Constellation (AU Obi-Wan Semi-SI)

[Sakumo]

PROLOGUE — THE MORE THINGS CHANGE

Jedi Temple in Coruscant, 32 BBY

Olana Chion:

"We are late, Master," Olana Chion clicked her tongue as Obi-Wan Kenobi strode purposefully across the Temple's Processional Way, beaming at every Jedi he encountered, stopping to trade a word or two with half of them as if the High Council's summons could simply be made to wait upon his goodwill. After a year and a half apprenticed under the man, Olana should have been used to it by now. It was practically a ritual for Kenobi to be late whenever the Council called for him — as though promptness were a virtue reserved for lesser men.

"Nonsense, young one," Obi-Wan countered, giving her a maddening, easy grin as he waved to a pair of Padawans hauling training equipment toward the sparring rings. "The Masters of the Jedi Council are the peak of our ideals. They would hardly be offended by a thing so trivial as tardiness."

They are, Olana privately thought to herself as she quickened her own pace, these little legs struggling to keep up with her mentor. It's just that, no one has the heart to criticize you.

Sometimes she thought her master's reputation objectively unfair. Most Jedi would have faced disciplinary censure for repeated offenses of this kind. Only last week, Knight Stass Allie had been reprimanded by Master Vokara Che for arriving late to a medical shift in the Halls of Healing. A Youngling clan had been sternly lectured by Master Rancisis after causing a ruckus in the Room of a Thousand Fountains — and they were children. Even the almost punishingly disciplined pairing of Master Jaro Tapal and his Padawan, Serra Keto, had once been grounded for six months over conduct unbecoming during an away mission. Master Obi-Wan, meanwhile, would simply smile at whichever unlucky Councilor had been sent to fetch him, and — Olana could always tell — the Councilor in question would leave more amused than aggrieved, privately impressed at how neatly he had wriggled free.

Well, she thought, rescuing a stranded Jedi Knight and his Padawan in Rattatak singlehandedly against a warband of Weequay raiders will certainly make you a hero of the Temple. Not to mention he protected the Duchess of Mandalore as a Padawan, has talked down or fought every manner of criminal the Outer Rim has to offer, and is a smoother tongue in the Senate rotunda than half the Senators themselves. No wonder he's the Order's shining example of what a Knight should be.

In all her time as his Padawan, Obi-Wan Kenobi had never once been on time to a Council summons. When matters grew truly dire, it was Grandmaster Yoda himself, or Master Windu, who was dispatched to retrieve them personally, and it was invariably Olana, not her unrepentant Master, who came away red-faced from the encounter.

"You are thinking something uncharitable about me," Obi-Wan said without turning his head, the corner of his mouth twitching. "You are thinking I am a good-for-nothing, inconsiderate, tardy excuse for a Jedi Knight who exists solely to torment my superiors."

"Not quite," she says, unable to fight the smile off her face. "But along those lines, yeah."

He placed a hand over his heart in theatrical outrage. "You may be the single most hurtful twelve-year-old I have ever had the misfortune to train, Olana Chion."

"You'd know," she said. "You trained me."

That, at least, earned a genuine laugh from him — bright, startled, entirely unguarded — and for a moment Olana felt the particular warmth that came from having actually landed a joke on a man who made his living landing them on everyone else. It didn't last. The doors of the High Council Chamber were already in sight, flanked by two silent Temple Guards in their gleaming helms, and reality reasserted itself.

"We're here, Master," she said, straightening her robes, smoothing down the padawan braid she still sometimes forgot to tuck behind her brown hair. "Please. Try not to cause a scene."

She regretted the words the instant they left her mouth, because Obi-Wan's expression shifted into something entirely too delighted, a wicked little twinkle rising in his blue-grey eyes. "Through the Force," he said solemnly, "all things are possible, my Padawan."

"That is not what that saying means and you know it."

But he was already reaching for the door.

---

"You are late again, Knight Kenobi."

Master Windu's voice rolled through the High Council Chamber like distant thunder — not raised, never raised, but carrying an authority that made the very air seem to still. Olana kept her chin dipped, eyes on the polished floor, though she risked one sidelong glance at her companion. Even Master Obi-Wan seemed faintly abashed, a telltale dusting of pink rising along his cheekbones above the beginnings of his beard.

"My apologies, Master Windu." His voice was contrite, and — Olana had to grudgingly admit — entirely convincing. "I was waylaid by Master Drallig. He asked me to demonstrate Form IV to the Soaring Hawkbat creche. I promise you, Master, the younglings were most impressed."

From Master Windu's left, the bald and broad-shouldered Master Micah Giiet let out a short bark of laughter he didn't bother to hide, while beside him Master Yaddle's brow crept upward in silent, ancient skepticism. The Master of the Order did not so much as blink.

"Is that so."

"I might," Obi-Wan allowed, color deepening, "have also given a practical demonstration alongside their creche master, Bolla Ropal. And sparred with him. For perhaps fifteen minutes. Or twenty."

"Twenty-five," came a dry voice from further down the ring, belonging to the Zabrak Master Eeth Koth, who did not look up from where he sat with his fingers steepled. "I timed it. I was waiting on you as well, Knight Kenobi."

A ripple of quiet amusement passed the Chamber. Master Windu let it settle before turning the full weight of his attention on Olana, who felt her stomach drop somewhere in the vicinity of her boots.

"Is your Master telling the truth, young Padawan?"

Never — not once in her twelve years, not through the worst of what had brought her to the Order, not through eighteen months of keeping pace with a man who treated punctuality as a personal insult — had Olana Chion quailed before another living being the way she nearly did now, pinned beneath Mace Windu's dark, level gaze. She was a survivor. She was, by Master Drallig's own generous assessment, the most resourceful Shii-Cho stylist among her age cohort in the Temple. She was a trusted Padawan in her own right.

She took a breath anyway.

"Yes, Master. Master Fisto was also present. And Master Drallig, watching from the gallery."

"Do not give the girl a hard time, Mace," said Master Depa Billaba, her voice gentle but edged with the particular fondness of someone who had once stood exactly where her Master Windu now stood and had learned, over the years, precisely how to needle him. "If anyone deserves a lecture on prudence, it is Knight Kenobi, not his twelve-year-old Padawan, who at least had the sense to arrive on time."

Low laughter rippled around the circle again, and Olana felt bold enough to let a small smile through. She glanced around the ring of twelve seats — the wisest, and by most accounts the strongest, that the Order had to offer — and marveled, not for the first time, at how differently each of them wore that weight. Yoda, small and ancient and unreadable. Master Windu, immovable as durasteel. The gentle Master Yaddle, watchful. Wise Master Rancisis coiled and precise. Master Poof unreadable behind his long neck and round face. Master Even Piell sharp as a blade despite his diminutive stature and permanent scowl that made Olana think of a vicious dog. Master Tyvokka's Wookie rumble of amusement audible even in silence. Master Koth dry as desert sand. Master Giiet warm and easily delighted. Master Billaba fond and wry. And yes, even her favorite lightsaber instructor, Master Tsui Choi watching everything with the wisdom she had known him to have.

And then there was the twelfth chair, the newest of them.

