resistance they faced. 

With their blades bound, Ayli shoved out with the Force, only to be hit by a matching Force Push that sent the two combatants flying to the opposite sides of the cave.

The shadow copy wasted no time in rising back into the fight, flying across the room with a scream.

The red lightsaber descended with enough power to crack the cave in two, but Ayli met it with her blade and stood her ground, struggling as much with holding off the blow as recovering her balance.

With a breath, she stopped pressing directly against the red lightsaber, turning instead to redirect the blow to her side.

The next swing, Ayli met by ducking under it and parrying behind her back.

That bought her a shot at tripping her foe, but the shadow hopped over Ayli’s spinning foot and avoided Ayli’s follow lightsaber strike by somersaulting backward.

The brief respite let Alyi spend a heartbeat focusing herself and looking at the situation like Kelda had taught her to.

This was what she had brought into the cave with her.

This was what she’d expected to find.

The shadow fought exactly like she did. 

And it made her angry.

She kicked herself mentally.

“You’re not my opponent,” she said aloud.

The shadow didn’t answer. It stalked around the perimeter of the caves towards her and drew a second lightsaber blade.

Ayli was puzzled by that for a moment until she caught a good look at the design of the hilt.

It was Nix’s blade and it had been scored and scorched. 

Ayli didn’t need psychometry to understand the meaning of the damage to hilt or what the red blade which sprang forth from it meant.

The hilt said it had been taken from Nix. The blade said its crystal had been corrupted when the lightsaber was used to kill a Force User. When it was used to kill Nix.

Ayli felt the jolt of fear shoot through her at the revelation. 

It tingled.

And with a deep breath and the inner awareness she’d spent a year struggling to attain, that was all it did.

In the Shadowed Cave, Ayli couldn’t quite find the feelings of peace and serenity that allowed her to feel in harmony with the Force but the darkness around her couldn’’t stop her from remembering the moments of grace she had found.

She’s lounging in bed on what promises to be a mild and sunny day. She’s perfectly awake and she could get up easily, but there’s a warm human woman nestled against her who is still blissfully slumbering. In a little while Nix will wake, and they’ll reheat the Paklar Lasagna they hadn’t finished the night before and then they’ll go for their morning walk along the seashore meditation path to start the day off with the sort of training that was particularly rigorous for those like Ayli who found peace and calm almost antithetical to their preferred mindset.

“I get it,” she said. “I do. This isn’t you. This what I’m tormenting myself with.”

The shadow growled and leaped in a spinning slash, which Ayli simply wasn’t there to be hit by.

“Fighting you is about as smart as punching myself in the face to knockout my own problems,” Ayli said, distinctly aware that if that had every been an option she would likely have taken it at several points in her life.

The shadows strikes didn’t get any slower, and it didn’t calm down, but Ayli found it increasingly easy to read them. She could feel the shadow’s frustration – her own frustration – and knew each moment what it would lead to.

Including the Force Lightning.

Ayli snapped her lightsaber to life for that and caught the lightning on her blade.

Shadow or not, real or not, Force Lighting was not something she was ready to fool around with. 

It also wasn’t a great sign that the shadow was escalating. 

“I don’t want to have to kill you,” Ayli said and then considered the idea for a moment longer. “Wait, can I kill you? What would that do to me?”

Her shadow clone raised both hands and screamed forth an even bigger torrent of Force Lighting.

It was enough that Ayli wasn’t able to catch it all with her lightsaber. Most of the bolts missed, flung wide by the shadow’s overwhelming aggression, but a few snuck around the blade and landed on her arms and legs.

Ayli dropped to one knee and only managed to keep one hand on her lightsaber as the rest of her muscles spasmed in agony.

“No!” she said through gritted teeth. “No. We’re not doing this. I am not letting you run out of control.”

She cast aside her lightsaber and held up both hands herself.

Rather than hurling her own Force Lightning back at the shadow though, she used the Force to draw power back into herself, making the storm of energy her own.

It wasn’t pleasant, but Ayli’s reserves held out long enough for the shadow to reach the end of its unnatural endurance and collapse in front of her.

With smoking hands, Ayli reached down and lifted the shadow back up to its feet.

“If I brought you in here, then you’re mine,” she said, sad to see that the shadow’s eyes now matching the yellow and red of her own.

The shadow tried to struggle, buy Ayli simply held the shadow’s wrists and waited. Rage is powerful but it is also terribly exhausting and Ayli could feel the crushing weight of fatigue that had built up on the shadow.

