Constellations (AU Obi-Wan Semi-SI)

[Sakumo]

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 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 his 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 Olana.

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

Click to shrink...

Thank you for the support!

 

[Sakumo]

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

Click to shrink...

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.

Click to shrink...

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.

 

[Lillie Jones]

Thanks for the chapter
Continue on
Cheers!

 

[Sakumo]

Shili, 32 BBY
Obi-Wan Kenobi:

I have attended a great many feasts in my time as a Jedi, first as a Padawan and now as a Knight — state dinners on Alderaan thick with more cutlery than any single course could justify, a Hutt's idea of hospitality on Nal Hutta I have spent considerable effort since forgetting, even the austere ritual meals of the Temple's own holidays, which Master Yoda insists on calling festive despite all evidence to the contrary.

The Relele feast was not, strictly, in memory of anything so small. Chief Gantika's people gathered beneath strings of woven fire-lanterns and the slow pull of a reed instrument, and for the better part of four hours I watched a village do something I suspect few Senators of the Republic have ever managed in earnest — set its grievances down, however briefly, and simply be glad of one another's company.

Olana danced, badly and without a trace of self-consciousness, with a cluster of Togruta children who found her hair and her round human ears an endless source of delight. I ate three servings of something called ashroot stew I still cannot adequately describe, complimented an elder's carving sincerely, and watched Gantika hold court over her people with the tired, steady warmth of a woman who had buried more of them than I dared ask after.

I did not see the household she'd half-confessed to. I looked, as subtly as I know how — subtle enough, I think, that not even Olana caught me at it — and came up short regardless. Whoever they were, they had not come to the fire that night.

We left before the second moon cleared the ridgeline, Gantika's parting words still sitting behind my sternum like a stone I hadn't yet decided how to carry.
​

---

Morning came grey and close over the valley, low cloud snagged in the high crags like wool on a fence, and it was into that cloud that Olana and I began our climb.

"You could have let R4 fly us up," she said, not for the first time, picking her way over a scree slope with rather more grace than I currently possessed.

"R4 is an astromech tasked with keeping our ship in one piece, and to keep an eye on the locals at the ground, not a mountaineering guide," I said, "and I would remind you that the last time I let her plot anything more ambitious than a hyperspace lane, I nearly ended up orbiting a moon that does not exist on any Republic star chart."

"That speaks more of your fault than his, Master. Besides, that's just one time."

"It was memorable enough to count as several, my Padawan, so that's why he's staying in the ship."

She muttered something that was almost uncharitable, and we climbed on in the particular companionable quiet that had settled between us more and more often these last months — the sort that didn't need filling, the sort Master Fay always said was the truest measure of a bond well made. I was grateful for it. The tense situation we found ourselves in did not encourage idle talk, and Ashfall Ridge, the locals called it, is rising ahead of us.

I felt Olana's attention sharpen beside me a breath before I heard anything myself.

"Master." Her voice had dropped, quiet and even. "Something's here. Close. And recent."

I stopped, closed my eyes, and let the Force settle the way the Temple taught me a lifetime ago and Fay taught me properly afterward. Living Force first, always — the immediate, the present, the shape of a thing as it stood before you now. Wind moving cold and thin across bare stone. Small things burrowing far beneath our boots, indifferent to the concerns of anyone larger than themselves.

And beneath that, threaded so faint I might have dismissed it as imagination if I'd had less respect for what my own Padawan's instincts had already flagged — something colder. Old blood, long since gone to ground. Fear, settled into stone the way frost settles into a crack, patient for the next thaw to widen it.

"Here," I agreed, opening my eyes. "Or very near it."

We found the gully twenty minutes later, exactly where Rosh's account had placed it — a narrow split in the rock, floored with shale the color of dried rust, running toward a shadowed overhang I did not doubt was the hollow his scouts had marked and never dared investigate. It took three careful breaths standing at its lip to understand why.

The shale had been disturbed. Not the ordinary scuffing of wind and season, but long, deliberate drag-marks running the gully's length toward that overhang.

"Master." Olana, crouched near the gully's mouth. "These aren't natural either."

Boundary markers, she'd found — small stones set in a rough line, nothing like the ancient, weathered markers Rosh had accused Vorok of shifting. These were newer. Cruder. And they described no property line at all, but a rough half-circle drawn tight around the hollow's mouth, the shape of a warning rather than a boundary.

"Something made this recently," Olana said. "The ground hasn't settled yet. It's been moved a lot."