"Knight Kenobi certainly displays," rumbled a deep, measured baritone, "the same youthful willfulness he did as a young man."

Qui-Gon Jinn regarded her master with an appraising, faintly amused expression that did not, to Olana's eye, extend any warmth toward its subject.

She felt it the instant it landed — a flicker across their training bond, sharp and cold, gone almost as fast as it came, but unmistakable. Irritation. More than irritation.

"I confess myself astonished you were ever elevated to this Council, Master Jinn," Master Obi-Wan said, and his voice had gone from contrite to something colder and considerably sharper, all trace of the earlier blush burned away. "I was quite certain planets would need to disintegrate, and the Hutt Cartels take up honest trade, before that particular miracle occurred."

Master Jinn stiffened in his seat, just slightly and just for a moment, before visibly forcing himself to relax. "Enough, Obi-Wan," he said, and though his tone remained even, there was iron beneath it. "Further disrespect toward this Council will result in disciplinary measures."

Olana looked from Grandmaster Yoda's carefully blank countenance to Master Windu's stony patience to Micah Giiet's wince — stern, resigned, and regretful, respectively — and understood, with the sudden clarity of a Padawan realizing she has stumbled into old, well-worn history, that this was not new. That every Master in this Chamber had watched this particular argument play out before, more than once, and had simply learned to let it run its course.

It was something close to an open secret in the Jedi Temple — the kind of history whispered among older Padawans over meals, the kind Olana had heard fragments of long before she'd ever been assigned to Master Obi-Wan — that when Kenobi was a thirteen-year-old hopeful vying for a Master's attention, Qui-Gon Jinn had turned him away. Not gently. Master Jinn had looked at a frightened, furious thirteen-year-old boy and pronounced him dangerous. Aggressive. A darksider in the making, though the boy had done nothing yet to earn such a comparison beyond having the misfortune of wanting to be chosen too visibly.

Master Jinn once thought me dangerous, Obi-Wan had told her once, quietly, during her first week as his apprentice, when she'd asked why he never spoke to the tall Master with the long braid and the easy manner with the Force. Fierce. Aggressive, even. I believe he thought he was looking at his fallen student, Xanatos, come again, though I hardly deserved the comparison. I was already halfway to Bandomeer, resigned to a life in the AgriCorps, when Master Fay found me on the transport manifest and decided, against every sensible instinct, that I could be salvaged after all.

He had said it lightly. He had not looked light, saying it.

"We did not summon you here, Obi-Wan, to trade barbs with Master Jinn," Windu said, cutting through the memory and the tension both with the same flat authority, shooting stern looks at both men in turn. "The Council has agreed, by majority vote, to dispatch you as Jedi negotiator to the planet of Shili. Senator Koves of the Togruta Assembly has petitioned for Jedi intervention in an escalating conflict between rival clans in two of the outlying settlements, with a request that the matter be settled peaceably, and swiftly."

Obi-Wan stroked his beard — a habit Olana had long since learned to read as the outward sign of a mind already several steps ahead. "Forgive me, Masters, but can the Togruta Monarchy not resolve this themselves? A show of royal authority would likely settle matters faster than any outside envoy."

"Unfortunately, the Monarch's hands are presently tied, Knight Kenobi," said Master Rancisis, the serpentine Master's tail coiling with quiet precision beneath his seat as he clasped long-fingered hands before him. "The current Regasa of Shili ascended the throne quite young, and her regent has judged it wiser to focus his energies on stabilizing the capital and securing the Royal Household than on adjudicating a rural land dispute. And should the Crown pick a side in a village quarrel regardless, it would be seen — rightly or not — as favoritism, and the resentment would only deepen."

"The Togruta," Obi-Wan murmured, half to himself, "are a cunning people. Excellent hunters. Fiercely close-knit, particularly in smaller settlements, where a slight against one family is a slight against the whole clan. Left unchecked, a dispute like this could very easily spiral into open bloodshed, and innocents caught in the middle of it."

"Precisely put," Rancisis agreed, inclining his head. "And these are not minor hamlets we speak of, Knight Kenobi. The two settlements in question are among the largest on the planet outside the capital itself. Whatever begins there may not stay contained there. Neighboring villages might take notice, and they too, might escalate."

Something in Master Obi-Wan's posture shifted subtle, but Olana caught it, the way his shoulders set a fraction straighter, the last trace of humor draining fully from his face. "Am I correct in presuming, Masters, that this is not the whole of it?"

"As perceptive as ever, young Kenobi," Giiet said, pride evident in his broad smile. "Our first instinct was to send Master Shaak Ti, a Togruta herself, familiar with Shili's customs and its people. But we could not be certain she would remain impartial where her own kin were concerned, and an arbiter perceived as partial is no arbiter at all. Master Gallia and her Padawan, meanwhile, are otherwise engaged, escorting Supreme Chancellor Valorum through the trade conference on Anaxes. Even accounting for your rather more recent Knighting, you have displayed considerable aptitude as a diplomat, and, when circumstances demand it, as an investigator."

"What Master Giiet means to say," Windu continued, with the air of a man circling toward the actual point at last, "is that beyond the diplomatic mission, we wish for you to determine whether there are Force-sensitives among the Togruta of those settlements worth bringing to the Temple's attention. And given your Padawan's considerable natural gift for Farsight, her presence would serve that purpose well, while also providing her a valuable first mission beyond Coruscant."

"You are lifting the standard precautions on taking Padawans into the field, then," Kenobi gathered and Olana's heart, quite without her permission, soared. Eight months. Eight months she had watched him leave the Temple alone, again and again, on Knight's business she was not yet deemed ready to share, while she drilled forms in an empty salle and told herself patience was a virtue and meant it less and less each time. Now finally it was her chance.

She already knew, of course, that her youth meant Obi-Wan would carry the true weight of the mission, that she would be watched over as much as she watched. But the chance to see something beyond the Coruscanti sky, to be trusted with a real task rather than a training exercise — that was not something she meant to let pass her by, whatever shape it came in.

"We are," Billaba confirmed, warmth returning fully to her voice. "We have watched the two of you progress as Master and apprentice for some time now, and judged the pairing more than ready. Padawan Chion's gift for Farsight will serve both tasks well: the negotiation, and whatever else you may find waiting in those villages."

Obi-Wan set a reassuring hand briefly on Olana's shoulder, and she felt the warmth of it through the fabric of her tunic. "Naturally, Master Billaba. Olana has a natural affinity for the Unifying Force that continues to elude my own understanding of it, however hard I chase it."

Her cheeks warmed at the praise, though her satisfaction was short-lived. From the center of the ring, Master Yoda hummed, low and thoughtful, and every head in the Chamber turned toward him as one.

"Careful, you must be, young Obi-Wan," the Grandmaster said, ears drooping with the particular gravity he reserved for genuine counsel rather than gentle scolding. "Wisdom, easy it is to give. Harder, far harder, to live by it yourself. The right course, a Jedi must always seek — even when convenient, the wrong one is."

Obi-Wan bowed low, lower than the moment strictly required, low enough that Olana understood without needing to be told that whatever performance he'd offered the rest of the Chamber this morning, this was not one of them. "I will hold your words close, Master Yoda."