When the shadow finally collapsed, Ayli was ready to catch her, which seemed to surprise the doppelganger.

Finish this, the doppelganger said, her voice a perfect mirror of Ayli’s.

“There’s no finishing anything in here,” Ayli said. “I’m stuck with you. Even if I could stab my dark side away there’s no chance that I’m stupid enough to make that mistake anymore.”

Or leave me, the doppelganger’s voice was fading as its strength seemed to run out like the tide.

“Can’t do that either,” Ayli said and turned to lift her former foe onto her back. “I brought you in here. I’m bringing you out. Probably whether I want to or not.”

Then hate me, the shadow’s voice was little more than a whisper.

“I’ve tried that.” Ayli found the shadow’s weight bearable but only just. Each step took more effort than the last, but her determination rose with each one. “I’ve been afraid of you. I’m been mad at you. I’ve even given up on you. None of those have every worked though. So we’re going to try something new.”

What? the shadow’s voice gained some strength from either curiosity or puzzlement.

“I don’t know. Maybe believing in you? Accepting you? Seeing you for what you are? We’ll play it by ear and see how things go.”

You cannot accept me.

“You sure about that? Because I know someone who already has.”

The Force Lighting that slammed into Ayli came as a total surprise.

She was on the ground, burning inside and unable to understand how her doppelganger had marshaled enough hatred for another assault without it being obvious.

Except the doppelganger was on the ground writhing beside her.

RUN! the doppelganger screamed and fear flooded Ayli’s battered body.

It was good advice impeded by the small problem that Ayli was quite incapable of any movement at all.

“Disappointing,” a voice steeped in a far greater darkness that the shadow could ever have managed said. “I’d hoped for the other one but this one will do. It and its shadow might even prove some amusement.”

Ayli called on the Force and felt the Dark Side swallowing her like an ocean. Beside her, the doppelganger was weeping. She had shrunk down to a reflection of the terrified girl Ayli had been when she’d learned of her parent’s death.

Which might have been an understandable response as she was moments from her own. 

“Perhaps if I toy with it for a while, the other will sense this one’s pain and come back for it?” the man said and Ayli recognized the voice underneath all the hate.

“Darsus Klex? How are you alive?” 

“Oh, I assure you, he most certainly is not,” the man wearing Darsus’s body said. “But he still hates you. So, so very much. I cannot tell you the joy this brings him.”

“Go to hell,” Ayli said, drawing on the Force through sheer determination to struggle back up to one knee.

“Where do you think we are?” the man said, raising his hands as another, final stroke of Force Lighting gathered in his fingers.

“Somewhere you are not wanted,” Kelda said, appearing in front of Ayli with her hand outstretched.

The Force Lighting never left the man’s fingers.

Instead a wave of blue brilliance surged through the Shadowed Cave, driving back the darkness with light unyielding.

Nix was used to be called a lot of things. As a ship’s mechanic, she hadn’t exactly had the highest of social standings, and her current, technically unemployed state, hadn’t exactly set her up to present the appearance of a valuable member of society. Despite that she was pretty sure that when the large dancer had called her ‘Unclean’, he hadn’t meant it as a commentary on her hygiene habits.

From how the rest of the dancers reacted she didn’t have to wonder at the scale of the offense she’d been charged with. Most flinched at the term and backed away, the shadow of ingrained fear washing over the faces. A few, either the braver or more aggressive ones, stepped forward though.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she said. “Your dance looked familiar though and I wanted to see it up close.”

Enough people either didn’t believe in the Force, or didn’t understand it at all, that Nix stuck to the parts of the truth that weren’t likely to raise even more concerns in the already agitated group.

“She is possessed, get away from her,” one of the younger dancers said.

“Not possessed, just curious,” Nix said, holding up her hands in a placating gesture.

She glanced around to see if Ravas was either the source of their “possession appraisal” or might have any wisdom to share on the subject. Nix could feel her friendly Force Ghost lingering nearby but she was out of sight and possibly far enough away to not hear the conversation.

“I do not see possession,” an older dancer said. She was human as far as Nix could see and was stooped with age but the Force was strong with her and she moved more freely than someone of her years might normally.

“There is no Shel-parv,” the large dancer said. “But look to her eyes. They are haunted by its shadows.”

The older dancer rapped the large one on his right bicep.

“My eyes haven’t failed me, Tovos,” she said. “This one is a fountain of Xah.”

“A corrupted fountain,” Tovos said.

Nix wanted to object to that, but even without the Force’s guidance, she could tell that silence would serve her better.