"Good eye," I told her, and meant it, though I could not resist adding, "But I think it is someone, and guessing from the footmarks, it's an animal. Still, Master Vant's survival course is finally paying dividends."

"I was top five in that class, Master, and one of the youngest ever to take it." Her flat look informed me she remained entirely unimpressed by my teasing. We followed the drag marks toward the overhang, and some thirty meters on, in a hollow the morning cloud hadn't yet burned off, we found the first body.

I knelt beside him. Togruta, young — younger than I was, though built considerably heavier through the shoulder. A bite through the neck that only tendons were keeping it connected to his shoulders. Claw-marks raked across a torn chest. The right arm gone from hand to elbow, the wound ragged rather than clean, which told me plainly enough that he'd still been alive, and struggling, when he was killed with the bite to the neck.

"This would be Rosh's nephew," I said. A few meters off, sun caught on something half-buried in the shale; I drew it to my hand through the Force and found a blaster rifle, stock cracked, one shot spent from the look of the scoring.

Olana kept her datapad steady, though I marked, faint through our bond, the effort it cost her to keep her voice as level as it came out. "It matches what Rosh told us. Last seen two, maybe three months back." She searched what remained of his effects and found an identification card, a bloodied knife, a small hunter's talisman, and bagged each in turn.

"Read it for me," I said, testing her. I wanted to hear whether we'd arrived at the same account independently, and there is no faster way to teach a Padawan to trust her own eyes than to occasionally decline to hand her mine first.

She considered the ground, the body, the blaster's angle where it had fallen. "This seems like the Akul was the one that ambushed him, instead of the other way around. He must have fired once, but the shot probably didn't hurt given that the Akul closed too fast and he went for the knife instead. It took the arm first and bit him in the neck."

"That matches what I make of it as well." I set my palm briefly against the cold stone beside him; no great revelation waiting there, only the residue of violence long since spent, the Force holding onto it the way old stone holds the day's heat after the sun is gone. "An Akul goes for the throat, neck, or skull as a rule. His is the aftermath of exactly that. Whatever killed him is consistent with how the Akul hunts. This is merely...unfortunate timing for him to come unprepared."

We did not linger. There is an etiquette I have come to observe around the dead in the field — Master Fay's and Master Sinube's, mostly, refined through rather more practice — give them their due attention, take what they have to teach, and move on, because grief indulged too long at a scene serves the dead not at all and the living rather poorly. I marked his coordinates for Rosh's people to reclaim him, said a quiet blessing under my breath and rose.

"There will be more," I said, and could not have told Olana precisely why I felt it so certainly, only that I did. She didn't ask. She has learned, this months, which of my instincts are worth questioning and which are simply worth trusting.

The second body we found the following morning, wedged into a crevice on the Ridge's northern face, where he'd evidently tried and failed to make himself small enough for something not to find him. Another Togruta, older than the first, and more brutalized than our first corpse — which alone told me he did not belong to this mountain the way Rosh's nephew had.

"No herd-brand, no clan markings, no hunting permit," I said, working through his kit rather than his body first. A blaster from Merr-Sonn, its serial half-scored away in an effort too lazy to have been thorough. Two thermal detonators, a backup blaster pistol, a vibroblade, and ammunition that can sustain operations for several weeks, if not months. Every hunter I'd met in either village wore a beaded cord at the wrist, sanctioned by whichever chief claimed their ground. This man wore nothing of the kind.

"That's not hunting gear," Olana said, crouched at a careful distance, her voice gone flat in the particular way it did when she was working hard not to sound as unsettled as she plainly was. "That's an incursion kit, Master."

"It is." I did not care for how readily, nor how correctly, the word had come to her. "Civilian hunters on this planet carry SoroSuub, or older Blastech stock, from what I've seen in both villages. This is something else."

"Then what was he here for?"

I turned the cracked blaster over and let the Force settle around the question rather than force an answer to it before I'd earned one. "I am not sure at the moment. It is likely that this man was a black market bounty hunter given his loadout, or a mercenary that slip past this part of Shili. I believe he did not succeed from his task, however."

The wounds told a harder story than the first body had. Both hands severed at the wrist, his innards spilled, before the killing blow — not the chaos of a struggle, but something closer to sequence, to intent. The blaster's stock cracked nearly in two, well past any use in the fight itself, as though whatever did it wanted the thing broken long after the man holding it had stopped being able to fire.