"See that you do," Windu said, not unkindly, as the Council rose as one. "All relevant details, Senator Koves's petition, the current territorial boundaries in dispute, and what intelligence we hold on the villages in question, will be transmitted to your quarters within the hour. May the Force be with you both."

"And with all of us, Master Windu," Obi-Wan replied, soft and genuine now, all needling set aside, before turning and beckoning Olana toward the tall doors of the Chamber. She followed gladly, and did not look back at the twelfth chair.

---

The Chamber doors sealed shut behind them with a soft pneumatic hiss, and Olana let out a breath she hadn't fully realized she'd been holding.

"You could try," she said, falling into step beside him as they made their way back down the Processional Way, "not antagonizing a sitting member of the Council. Just — occasionally. As a novelty."

"I could," her Master agreed amicably. "I choose not to."

"He's going to report you eventually."

"He's been threatening since I was a boy, Olana, even when he was still a Master known for flouting the rules. I find the anticipation builds character." But some of the lightness had gone out of his voice, and after a moment he added, more quietly, "Master Jinn is not wrong to dislike me, you understand. I gave him every reason to, once. I simply object to being reminded of it by the man who put it there."

Olana considered that for a long moment, turning it over the way Master Drallig had taught her to turn over a difficult riposte before committing to a counter. "For what it's worth," she said finally, "I don't think thirteen-year-old you was dangerous. I think thirteen-year-old you was scared, and scared people are loud about the wrong things."

Obi-Wan glanced down at her, something unreadable moving behind his eyes — surprise, maybe, or the particular ache of being understood by someone he hadn't expected to understand him. "That," he said, "is an uncomfortably perceptive thing for a twelve-year-old to say to her Master."

"I had a good teacher in being perceptive. Terrible teacher in punctuality, but very good at the other thing."

That startled the laugh out of him again, and this time it lasted longer. "Duly noted," he said. "Come. If we're to make Shili with any dignity intact, we have a great deal of packing to do, and a Padawan who has never left this planet's atmosphere to prepare."

"I've been to the upper hangar levels."

"That," Obi-Wan said, "does not count, and you know it."

Their quarters, when they reached them, were modest by any standard beyond the Temple's own — a shared common room with two narrow sleeping alcoves, a meditation nook barely large enough for one, and a single window that looked out over the endless grey-gold sprawl of the Coruscanti skyline, ships threading between towers like schools of luminous fish. Olana had lived in grander places, once, in a life she tried not to dwell on too often. She had also lived in far worse ones. This place, small as it was, had never once felt like either.

She knelt beside her travel pack and began the careful, familiar ritual of deciding what a Jedi actually needed on a mission and what was simply comfort dressed up as necessity. Two changes of robes. Her lightsaber. A Jedi belt. And an energy slingshot that Master Obi-Wan had built for her after she completed the Engineering Course that the Jedi Temple had offered to Padawans.

"You're quiet," Obi-Wan observed from across the room, not looking up from where he was methodically checking the charge on his comlink on one hand, and patting the head of his droid, R4-M17 with another.

"I'm thinking."

"Dangerous habit. I'd stop, if I were you."

"Master Rancisis said it. About the villages being large, and close-knit, and prone to bloodshed if this isn't handled carefully." She folded a robe with more precision than it strictly required. "What happens if we can't fix it? If it's already too far gone by the time we land?"

Obi-Wan set the comlink down and turned to face her fully, and whatever wry armor he'd worn through the Council Chamber and the walk back had quieted, leaving something plainer and more honest in its place. "Then we do what Jedi have always done, Olana. We do the next right thing in front of us, and the thing after that, and we trust that the Force brought us to Shili for a reason even if we can't yet see the whole of it." A pause, and the ghost of his earlier grin returned, softer now. "And if all else fails, I distract everyone by being extravagantly, catastrophically late to something. It's worked for me so far."

Olana huffed something that was not quite a laugh, but close enough that he seemed satisfied with it. "That's not actually reassuring, Master."

"No," he agreed. "But it made you smile, which was the point." He rose, crossing to the window, silhouetted against the last amber light of the Coruscanti afternoon. "For what it's worth — I meant what I told the Council. You have a gift for the Unifying Force that I will likely spend the rest of my life admiring and never quite matching. Whatever waits for us on Shili, clan dispute or Force-sensitive child or something else the Council hasn't thought to warn us about, I trust your instincts as much as my own. More, on your better days."

"You're just saying that so I don't panic on the transport."

"I am saying it," Obi-Wan said, "because it happens to be true, and because you are entirely too young to be as competent as you are, and someone ought to tell you so before you start believing otherwise."

Olana ducked her head, ostensibly to finish sealing her pack, and said nothing at all, because there was, for once, nothing clever left to say.

​

---

They left the following morning before the sun of Coruscant's orbital mirrors had finished their slow climb over the skyline, boarding a modest Republic Consular-class cruiser requisitioned from the Temple's diplomatic pool. Olana pressed her palm briefly to the transparisteel viewport as the great spires of the Temple fell away beneath them, then the endless city beneath that, then the planet itself, until Coruscant was nothing more than a bright coin swallowed by the dark.

"First time," Obi-Wan said from the pilot's seat, not quite a question.

"First time," she confirmed.

"It doesn't get any less strange. Just less frightening." He guided the transport into the swirling non-place of hyperspace with the easy competence of a man who had made this exact maneuver a hundred times before, and the stars outside smeared into long, silent streaks of light. "Get some rest if you can. Shili is a fair distance, and the files tell me the villages we're headed toward keep to old customs — sunrise greetings, formal introductions, the works. We'll want to arrive looking like Jedi, not like we crawled out of a cargo hold. By the way, Master Fay sends her regards."

"Really? What did she say?"

"See for yourself, my dear Padawan." Her Master then gave her a holorecording of his youthful former master, who still looks like a woman in her thirties rather than a centuries-old Jedi.

'Greetings Obi-Wan, and of course you, Padawan Olana. I have been in contact with the Jedi Temple in Coruscant, mainly at the insistence of Obi-Wan of course," the recording said, shooting her Master a chiding look that felt like Master Fay was lecturing Kenobi in real time. "Master Yoda had told me that you would be taking part in a diplomatic mission, a wise calling for a Jedi. Be vigilant, and consider your words first before speaking, that goes for the both of you. And keep an open mind in all things."

The recording then smiled as she uttered, "May the Force be with you."

Olana returned the recording. "It's nice that she knows me, Master.

"What do you think of me, Olana? A neglectful Master?"

She did not deign to reply to that accusation as she pivoted to other matters. "Is it true there's a beast?"

Master Obi-Wan glanced back at her, one eyebrow arched. "Where did you hear that?"

"I read the briefing packet, Master. Same as you." A beat. "There's a footnote. Village elders report something living in the high canyons near the second settlement. Big. Something that hunts at night and doesn't show up on any survey the Republic's ever run of the planet."

"Ah." he turned back to the console, and if Olana hadn't known him quite so well by now, she might have missed the small, thoughtful frown that crossed his face before he smoothed it away. "Well. I suppose we'll simply have to go and see for ourselves, won't we."

Olana meant to answer him but the words never made it past her teeth, because the Force chose that exact moment to show her something she hadn't asked to see.