“Maybe,” the old dancer said. “You should get back.”

“We can’t let something corrupted run free in our home,” Tovos said.

“We won’t,” the old dancer said. “I will speak with her. And the Xah decide what is to be done from there.”

“Honored Jolu,” Tovos said, both an acknowledgement and a protest.

“Is the Xah telling you to oppose me?” Honored Joul asked.

Nix had never heard of ‘Xah’, but from the research she’d done prior to galavanting off into the galaxy to try to discover other Force using traditions, she knew it was common for different peoples to have different names for the Force, and different relationships to it.

As far as Nix could feel the Force had no particular feelings on the outcome of the meeting she’d precipitated. She was tempted to nudge it, or ask for a bit more guidance but if the dancers could sense the use of the Force, even small efforts like when she’d exerted to break her fall then she didn’t think they would react kindly to her try to manipulate the outcome of their discussion even a little.

Not that it Tovos seemed inclined to react kindly to regardless of what Nix did.

Honored Jolu’s question drew Tovos’ attention aware from Nix, and Tovos’s fear-spiked anger soured when faced with the fear of opposing his elder.

“No, Honored,”  Tovos said and stepped back.

“Good. We were close to done anyways. Head back to the enclave. I will join you there when the Xah tells me this issue has been dealt with,” Honored Jolu said.

Most of the dancers seem relieved that the problem which had dropped in on them was someone else’s issue to deal with. The one’s who’d stepped up beside Tovos however made it a point to glare daggers at Nix and didn’t turn their back until they were on the far side of courtyard and beyond striking distance.

In theory.

In practice Nix was reasonably sure she could have thrown her lightsaber and guided it to slice them all down, but those kind of thoughts were ones she offered a bemused smile too and let flutter out of her mind like the silly butterflies they were.

“I’m not sure if ‘thank you’ or an additional apology would be more appropriate here,” she said instead of precipitating mayhem.

“Neither,” Honored Jolu said. “I would appreciate an explanation of what you really wanted though.”

Jolu was standing with her hands crossed in front of her and Nix didn’t sense any ripples in the Force to indicate that Jolu was intending to strike out at her. Jolu was, in fact, remarkably still both in body and in the Force, which puzzled Nix a bit. Usually people’s emotions jostled the Force around them to some degree.

On the other hand though, Nix reasoned, this was an aged Force user who’d managed to live through the Imperial purge of the Jedi and other Force users. Honored Jolu likely hadn’t lived long enough to reach an ‘Honored’ status because she was clumsy with the Force.

“I’m looking for peoples who survived the Imperial purges. People who understand and use the Force, and unless I’m mistaken you were using the Force in that dance,” Nix said, deciding honesty was the safest tool in her arsenal. It wasn’t, but sometimes the Force offers guidance in what it doesn’t share she later understood.

Honored Jolu’s expression didn’t exactly shift but Nix still felt a hard wall of resentment rise between them.

“You are Jedi,” Jolu said.

“I’m Nix.”

“You carry a lightsaber.”

“It’s a gift,” Nix said. “And a tool. Nothing more.”

An unpleasant smile cracked Jolu’s face.

“Tools have many uses. That has one. It is a weapon.” Jolu didn’t seem to be afraid of it, and if there was anger there it was buried under too strong a mastery of the Force and too many years for Nix to fathom its depth.

“For some,” Nix said and unclipped the hilt from her belt to offer it to Jolu. They were too far apart for Jolu to take it but a Force user of her caliber could easily telekinesis it away from Nix.

Except Jolu did not.

“The last thing I used this for was to separate a landing strut connector that was misbehaving,” Nix said. “It wasn’t the perfect tool for the job, but it got it done and probably saved me ten minutes on the repair. Before that I used it to section lengths of tubing for some heat ducting. Technically it wasn’t the right tool for that either, but the Stantech cutter I have is just trash. Its plasma beam has such poor regulation the cuts never wind up joining to anything well. Which makes sense, if you’ve ever used Stantech stuff. Their epoxies are great but the rest of the line is garbage. Which is why they throw the cutters in for free if you order enough tubing, and when you’ve got a budget like I had, free looks pretty good even if its trash.”

Nix paused.

She was rambling.

She did that sometimes, and somehow they’d gotten onto the subject of ship repair, which was a weak spot for her. 

So she shut up.

Because people usually preferred that.

Honored Jolu however…Nix couldn’t tell what the old woman preferred? Jolu didn’t look mad or exasperated. Just confused.

“Sorry,” Nix said. “It’s not just a weapon though. Want to see?”