"It didn't kill him because it was provoked," Olana said quietly, arriving at the thought a half-step ahead of me again. "It killed him because he was a threat."

"Quite right. And I find I like the shape of what that suggests rather less with every hour we spend up here." I gathered the evidence and gave a final look at the corpse before following the tug of the Force outside. "Come, Padawan."

We spent the better part of two more days tracking backward along whatever trail our second corpse left before the Ridge finished with him — a discarded ration wrapper, a boot-print pressed into softer ground, the scorch of a blaster bolt fired wide and gone wasted. The picture that assembled itself, piece by careful piece, was not a comforting one. I found a herd of kybuck three hours later, in a shallow bowl of grassland sheltered from the wind. They had not scattered. A herd that loses one of its own to a predator ought to run to the furthest edge of its territory and stay there jumping at shadows for a week.

This one had gathered instead, tight and low, in a ring around a single patch of trampled, blood-dark grass, keening low and constant, the particular grief-song of a herd mourning its own.

"There's only one kill," Olana said, circling the ring's edge with the careful, unhurried gait. "Shouldn't there be more? If an Akul came through a herd this size hungry, wouldn't it take three, four, before the rest even scattered?"

It was, I thought, precisely the question the ground itself was asking, and she'd reached it before I'd finished forming it. The single kybuck at the center of the ring had its throat opened, cleanly, efficiently — and nothing else. No second bite. No further disturbance to the rest of the herd at all.

I laid a hand flat against the trampled grass and felt for what the Force still held of it. Fear, thick and recent, the herd's own terror still humming like a struck bell not yet silent. But beneath that — not hunger. Something nearer restraint, which is a strange word to reach for in connection with a predator built to kill things twice my own size without effort, and yet it was the truest one I had.

"It killed one," I said, thinking aloud, "and then it stopped."

"Like it wasn't trying to eat at all," Olana said. "Like it was—" She frowned, hunting the word the way she always did when a thought outran the vocabulary she had to hold it in. "Like it was told, or was forced not to eat them."

I did not have a ready answer for that, and I have found it wiser, across a decade of learning the particular humility a Jedi owes their own uncertainty, to say so plainly rather than offer a Padawan false comfort dressed as expertise. "I don't know, Olana. But I think you may be closer to the truth of it than I am." I rose, brushing dried blood from my knees, and looked back toward the gully, toward the hollow no hunter of either village had dared return to. "Any visions, since the transport?"

She considered it a moment, then shook her head. "Not yet. But I've felt the Force nudging at something for a while now."

"When it does come," I said, "trust it. Trust your instincts in Farsight the way you'd trust your own eyes."

We marked the site, took samples, and moved on. The herd's keening followed us some distance before the wind and the rising ground finally swallowed it.

By tonight, we stood before a footpath worn smooth by years of quiet, deliberate use, climbing toward a fold in the rock no Republic survey had ever thought to mark.

"That's it," Olana said softly. "Isn't it. That's where Gantika meant."

"I believe so."

She looked up at me, and I did not need the Force, nor even a year and a half of reading her every tell, to see the dread and the resolve sitting plainly together on her face. "Together, Master?"

"Together," I said, and we began the last climb.

The household was nothing like the two days of grim speculation had built for me. No hidden compound bristling with whatever might explain a dead poacher and an uncharacteristically restrained predator; only a modest dwelling of timber and packed stone, smoke curling thin from its chimney, a garden terraced into the slope, and carved wooden charms clattering gently at the eaves.

The man who answered our approach was broad-shouldered in the manner of someone who builds things for a living rather than hunts them. A craftsman's hands, or a builder's, callused in a pattern I recognized from the Temple's own maintenance crews. He went very still at the sight of my robes and my lightsaber both, the color draining slowly out from beneath the orange of his montrals.

"Jedi," he said. It was not a greeting.

"Hello there." I kept my voice gentle, hands visible, every small signal I have spent a career learning to offer a frightened being deployed at once. "Forgive the intrusion. Obi-Wan Kenobi, of the Jedi Order. This is my Padawan, Olana Chion. Chief Gantika directed us here, some days past, though she told us very little beyond the direction itself."

"Gantika sent you." A woman's voice, sharper, from further inside, and a moment later she appeared at his shoulder — smaller, wiry, her montrals bearing the same ritual hunting-notches I'd first noticed on Rosh, worn like a badge long since earned rather than newly claimed. "Why would she send outsiders to our door? She swore—" She caught herself, jaw tightening, and I marked something raw flicker beneath the composure before she smoothed it back down.