It came the way Farsight always came for her: sideways, uninvited, more felt than seen, like catching a reflection in water a half-second before the water stilled. A canyon, red-walled, lit gold with a sun that wasn't Coruscant's. A child — Togruta, small enough that she could only just be walking on her own, montrals barely more than nubs beneath twin tresses — stumbling backward across bare rock with her arms flung wide for balance.

And something enormous unfolding itself from the canyon shadow above her.

Olana knew what it was before the shape of it had even fully resolved, the way you know a word before you finish reading it — sabertooth, the old Temple bestiary chip come unbidden to mind, apex predator, indigenous, height at the shoulder easily twice a grown man, jaws built to close around something considerably larger than one small child. It moved like the canyon itself was exhaling it. The toddler did not run. Small hands curled instead, and for one flickering, impossible instant Olana felt something enormous and gentle and terrifyingly bright answer that curling of hands from somewhere deep inside the child, something that didn't belong in a body that young—

The vision let her go all at once, the way Farsight always did, without ceremony, without mercy, dropping her back into the recycled air of the transport and the low hum of the hyperdrive and Master Obi-Wan's face, half-turned from the console, already frowning.

"Olana?"

Her hands had gone very still around the strap of her pack. She made them move again.

"Olana," he said again, quieter now, the teasing entirely gone out of his voice, "what did you see?"

"Nothing." The lie came easier than she expected, and worse, easier than it should have. She smoothed the strap flat beneath her palm, kept her eyes on the streaking dark beyond the viewport rather than on him, because she had never yet managed to lie to Obi-Wan Kenobi's face and succeed. "Just the transport shuddering. It startled me. That's all."

He held her gaze a moment longer than comfort allowed, blue-grey eyes doing the thing they did when he was deciding whether to press. Whatever he saw — or didn't — he let it go, though not without a faint line staying between his brows as he turned back to the console.

"Get some rest," he said again, softer this time.

In response to her outburst, Arfour bleeped something in Binary, but considering its feminine tone of optimism, Olana thought that the droid was as idiosyncratic as her Master was. Perhaps it was to be expected when you've been in the care of Obi-Wan Kenobi for a certain period of time.

Outside the viewport, hyperspace blurred on, indifferent, carrying them both toward Shili, and toward a mission that Olana felt would prove to be considerably larger than a border dispute between two villages.

The more things change, Olana thought, watching her Master's reflection in the dark glass, half-amused and half-uncertain in equal measure.

The more they somehow, impossibly, stay the same.

---

Appendix:

Jedi High Council as of 32 B.B.Y.

Grandmaster/Grand Master: Yoda [lifetime member] — voiced by Andy Serkis

Master of the Order: Mace Windu [lifetime member] — played by Morris Chestnut

Members:

• Yaddle [lifetime member]

• Even Piell [lifetime-term member]

• Oppo Rancisis [lifetime member]

• Tyvokka [long-term member]

• Yarael Poof [long-term member]

• Micah Giiet [long-term member]

• Eeth Koth [long-term member]

• Depa Billaba [limited-term member]

• Tsui Choi [limited-term member]

• Qui-Gon Jinn [limited-term member]

Fay's Lineage

• Fay [Jedi Master]

• Obi-Wan Kenobi [Jedi Knight]

• Olana Chion [Jedi Padawan]

 

[Lillie Jones]

Impressive
Thanks for the chapter

 

[FoxGirlFan]

Very interested to see what happens next! Master Fay has always interested me.

 

[Sakumo]

Shili, Mid-Rim, 32 BBY
Obi-Wan Kenobi:

Piloting a cruiser was never my idea of adventure. If anything, I have always found the act itself faintly absurd; hours spent nursing a ship through the black so that, eventually, something interesting might be permitted to happen to you on the other end of it.

And yet it has been one of the few true constants of my life, for better or worse. In my creche clan, when I was still small enough to be praised for things rather than expected of them, my instructors marked me out for quick reflexes in the flight simulators — a compliment I remember mostly because it was hard to earn praise in an institution filled with prodigies. At thirteen, half-resigned already to a life in the AgriCorps and telling myself I did not mind it, I found myself hauling an unconscious pilot out of his seat and bringing a crashing shuttle down myself rather than let it take the both of us with it. Master Fay was aboard that shuttle. She has never let me forget it, though she has always had the grace to tell the story as though I were the hero of it, rather than simply the only person awake.

And when she took me on as her Padawan, Fay made me her designated driver from the very first week, "so you never forget what it cost you to get here," she told me once, not unkindly, though I have never been entirely sure whether she meant the words as a lesson or a small, private joke at my expense. Likely both. It would be very like the ageless Jedi Master to spout both wisdom and japes at the same time.

From then on came my lifelong, entirely unreasonable aversion to a task I am, by every practical measure, quite good at.

I would rather have spent the descent doing nothing at all but looking. Shili unspooled beneath the viewport in long folds of ochre and green, mountain ranges combed with mist, rivers silvering where the light caught them — the kind of planet that made the whole galaxy feel briefly, foolishly generous. I promised myself, as I always did on worlds like this, that I would find some quiet hour before we left to simply see it, rather than merely pass through it on the Order's business.

To my regret, I have never yet kept that promise to myself. I did not expect to keep it here, either. Work is a cruel mistress, even for a Jedi Knight.

"All frequencies, please respond," I said into the comm, more out of habit than expectation. "This is Obi-Wan Kenobi of the Jedi Order, here on a mission requested by Senator Koves of the Togruta Delegation in Coruscant."

A beat of static, and then a voice, bright and young and entirely unbothered by the fact that a Jedi cruiser had just announced itself in Togruta airspace. "Well met, Master Jedi! This is Commander Audyo of the Royal Togruta Fleet. Are you landing in the capital?"

"No, Commander. I have a particular set of coordinates, some distance from it. Would you happen to know Azimuth Seven-Three-Three, Gamma Five-Six-One?"

Another pause, longer this time, filled with the faint clatter of someone working a console. "That would put you at Vorok Village, Master Kenobi. Northeastern region of the continent, up near the high ridge country. Do you require an armed escort, sir?"

I weighed it, the honest offer against the honest cost of it. A Royal cruiser setting down behind us would announce us as the Crown's business before we had said a single word for ourselves, and I had a suspicion, that whatever waited in that valley would be better met without the Queen's colors at our backs. "There's no need, Commander. Thank you for the offer, all the same."

"Understood. If it would help, sir, I can send along a wayfinder map for your ship and save you the trouble of the long way round through the canyon passes."

Relief must have shown plainly on my face, because I heard R4-M17 give a pleased little trill from beside the console before I'd even answered. "Yes, that would be quite useful, Commander Audyo. My astromech is patched in, you may send it to her directly."

"Copy that, Master Jedi... and — there. Map's away." A pause, warmer now, the formality dropping out of the young officer's voice. "Can I ask, sir, is it true, what they're saying about the villages? That it's gotten bad enough the Senator went over the Regent's head to call you lot in?"

It was, I thought, a rather unguarded question for an open channel, and told me a good deal about how far the worry over Vorok and Rekai had already traveled beyond the two villages themselves. "I couldn't say, my good man, until I've seen it myself. But I intend to find out."