Psychometry was a fairly common Force skill but it occurred to Nix that not every Force user would necessarily be able to read the truth of her words from the history wrapped around the blade she carried.

Also the lightsaber had definitely been used as a weapon in the past.

The distant past, probably long enough Nix thought that the lives it had taken would be such faded echoes that they wouldn’t stand out.

A belief she hoped was also true for herself.

“We do not treat with Jedi,” Honored Jolu said at last, retreating it seemed to the comfort of whatever orthodoxy the dancers subscribed to.

“I’m not a Jedi,” Nix said. “I’ve read some of their texts but I didn’t learn about the Force from them. Well, not from any living Jedi at least. I grew up on my own, and was practicing with the Force without really being aware of it until about a year ago. Now I’m looking for other cultures which know about the Force because the Jedi clearly had some questionable views on it.”

“You’re not lying,” Jolu said. “How curious. But are you telling the truth?”

Nix threw a puzzled glance at her.

“Wouldn’t the one indicate the other?” she asked.

“Not in the slightest,” Jolu said. “You’re skilled enough with Xah, and unclean enough, that you might be able to cloak partial truths to sound sincere and complete, but unless my old eyes deceive me, you’re not malicious, simply mislead.”

Nix wasn’t sure how to take that. Compliment? Insult? She suspected their cultural frames of reference were simply so misaligned that despite sharing a common language they were not communicating clearly yet.

“I don’t understand the ‘unclean’ label your people place on me?” she said. “Is it because I’m an outsider?”

“It is because you bend the natural flow of Xah to your will,” Jolu said. “You corrupt and taint the harmonious flow of destiny and place yourself as its master. It is one of the greatest evils we know.”

“Using the Force is a great evil?” Nix couldn’t imagine a Force sensitive culture that could hold that belief. 

“Your name for it gives away how you’ve been mislead,” Jolu said. “You call it ‘the Force’ as though it was nothing more than power. Something with which to move people and things. Something with which to claim dominion over others as the Jedi did.”

“The Jedi didn’t…?” Nix began to say.

“The Jedi scoured the galaxy when they ruled. They took children from parents. They forced their rules and their beliefs on all others, either for their own reasons, or under the orders of the Empire of the Republic.”

“The Empire came after the Republic though? It was the Sith, or one Sith I guess, who tried to control everything and claim dominion over the galaxy.”

“Sith. Jedi. They are two symptoms of the same disease,” Jolu said. “Neither could coexist with others. Neither could tolerate being anywhere but in control. In the time of my people, in my own lifetime, Jedi and Sith came for us both, but it was not the will of the Xah that they destroy us.”

“So you fought them?” Nix asked, wondering what sort of trap she might have walked into.

“We do not fight. We do not oppose. We listen. We are moved. We follow the will of the Xah and it protect has protected us.”

“By keeping you hidden,” Nix guessed. While she could imagine Jedi speaking peacefully with a non-violent Force sect, the Sith Inquisitors who stalked the galaxy under Palpatine’s rule would have been far less tolerant of any potential enemies they came across.

“We listen. We are moved. When enemies approach from one side of the river, the Xah leads us to the other. When monsters stalk us in the darkness, the Xah reveals shadows even the sharpest gaze cannot pierce.”

“But it didn’t lead you away when I dropped down on your dance,” Nix said. “That has to be a good sign, right? Proof that I’m not your enemy?”

“Not proof, but it does raise a question which must be answered,” Jolu said.

“So how do we find the answer?” Nix asked.

“Will you surrender your weapon?” Jolu asked.

“Sure,” Nix said and tossed the unlit hilt to her. 

“Then follow me,” Jolu said. “We will go before the Council of Elders and listen to what the Xah tells us of you.”

Nix was annoyed and that increased the likelihood that someone was going to get hurt.

“I did warn you that finding archives of other Force using traditions was going to be difficult,” Ravas said, for the moment merely an invisible presence to side of Nix’s left elbow.

“You did.” Nix’s admission did not lower her general annoyance level at all.

“But you paid hard credits for this lead,” Ravas said, her tone bland enough that Nix couldn’t tell if there was a rebuke hiding in there somewhere, or if Ravas meant to sound sympathetic.

“Yes. A lot of hard credits,” Nix said, again not diminishing the overall aggravation she felt.

“And now you would like to go back to the information broker on Arctus Secondi and Force choke him until he returns the credits and gives you some useful information.”

Nix drew in a long breath.