"She swore to protect this household," I finished for her, gently, "and I believe she still thinks she's doing exactly that. I'm not here to threaten you, nor hurt you. I'm here because a young man is dead in the gully below the hollow, and a stranger with a military-grade blaster is dead not far from him, and because two villages who haven't raised arms against each other in living memory now stand a hair's breadth from it. I don't believe those things are separate from whatever this household is hiding. I would very much like to be wrong."

The silence ran long enough that I heard, faint through the walls, the small domestic sounds of a home going about its evening.

"You'd best come in, then," the man said, though his wife's hand tightened visibly on his arm.
​

---

We learned that their names were Pav-ti and Nak-il Tano — the wife was a hunter of Vorok by trade and temperament both, while the husband was a carpenter. The house wore the mark of two very different hands: carved wooden toys of patient craftsmanship along one shelf, and across from them, hung with evident ceremony, a string of curved teeth larger than any I'd yet seen on this world.

It was Olana who caught it first, of course. "Those are Akul teeth," she said, quiet, careful. "Aren't they."

Pav-ti's hand rose instinctively toward the string, then stopped halfway. "The tooth in the middle was my kill. This one on the left is my mother's. It's something of a tradition, among Togruta hunting families — a daughter is carried into the high forests to be hunt an Akul. Most families successfully hunt at least one Akul in their lifetimes and call themselves fortunate for it. When I took the path of the hunter, I tried to search in the village and the forest to see another Akul for me to seek and hunt for my daughter, yet none came. They are a rare species now, and hasn't appeared for four years now. Or so I believed, until six days ago."

"Six days," I said.

Nak-il's jaw worked, and it was he who answered, an old argument audible beneath the words. "I told her the custom was foolishness before we ever married. You do not walk an infant into a predator's hunting ground and call it devotion. But her family has kept the rite four generations running, and I am only her husband, not her chief, and there's only so much a man forbids in his own house before he stops being welcome in it."

"Nak-il." Pav-ti's voice had gone tight — less anger in it, I thought, than plain, exhausted grief.

"They should know," he said, not unkindly, though the strain in it was real. "If Gantika sent them, it's already gone further than the two of us can manage alone."

Olana had gone very still beside me, and I felt, faint through our bond, the particular hum I'd learned across the last year to recognize as recognition rather than ordinary unease.

"You took her into the forest," she said slowly, choosing each word with care. "Recently. Your daughter. You walked her toward the high canyons, near where the gully splits. And something happened there. Something that should have ended badly, and didn't."

"How could you possibly—" Pav-ti's hands had gone white-knuckled on the table's edge.

"She's gone." The words came broken, all composure collapsing at once, the way a dam gives, all in a single rush. "Three days. I took her for the rite, same as my mother did for me. The Akul came, and I froze, not in fear of myself, but for my daughter. I have hunted these hills since I was a girl and I have never in my life been so afraid, and my daughter did not cry. She looked at it, and it looked at her, and then it simply left, and took her with it, up into the rock, and I could not follow where it went."

The wind moved through the charms at the eaves, a soft hollow clattering that seemed, in the quiet that followed, entirely too loud.

"May I ask her name?," I said, gently.

"Ahsoka," Pav-ti said, and broke fully on the second syllable. "Our daughter's name is Ahsoka."

I felt the name land through the Force, as if something shifted it before turning to Olana. A jolt through our bond sharp enough that I turned to her at once and found her gone pale, eyes fixed on nothing at all, the way they went whenever the Force showed her something she hadn't asked to see.

"It's her," she said, barely above a whisper, and then, steadier, "Master, it's her. From the transport. The vision — the little girl standing in front of the Akul, not afraid. That was her." She turned to the Tanos, urgency overtaking the care she'd been keeping until now. "She isn't being hunted. I don't think she ever was. I think the Akul let her live because she reached for it, because something in her reached back. They're connected."

Nak-il had gone rigid. Pav-ti's hand rose to press against her own mouth, her eyes bright and wide with something that had stopped being grief for a missing child and become, I understood with a slow, sinking clarity, an older fear entirely.

"You're saying," Nak-il said, each word set down like a man testing ice before he trusted his weight to it, "that our daughter has your gift. The Jedi's gift."