"Fair enough, sir. Force be with you, and good luck. Whatever's got the Ridge folk this rattled, it's not nothing."

"Thank you. And may the Force be with you as well, and with your new Regasa."

"We'll pass your regards along, Master Jedi. Royal Fleet out."

The channel clicked dead. Beside me, Arfour whistled something quick and self-satisfied, the astromech equivalent of a job well done, and I gave the top of her dome a small, fond pat. "Indeed, my friend. We're headed there."

I turned the pilot's chair carefully, the console was cramped, and I had once caught an elbow badly enough on the flight controls that Olana still brought it up whenever she wanted to win an argument about my grace under pressure, and found my Padawan settled cross-legged on her bunk, eyes closed, hands loose in her lap, the particular stillness about her that meant she had gone somewhere the Force alone could take her.

It struck me, watching her, not for the first time, how strange it was that the frightened, sharp-edged child I had pulled off a burning transport ten years ago — back when I was still a young Padawan myself — had grown into someone so quietly, thoroughly steady. I had been many things as an apprentice: clever, certainly; stubborn, without question, but steady had rarely been among them.

In many ways, I thought, she was already a better Jedi than I had been at her age. Bolder and more mature than I was at twelve, that's for sure.

"Arfour, hold us on the wayfinder course. Autopilot mode," I murmured, and crossed to her.

I did not need the Force to tell me something sat unspoken between us; I had felt its shape since Coruscant's atmosphere had fallen away beneath us, a faint, persistent unease threading along our training bond like a hairline crack in old durasteel — small, easy to overlook, and entirely unlikely to stay that way.

"Would you like to talk about your vision?" I asked her, gently, and watched her eyes snap open.

"How did you—"

"Young one, Farsight is not merely a gift for sensing people and objects at a distance," I said, settling onto the edge of the bunk across from her. "It carries with it a kind of clarity, an understanding of what you've seen, however partial. That is why the Jedi Seers of the Old Republic were so valued. Not for the seeing alone, but for what the seeing left behind in them."

"But I couldn't make sense of it," she said, the words coming faster now, as though she'd been holding them since the transport and only now been given leave to let them go. "There was a beast and it was huge, Master, and it should have attacked, everything about it said it was going to attack — and then it just... looked at her. At the child. I don't know why. And the beast, it looked like…" She frowned, searching. "The sabertooth. The Akul, I think it's called."

"The Akul," I repeated, turning the word over. "That would match the descriptions I've read. Shili's foremost predator. Master Shaak Ti wears an Akul-tooth headdress in her montrals, if memory serves — a mark of passage among her people, I believe, not merely decoration."

I studied her a moment, weighing how much of my own certainty to hand her and how much to let her arrive at herself. "It may well be a Force-sensitive child you saw, Olana. But we cannot know that yet, and I would ask you to hold that question aside for now, difficult as I know that is, and give your full attention to the task in front of us. I promise you this, though — whatever, whoever, you saw, we will seek them out before we leave this planet."

She nodded, though the crease between her brows didn't fully smooth, and I let it be. Some worries are not meant to be talked away in a single conversation; they simply need company while they wear themselves down.

Arfour interrupted before either of us could say more, beeping and whistling with an urgency that had become, over the better part of a year, entirely familiar to me, 'Jedi + Astromech + Coordinates = Approaching' he said in binary.

"Noted, Arfour. Thank you." I rose, offering Olana a hand up she didn't strictly need but took anyway. "Ready your things. We're beginning our descent, and don't forget the gifts I packed in the aft compartment."

"You packed gifts?"

"A Jedi must play both an ambassador of the Jedi Order, and a diplomat for the Republic, my Padawan. We represent interests far more greater than our mandates, they must also view us not with suspicion, but with openness." I smiled without humor. "My methods happened to be shaped like sweets and cheap jewelry."​

---

I could feel the valley's mood before I ever saw a face in it — the Force carrying up to meet the ship in a tangled current of anxiety, curiosity, distrust, and, here and there, a bright thread of something almost triumphant, though I could not yet say to whom that triumph belonged. Jedi robes are not, whatever some in the Temple like to believe, a subtle thing to arrive in. Neither is a lightsaber at one's hip. I marked more than one face in the gathered crowd fall, subtly, from hope to something nearer disappointment as we descended; they had likely hoped for one of their own sent by the Order, a Togruta face among Togruta troubles, not two humans stepping off a Republic-marked hull.

I understood the disappointment. I did not take it personally. I rarely do, these days; Master Fay spent a great deal of my adolescence teaching me the difference between another being's grief and my own failure, and it is a lesson I have found myself grateful for more often than I ever expected to be.

"Hello there!" I called, raising a hand, letting the warmth I felt reach my voice rather than perform it. "My name is Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi, and this is my Padawan, Olana Chion. We were sent by the Jedi Order at the request of your Senator."

My eyes found the two figures the crowd had, almost unconsciously, arranged itself around — an elderly woman near the front, wrinkled, silver-striped and unhurried, and beside her but somehow apart from her, at a distance that felt deliberate even from a dozen meters off, a broad, powerfully built man whose montrals bore the ritual notching I recognized, vaguely, as a hunter's mark of kills. "We were told this valley serves as the midpoint between Vorok and Rekai," I continued. "Neutral ground, of a kind?"

"You presume well, Jedi," the elder woman said, her voice even, her face giving away nothing at all. "I am Gantika, chief of Vorok."

"And I am Kakal Rosh," the man said, in a voice pitched to carry, proud without quite tipping into boastful, "First Hunter of Rekai."

"Well met, Chieftain Gantika. First Hunter Rosh." I inclined my head to each in turn. "I've brought gifts. A poor offering, I imagine, set against the bounty Shili provides its own, but they carry the comforts of Coruscant, for whatever that's worth this far from it."

Olana stepped forward with the two baskets, back straight, chin level, every inch the composed young Padawan — though I caught, faint through our bond, the flutter of nerves beneath the composure, and felt an entirely unreasonable swell of pride at how well she hid it. Sweets, small handcrafted figurines, a scattering of cheap but pretty jewelry, and a holoprojection of Coruscant's public gardens, in case either leader had ever wondered what planet a Jedi actually called home.

Both leaders regarded the baskets for a long moment before Gantika passed hers wordlessly to the stooped aide at her shoulder.

"Never, in our dealings with Republic ambassadors," Gantika said, "nor with the handful of Jedi who have passed through this world before you, has a visitor thought to bring anything at all. It is usually we who are expected to provide." A pause, her dark eyes moving over me with an appraisal I couldn't quite read. "You are a peculiar man, Obi-Wan Kenobi."

"I've been told that before," I said, and laughed, because I genuinely have, by rather more people than I care to count. "Usually by people who mean it as a compliment. Occasionally by people who very much do not."

"Which was I, do you imagine?" Gantika asked, and there was something that might, on a less guarded woman, have been the beginning of a smile.

"I've learned not to guess too early in a negotiation, my lady. It tends to go poorly for me."

That, at least, drew a low rumble of amusement from Rosh. "Wise, for a Jedi," he said. "It is an appreciated gesture, Master Kenobi, whatever the Elder Gantika's opinion of you proves to be."