She could deny Ravas’ assertion, but there was a danger in doing so. Pretending to be a good and saintly person could sometimes work as a ‘fake it till you make it’ sort of plan, but other times repressed negative emotions could manage to turn into something much worse rather than evaporating. That wasn’t the real danger though. What Nix knew she needed to worry about more than the content of her response was that she might start believing any lies she told.

“I would,” she confessed. “I’m not going to, because I’d hate myself a moment afterwards, and we’re wanted in enough systems as it is, but the temptation is there.”

“So what do you want to do that doesn’t involve flirting with the Dark Side then?” the former Dark Side ghost asked. 

“We could head back to Arcswell,” Nix said, trying out the idea on her tongue.

“Your wife would be glad to see you,” Ravas said.

“Yours would to,” Nix said.

“I’m not sure I am eligible to call her that,” Ravas said. “Unlike you and yours, we never swore a binding troth.”

Nix paused, her lost credits and frustration momentarily pushed aside. 

“You waited for each other for a THOUSAND YEARS,” she said, drawing a few stares from the people in the market she was walking through. The comm rig she wore over her left ear explained her seemingly random conversation to casual onlookers but the shouting drew attention regardless.

“I was asleep for most of that,” Ravas said. “I don’t know that it counts.”

“Manifest right now so I do some manner of violence to you,” Nix said. “Seriously, its been months. Have you and Kelda honestly not made things official yet?”

“There’s been your training,” Ravas said, the defensive tone in her voice clearly backed by the knowledge that she had no real defense to offer. “And before that the search for Arcswell, and the Jedi temple.”

“It. Has. Been. Months,” Nix said. “You realize that Kelda probably thinks you already know that the two of you are married right? Like by the Force or something?”

“She hasn’t said anything about it either,” Ravas said.

Nix could feel her aggravation over the lost credits and false trail converting into frustration with her two mentors.

Kelda and Ravas were both brilliant masters of the Force. From their shared time as Padawans to the starkly different life paths they’d followed, they’d racked up a tremendous amount of knowledge about the Force, both theoretical and practical. Throw in a thousand years or so as ghosts in direct communion with the Force and they harbored a pool of wisdom Nix doubted she could ever fully plumb of the depth of.

And yet they were so incredibly stupid at the same time too.

Some days, Nix grieved the loss of the Jedi and saw how much brighter the galaxy could be if there were even a few dozen left to sort out the big problems which remained. Other days, she was darkly glad that they’d been swept away, them and their horrid child rearing techniques with them.

Which was unfair.

She knew both Kelda and Ravas were outliers in terms of the how Padawan’s responded to the Jedi’s teachings. For as far off the path as Ravas had fallen, and from Ravas’ own stories that had been pretty damn far, she was possibly the one who was the less impacted by their upbringing.

Prior to Kelda’s fateful decision to cast aside her place among the Jedi and search for Ravas, she’d pushed herself to excel to such an unhealthy level that even the other Jedi had tried to council her to relax and find the harmony in moderation rather than perfection.

Which of course had made Kelda simply strive for ‘Perfected Moderation’ all the harder.

“I don’t think I want to go back to the temple yet,” Nix said, the words tasting right as she said them.

“Afraid of returning in failure?” Ravas asked.

“No. I know Ayli and Kelda aren’t counting on me to succeed here, and this is curiosity not compulsion that’s driving me to look for an archive on the Force from other perspectives.”

“I envy you,” Ravas said. “My curiosities became compulsions far too often.”

“You were a kid though,” Nix said, and spied a courtyard on the level below them where a group of twenty people in brightly colored robes were either dancing or exercising in beautiful unison. “I still think you and Kelda both need to cut your younger selves more slack. You were young and stupid and made some mistakes. That was a long time ago and you can do better now.”

“Can we? We’ve talked about that, she and I,” Ravas said. “I can’t make amends for any of the harm I did. And I can’t touch the world as you can anymore.”

“You touched the world just fine in Praxis Mar,” Nix said, thinking back to the moment when Ravas destroyed her former master in order to save the rest of them.

“As a projection of the Force, other Force emanations are within my purview still,” Ravas said. “And some parts of the living world as well. Those I’m bound to. The places I knew in life. Those people who will let me work through them. But that’s not life, and I do not know that we are capable of change as you are. We are dead, we do not grow any longer.”

Nix paused. She drew in a deep breath through her nose. She released the breath.

“Nope. Can’t just let this one go,” she said, mostly to herself, before reaching to her side and grabbing Ravas’ spiritual arm.