I let my gaze travel once around the assembled crowd — perhaps thirty souls all told, hunters and herders and a scattering of children peering out from behind their elders' legs, all of them watching two off-worlders with the particular wariness of people who had been promised help before and had not always received it — before returning to the two leaders. "Forgive me for getting straight to the point, but where might we conduct our negotiations? I confess I was led to expect something closer to open hostility."

Rosh snorted, not unkindly, and threw a sidelong look at Gantika that carried more history in it than I could yet parse. "Tensions run thick enough, Master Jedi, make no mistake. But even feuding villages do not wage war on the Relele — the sixth day, and the holiest of our week — for it is held, from the oldest of our grandmothers down to the newest child, that violence on Relele curses a household for generations to come. Whatever quarrel Vorok and I share, neither of us is fool enough to risk that."

Something in my shoulders eased that I had not realized was tensed. "Then might I suggest we speak candidly with just the two of you, and perhaps two or three aides apiece? I find negotiations tend to go rather better without an audience large enough to perform for."

The crowd's reaction to that was not agreement so much as a held breath, two dozen hunters and herders weighing, visibly, whether an outsider's word was worth the risk of standing down. On Shili, I suspect, honor was no abstraction. It lived in the set of a hunter's shoulders, in the scars they wore without shame, in the trophies that lined a household's hearth like a ledger kept in bone and hide.

"No harm will come to either of you," I said, raising my voice enough to carry to the crowd's edges. "On my honor as a teacher, and as a Jedi."

Gantika settled it first, with nothing more than a raised hand and a low murmur in her own tongue that I caught perhaps one word in five of. Rosh required considerably more volume — barking names, pointing fingers, until only two men remained flanking him, one of them young enough, and similar enough about the montrals, that I marked him instantly as kin. A son, perhaps, or a favored younger brother.

Gantika's remaining two were an older woman near the Chief's own age, solemn, experienced, and stooped with what looked less like age and more like a lifetime spent bent over herd-work, and a broad-shouldered young man who fixed his stare on my lightsaber the moment it came into view and did not once let it wander — as though he expected the thing to leap from my belt of its own volition and take a life without my say-so. I could not fault him the caution. I have known Jedi who might have made him right to hold it.

Behind me, I felt Olana's nerves ease as the crowd thinned, wariness bleeding slowly into something like relief, the tight coil of her shoulders loosening by degrees I doubt she was even aware of.

"Shall we sit?" I asked, gesturing toward a ring of flattened stones circling what had clearly once served as a ceremonial fire pit now cold, its ash gone the pale grey of long disuse. "I find negotiations proceed rather better when no one's knees are aching by the halfway mark."

Rosh huffed something that might, charitably, have been called amusement. Gantika lowered herself onto the stone with the unhurried economy of a woman who had settled into a hundred such circles before this one and expected, without particular resentment, to settle into a hundred more before the ground finally, mercifully claimed her. Olana took her place at my side, datapad balanced on one knee, stylus poised.

A dutiful scribe, my Padawan, I thought, not without fondness. Then again, children are, I have found, at their most dutiful precisely when they've decided a thing is worth truly listening to.​

---

The valley itself was a natural amphitheater, its walls iron-rich sandstone that bled crimson against a sky gone the deep bruised purple of a Shili evening drawing near. A creek ran — or had once run — through its center; what should have been a rushing tributary fed by high mountain springs had thinned to a muddy trickle, choked with dying river-weed and stagnant, brackish pools. I marked it and said nothing, not yet, though I suspected before the afternoon was through it would matter more than either leader currently intended to let on.

"I confess," I began, once we'd settled, "that Senator Koves's petition to the Council was rather light on particulars. A boundary dispute between Vorok and Rekai, he said, escalating toward violence. I should like, if you'll permit it, to hear the shape of the thing from each of you directly in your own words, before I offer counsel of any kind."

"There is little shape to it that isn't already plain," Rosh said, before Gantika had so much as drawn breath to answer. "The old boundary has run along the Ashfall Ridge since before my grandfather's grandfather hunted these hills. These last two dry months, Vorok has grazed herds past it — land that was never theirs. When my hunters went to challenge them on it, they found the boundary-stones shifted. Moved, Master Jedi. Not eroded. Moved."

"A serious accusation," I said, keeping my tone light, my attention on Gantika rather than the man leveling it. "Chieftain Gantika, your rebuttal?"

She was quiet a long moment, weathered hands folded evenly in her lap, and when she answered it was without heat, without haste — the cadence of a woman who had spoken through forty years of exactly this sort of quarrel and long ago run out of patience for urgency she didn't feel. "The Ridge has always been poorly marked, Master Jedi. Stones shift on their own in the flood season, same as anywhere rock meets water. I would not call a landslide theft."

"There has been no flood on the Ridge in a year," Rosh said flatly. "You know this, Gantika. Every soul in Rekai knows it."

"I know that Ridge better than any hunter half my age presumes to lecture me on it," Gantika said, and there, finally, was the first true flash of heat I'd seen from her. Brief, banked almost as quickly as it surfaced, but entirely real. "I walked it, First Hunter, before your mother's naming day."

I let the silence that followed sit a moment before filling it; a habit Master Fay drilled into me long before I understood its use. Observe first, she used to say, before you struggle after the words that want to come out of your mouth.

"Setting the stones aside for the moment," I said, "First Hunter, you mentioned your people have gone to challenge Vorok's herders directly on the Ridge. I'd like to understand what came of those encounters, if you're willing to tell it."

Rosh's jaw tightened, and for the first time since I'd landed I saw something beneath the proud bark of his public voice — not anger exactly, though it wore anger's shape convincingly enough. Grief, more likely, dressed in whatever armor was closest to hand. "Three months past," he said, "my brother's son went up to the Ridge to move Vorok's herd back across the old line. He did not return that night. We found him two days later, in the shale gully below the ridgeline. Mauled." His hands curled slow and deliberate against his knees. "The elders say Akul did it. I do not dispute that an Akul killed him, Master Jedi. But I have hunted that gully since I was old enough to carry a spear, and no Akul has denned there in the past half-decade. Something changed on that Ridge before my nephew died on it. Something Gantika, and her village, knows of — and will not speak."

I felt Olana go very still beside me. I did not need the Force to know the shape of what she was thinking, because it mirrored my own precisely: a beast that had no business denning where it now did, a village gone strangely, carefully quiet on the matter, and a vision of a small child standing entirely unafraid before the very predator a grieving man's family had just laid the blame for his death upon.

I kept my face as unreadable as I knew how to make it. That particular discipline has never come easily to me, and in the years since I have improved on that only marginally, but I managed it now, or near enough that I don't believe either leader caught the shift.

"I grieve for your loss, First Hunter," I said, and meant every word of it. "Truly. No dispute over grazing land is worth a young man's life, and I would not say that lightly to you or to anyone." I turned, deliberately, back to Gantika. "My lady, has there been a change on the Ridge? In the land, the water, the game — anything that might account for an Akul denning somewhere over where the First Hunter is telling us?"

It was the smallest thing, and I might have missed it entirely had I not spent the better part of a decade learning to read the particular body language under strain, whatever species wore it. Gantika's folded fingers pressed fractionally tighter together. Her face did not change at all. Her voice, when it came, was perfectly level.

"The Ridge holds many mysteries, Master Jedi. I could not tell you the mind of a beast."

I blinked for a few seconds, before nodding. It was not an answer to the question I had actually asked.

"Of course," I said, mild as milk, and let it go for the moment. Pressing a witness who has already decided to hold a line rarely breaks it; it only teaches them to hold it more carefully still. Better, I have found, to circle wide and come at the same ground from an angle she hadn't yet thought to guard.

"Might I ask instead," I said, "how the village itself is arranged? I've seen little of Shili beyond the view from a cockpit and the inside of this valley, and I confess I'm curious — the households, the elders, how a chief such as yourself divides her attention among them."

I watched her shoulders as I asked it, expecting the same easy, well-worn recitation I imagined she'd given a dozen Senate ambassadors before me. However, I did not expect the pause that followed.

It ran longer than the last one had. Long enough that Rosh glanced sidelong at her, one thin eyebrow lifting. Long enough that even the stooped aide at Gantika's shoulder shifted her weight, some old instinct telling her that something in the air of the valley had quietly, subtly changed.

"Vorok is a modest village," Gantika said finally. "Herding families, mostly, with some hunters and farmers besides. A handful of households nearer the high ground — closer to the Ridge itself — who keep more to themselves than the rest of us do."

"Closer to the Ridge," I repeated.

"Yes."

"How many households, would you say?"

"Enough," Gantika said, "that I could not name them all to a stranger without insulting whichever ones I forgot."

It was an elegant deflection, the kind I might have admired freely, under different circumstances, for its craftsmanship alone. But an elegant deflection is still a deflection, and I have made something of a career, across my years first as a Padawan and now as a Knight, of noticing the particular shape people build to keep a stranger from looking directly at whatever sits behind it. Perhaps that is the Wayseeker in me that Master Fay so carefully cultivated. Perhaps it is simply the natural evolution of a child who was curious about everything and never quite grew out of it.

"Chief Gantika," I said, gently, "I mean you no disrespect in asking, nor in noticing aloud that you have twice now declined to answer a question I put to you plainly. I understand a village leader's first duty is to her people, and that a Jedi arriving unannounced in your valley offers no particular guarantee of safety in your eyes, whatever oaths I might swear on my own honor. But I would ask you, in turn, to understand that a boundary dispute which has already cost one life is not a thing I intend to handle promptly and respectfully for anyone's comfort, mine included. I want peace restored to both your villages in the shortest time and at the least further cost that peace can be bought for."

I marked, from the edge of my attention, the other leader's stillness: not triumph exactly, though he had plainly won some private point simply by outlasting Gantika at her own evasions, and not quite satisfaction either. Something more patient than either. He said nothing, and let the silence do its own work.

Gantika regarded me for a long moment with an expression I found genuinely difficult to read — not guarded and not hostile, but weighing, the way I imagined a woman weighs a decision she has turned over many times already and has not yet found a version of that doesn't cost her something she isn't ready to spend.

"You are perceptive," she said at last, "for an outsider."

"My Master said much the same, the day we met," I said, and let a small smile reach my mouth. "Master Fay still maintains it's my one redeeming quality, most days."

That, at least, won the ghost of something from her, not quite a smile, there and gone again inside a single breath, but real while it lasted.

"There is a household," she said, slower now, each word set down like a stone she was still deciding whether to let go of, "in my village, that keeps more apart than most. A family so unremarkable in every other regard that no one thinks to remark on them at all — and that, Master Jedi, is precisely as they would wish it. Whatever they are, whatever this trouble on the Ridge has to do with them, they remain part of my family, under my protection, same as any other soul in Vorok. I would not have you go stirring suspicion against them for the sake of a grazing line. That is the whole of what I am unwilling to speak of today, and I would ask that you accept it as such, for now."

It was not the whole truth, that much was obvious to anyone here. It was, however, considerably more than I had been offered all afternoon, and in eighteen months as a Knight I have learned that a negotiator who demands the whole of a thing all at once generally walks away with none of it.

"I can accept that," I said, "for today." I let the emphasis land precisely where I meant it to, and watched it do so. Gantika's eyes flicked, briefly, toward the pale gold line of the ridge rising behind the valley's northern rim, and I found myself wondering — not for the first time since Olana's vision on the transport — exactly what waited in those high canyons, and exactly how much of it this careful, tired old woman already knew and had chosen, for reasons that were beginning to feel less like obstruction and more like mercy, not to say.

Beside me, Olana had gone very quiet over her data-slate, stylus stilled, eyes fixed somewhere past Gantika's shoulder toward the Ridge itself, and I felt, faint but unmistakable through our bond, the particular hum of the Force settling into place around her — the sensation I had come to recognize, in the months since her vision-gift first fully woke, as clarity arriving uninvited.

She shifted toward me, some words half-formed and ready to spill.

Not now, I sent along the training bond, as gently as I knew how to make an order land.

She blinked, and the moment passed her by, and if either village leader noticed anything beyond a Jedi Master idly glancing over his apprentice's notes, neither gave the slightest sign of it.

"First Hunter," I said, turning the conversation deliberately away from the household Gantika had just, very carefully, half-confessed to, "you mentioned boundary-stones moved, and your nephew found in a gully no Akul had denned in before. I'd ask the same courtesy of you that I've just asked of the Chief. Has anything else changed on the Ridge these past months? Anything at all, however small it may have seemed at the time?"

Rosh considered the question with rather more visible effort than Gantika had given her own evasions, which told me something in itself — that whatever he might be holding back, if he was holding anything back at all, it was held less carefully, less rehearsed, the honest uncertainty of a man still turning the pieces of his own grief over and trying to make them fit.

"The game has thinned," he said slowly. "Thimiars, mostly, and the fathier herds that graze the upper slopes. Thinned enough, these two months, that some of my younger hunters have taken to muttering the Ridge itself is cursed, though I've little patience for that kind of talk, and less patience still for hunters who'd rather blame a curse than sharpen their own tracking." A pause, and something almost reluctant crossed his broad features. "And there have been lights. Some nights. Small ones, high up. Past where any herder or hunter of either village keeps a fire. My scouts assumed poachers, at first. But poachers do not linger three seasons running without once being caught, Master Jedi. Not on ground I know as well as I know that Ridge."

Lights, high on the Ridge, unmoving. A seemingly ordinary family in Gantika's village that she had chosen to shelter rather than dismiss outright. Game thinned by a predator with, by every account I'd yet heard, no business housing itself where it now clearly had. A vision of a child, standing unafraid, before that very predator.

I did not think, sitting there on that cold ring of stone with the long-dead ash of some old ceremonial fire between us, that these were four unrelated mysteries.

"Master," Olana said quietly. "might I ask the First Hunter something?"

Rosh glanced at her with the faint, indulgent surprise adults so often wear when a child speaks up in a room built for grown concerns, though to his credit he inclined his head rather than waving her off. "Ask, young one."

"The light," she said. "Was it always in the same place? Or did it move?"

I watched Rosh's face carefully as the question landed, and felt a small, entirely unearned swell of pride bloom in my chest, she had gone straight past every question I might have asked myself and found the one that actually mattered.