With a grunt she dragged Ravas into a full manifestation, pulling the two of them into an empty alleyway she did.

“You’re not alive? You can’t change?” she asked, daring Ravas to repeat those words.

“It is as I…oww!” Ravas complained as Nix pinched the skin of Ravas’ ghostly arm.

“Hmm, seem alive enough to notice that,” Nix said. “Also you’re being stupid, which seems to be the province of living things.”

Ravas huffed. 

“How…I am not being stupid,” she said.

“Yes you are,” Nix said. “I get that you’ve got a lot of baggage. I get that working out things with Kelda has some significant complications to it. I even understand that you feel like your mistakes are eternal and unforgivable. And I’m not the one who can fix any of that. Your baggage is yours to carry or put down, not anyone else’s. And you and Kelda are the only ones who get to say what you mean to each other. But to say you can’t change? A year ago you were trying to tempt me to the Dark Side and now you’re walking through a boring old market with me on a silly treasure hunt and trying to make sure I’m remembering to process my feelings before they process me. Under what ridiculous star does that not count as change?”

“I…I could be trying to trick you?” Ravas said, with an absolute lack of conviction. “Also, I was never trying to lure you to Dark Side. You seemed too well balanced. It was your wife I thought I could persuade to be what I thought I needed her to be.”

“And you did. You had her. And you let her go. If I told you that anyone else had done that would you even hesitate to believe they’d changed?”

“No, but it wasn’t like that for me. There were other circumstances, I just did what I wanted to.”

“Yes. Exactly. Because you wanted to do what was right.”

“No! It was because…because…” 

Nix sighed again. Which, she felt, was a better answer than Force Lightning.

“Because you chose to believe Kelda when she said that she still loved you.”

“She didn’t…”

“Yes she did. Not with those simple words, but with the proof of her love standing in front of you. With her need for you to be okay. She loved you a thousand years ago and she still does. And despite losing yourself as deeply into the Dark Side as you could go, you saw that and let yourself believe it. You changed. You can pretend you didn’t. You can pretend you can’t, but I’m not going to help you with any of that.”

Ravas was silent for a long moment before a smirk played across her lips.

“Padawans are not supposed to have more wisdom than their mentors,” she said at last.

“Good thing I’m far too old to be a Padawan then I guess,” Nix said.

“Yes, I suppose there’s nothing left I can teach you,” Ravas said with the faux-wounded air that said she already had a lesson in mind.

“You know where to find the archive,” Nix guessed. It was something of a wild hope, and she didn’t feel the Force guiding her, but something in Ravas’ tone or the glint in her spectral eye told Nix she was right..

“As do you,” Ravas said. “To be quite honest, I only noticed it because you did.”

“But you could feel it was here?” Nix asked, wondering why Ravas hadn’t questioned their destination sooner. The Force didn’t seem to have much to say either for or against the existence of an archive detailing its secrets, but that was to Nix’s human senses. She knew Ravas was just a wee bit more plugged into the Force than she was.

“Yes and no,” Ravas said. “There is knowledge of the Force here, particularly knowledge which isn’t related to the Jedi or the Sith, but it’s not stored in a holocron or data archive from what I can sense.”

Nix pondered that, trying to work out what the options could be.

“Stone tablets? An ancient tradition could have inscribed them tens of thousands of years ago I suppose.”

“I cannot say that such do not exist,” Ravas was looking beyond the alley as she spoke. “But the Jedi sought those out from the time of their founding till the day they fell. The Sith as well. A new discovery might still be possible, but I don’t believe that is what we have stumbled on here.”

“Because you’ve seen the archive,” Nix said and an image of brightly colored cloth danced across her mind’s eye. “And so have I!”

“You really are a delight to deal with,” Ravas said. “I know she didn’t have any children, but there are times I could swear you were one of Kelda’s descendants.”

“It would be nice to think so, but given the generations which separate us even if I was I would have inherited almost nothing from her specifically.”

“Perhaps. The Force does work in mysterious ways though.”

“Well let’s go see how it dances,” Nix said, letting Ravas return to her spectral state as she left the alley and hopped over the balcony on the far side of the road to fall to the courtyard below before the dancers could disperse and leave her searching once more.

With a tiny bit of Force assistance, Nix landed at the edge of the courtyard, feather light and near silently. She’d been as concerned about interrupting the dancers as she had about missing their departure but it seemed even with her quiet approach she’d attracted their attention.

“What is that,” one of the dancers, a slim fellow, asked.

“Unclean,” another, much larger, dancer said. “Unclean and possessed.”

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.