His brow furrowed, genuine thought visibly replacing the earlier indulgence. "Always the same place," he said slowly, turning the memory over now with real care. "A hollow in the high rock, near where the gully splits. My scouts marked it once, meaning to investigate come the dry season. None have gone up since my nephew died there."

Something settled in my chest, quiet and certain — not the stillness of a mystery solved, but the steadier, plainer stillness of finally knowing which direction to start walking in search of the solving. Whatever waited in that hollow — beast, child, grieving household, or some tangled knot of all three at once — it was there, no longer merely somewhere on the Ridge in the abstract, and both leaders sitting across the cold fire-ring from me had just told me, without quite meaning to, precisely where to look.

"Chieftain," I said, turning back to Gantika, keeping my voice as even and unthreatening as I knew how without softening the question itself, "the household you mentioned, do any of them live near, or walk near, the hollow where the gully splits?"

The silence that answered me was, I thought, answer enough in itself. But Gantika did not give me the satisfaction of confirming it aloud. She rose instead, slow and deliberate, her joints protesting audibly against the effort, and looked down at me with an expression that held, in equal and uneasy measure, both warning and something that might, in a kinder light, have passed for a plea.

"It grows late, Master Jedi," she said. "And there is a Relele feast tonight, in Vorok, that I am bound by oaths far older than any I might swear to you to attend. If you wish to see the truth of my village with your own eyes, rather than take an old woman's evasions on faith, you are welcome to walk with us there this evening…and judge for yourself what manner of people you have been sent to arbitrate between."

Her dark eyes held mine a moment longer, something ancient and tired and not entirely unkind behind them. "But I would ask that whatever you find in Vorok tonight, Master Jedi, you remember this: not every silence is a lie. Some of us have simply learned, the hard way, which truths a person can survive hearing all at once — and which ones must be given slowly, in pieces, or else not given at all."

I rose as well, and inclined my head with rather more gravity than I had offered anyone since stepping off the Council dais a month before. "I would be glad to walk with you, Chief Gantika. And you have my word, I will tread as carefully with your village's grief as I would with my own."

She studied me a moment longer, as though weighing whether a Jedi's word carried quite the value Jedi generally presumed it did, and then, without further comment, turned and began the long walk back toward the tree line, her two aides falling into step a pace behind her.

Rosh watched her go with an expression I couldn't fully place, not triumph, though he had plainly won some private point simply by outlasting her, and not quite satisfaction either. "She has always been a woman of secrets, that one," he said, half to me, half to the Ridge line beyond. "Even before this trouble on the boundary. There are those in Rekai who say Vorok's chief keeps more buried on that mountain than grazing rights, Master Jedi. I confess I have never fully disbelieved them."

"And what do you believe, First Hunter?" I asked, my voice curious and solemn in equal measure. To his credit, he seemed to genuinely want to answer rather than simply perform an answer for my benefit.

Rosh considered the question with the same slow gravity he had given Olana's, and for a moment the proud bark of his public voice fell away entirely, leaving something more tired, more plainly human, beneath it. "I believe my nephew is dead," he said, "and that the woman who might tell me why has chosen, for reasons of her own, not to. Beyond that, Master Jedi, I believe whatever the Jedi Order sees fit to tell me, which in my experience of the Republic has generally amounted to considerably less than the whole of anything."

It was not, I reflected, watching him gather his own aides and turn back toward Rekai's distant smoke-haze, an unfair assessment. I told him so. He seemed, if not mollified exactly, then at least faintly surprised to hear a Jedi say it aloud rather than simply absorb the accusation in polite silence.​

---

When the valley had emptied of everyone but the two of us and Arfour trundling faithfully at our heels, and the cooling gold light of a Shili evening had begun settling over the grass like something poured rather than fallen, my Padawan finally allowed herself to speak freely.

"Master. That household. The lights on the Ridge. The child in my vision—"

"I know," I confirmed.

"You think it's the same place."

"I think," I said carefully, watching the last of Rosh's people vanish into the tree line, "that I have rarely, in my time as a Jedi, encountered several unrelated mysteries clustered quite so tidily around a single hollow in a single ridge. The Force rang true in both their tellings, Olana, I don't believe either of them lied to me outright. But both Chief Gantika and First Hunter Rosh have omitted something. Something is amiss here, and I begin to suspect the Council was rather wiser in sending us than even they knew." I glanced down at her, and did not entirely manage to keep the concern from my voice. "Whatever we find up there — whoever we find up there — I suspect Chief Gantika was not wrong that it won't be a simple thing to hear."

"But we're still going."

"Tonight, we play nice with the locals and attend a feast," I said, "and we watch, and we try to understand the whys and the whats of this world properly, rather than assume we already do. We owe these people that much respect, same as the galaxy at large affords our own symbols some measure of trust when we go wandering into their troubles wearing these robes. We set judgment aside, for tonight."

I looked past the valley, up toward the pale gold line of the Ridge, already dimming to rose and violet as Shili's sun began its long retreat behind it, and thought of a small Togruta child with her hands curled before an impossible beast.

"Tomorrow, I imagine, that we climb."

Olana followed my gaze up toward that distant hollow where the gully split, and said nothing further, though I could feel, quiet and steady through our bond, that she was thinking precisely what I was thinking, and precisely what neither of us yet had the courage to say aloud.

Whatever waited for us in Vorok's high ground had already cost one household something.

As we walked back toward our ship in the gathering dark, I did not think that it meant to stop there.​

---

Author's Note: Slight worldbuilding to one of the more recognizable (but still having scarce information) planets in Star Wars.

Terms:
a.) Akul — was a large quadrupedal, carnivorous predator with orange fur native to the grasslands of the planet Shili. They were the only creature that the Togrutas feared, and could attack and destroy settlements and villages; exists in EU. The animal is repurposed as the Raxshir in Canon (Tales of the Jedi).

b.) Farsight — also known as clairvoyance or farseeing. Force users employing farsight were able to see visions of people or places in their mind, as it appeared at the same time they were observing. Exists in both EU and Canon.

c.) Relele — The Togruta's holy day, much like our Sunday. Original Creation

d.) Regasa — formally addressed as Most High Regasa. The sovereign of the Togruta government, and served as the planetary leader of Shili. Exists in Canon.

 

[OryxCrown]

I love how so far the story just goes right into it and youre shown the difference and nuance in Obi-Wan compared to the orginal.

 

[Sakumo]

Impressive
Thanks for the chapter

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Thank you for the support!

 

[Sakumo]

Very interested to see what happens next! Master Fay has always interested me.

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We won't be seeing Master Fay in Arc 1 (this Arc) and Arc 2 (which is still being rewritten and edited). Hopefully, we will see her soon though!

I love how so far the story just goes right into it and youre shown the difference and nuance in Obi-Wan compared to the orginal.

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Thank you for your interest! Ah yes, while original Obi-Wan tended to be a more moderate, orthodox Jedi that while had his own opinions, would bow down to the wisdom of the Council (which led conflicts with Anakin and Ahsoka), this Obi-Wan is actually an adherent of the Living Force, more fast and loose with his dealings with the Council, but still competent and reliable in his core.