"I believe so." I said it before Olana could, wanting to feel the shape of that fear a moment longer before I let anyone speak further into it. Gantika had told me yesterday that some truths must be given slowly, in pieces, or not at all. I did not think this was one I had the luxury of giving slowly any longer. "Force-sensitivity shows itself in children a great many ways, some considerably less subtle than others. An affinity for beasts, particularly formidable ones, isn a powerful ability among the more empathically gifted of us. If your daughter reached that Akul the way my Padawan believes she did, and it answered rather than attacked, that isn't a curse on this household. It's a rare gift, and not an easy one to carry even for an adult — there are few in our Order who can claim the title of Beastmaster, and every one of them trained for years to earn it."

"A gift that's kept our daughter from our door for days," Pav-ti said, and there was iron beneath the grief now, a mother's fear sharpening into something with an edge. "Gift or curse, Master Jedi, I want her home."

"So do I," I said. "And I mean to see her there." I let a breath pass before I asked the rest of it. "Has anyone beyond this household, beyond Gantika, known of Ahsoka's gift?"

The look that passed between them was answer enough before either spoke.

"None," Nak-il said slowly. "But there have been strange visitors of the ridge, even before the Akul ever appeared. My family and I steered clear from it, and that is perhaps for the best. I heard rumors of them being an unsavory group, perhaps off-worlders intent on damaging the forests and the mountain."

For a while none of us spoke. Pav-ti's hand had found her husband's, and neither let go of it. Olana sat very still beside me, the datapad forgotten in her lap, and I let the silence hold a moment before opening my mouth to speak.

My comlink broke it instead, sharp and sudden against the hush of the room.

R4. And he was sending a distress signal.​

 

[Starman25]

Thanks for chapter!

Spoiler

 

[Lillie Jones]

Thanks for the chapter

 

[Sakumo]

Tano Homestead, 32 BBY
Obi-Wan Kenobi:

R4-M17 broke whatever moment might otherwise have followed, his urgent, high-pitched whistling audible even through the timber walls, and I rose at once, some old instinct already sharpening past the immediate grief of the room and toward whatever fresh trouble had prompted him.

Three days, the loyal astromech informed me, in the clipped, efficient binary he reserved for matters Arfour judged genuinely urgent rather than merely inconvenient. Three days since we'd left the valley floor, and in that time, word had spread through both Vorok and Rekai in the particular, poisonous way rumor spreads through a community already primed to expect the worst of its neighbor.

The Jedi had vanished into the mountains and not returned. That whatever had killed Kakal Rosh's nephew three months past was not an animal , but rather one of Gantika's own men, Arfour relayed.

They had gone looking for someone to blame.

Rekai's hunters, Arfour's report continued, had begun gathering at the valley's northern approach not two hours past. Vorok's herders and a fair portion of its own younger hunters, no longer content to wait on Gantika's counsel of patience, had begun gathering to meet them.

"How long before that becomes something neither side can walk back from?," I asked and Arfour's answer was not encouraging.

"Master." Olana was on her feet as well, her earlier grief for Ahsoka's parents visibly warring now with the plain, practical urgency of the moment. "If we go down now, Ahsoka is still out there. If we leave, we lose whatever trail we have left of her."

"I know." I turned to her, and found myself weighing a decision I did not entirely trust myself to make wisely, torn as I was between two obligations that had, until this very moment, felt like the same obligation wearing two different faces.

Two villages, moments from spilling blood over a grief neither fully understood the true shape of.

"I cannot be in both places at once, Olana," I said heavily, "and I do not believe either need waits well for the other." I once again closed my eyes and search the Force for answers, before it nudged me to where Olana was standing, and that is when I knew that it heard me.

"Then let's split up." She said it plainly, without the hesitation I half-expected, chin lifted in a manner I recognized with a small, aching pride I did not have time to properly feel. "You know the villages. You've already built whatever trust exists between us and them. I'm now sure she's the child in my vision, Master. And I think — I think if anyone can find her before this goes any further wrong, it should be the one the Force already showed her to."

I studied my Padawan for a long moment, weighing a dozen counterarguments and setting each of them down again in turn, because every one of them, I found, was born less of genuine caution and more of a Master's plain reluctance to send a twelve-year-old alone onto a mountain with all the dangers of one. But I had watched her perform admirably in her first mission outside Coruscant, and she delivered so far.

And I had promised her, on the transport out from Coruscant, that I trusted her instincts as much as my own.

More, on your better days, I had told her. I found I had not been lying.

"Lady Tano," I said, turning to Ahsoka's mother, who had risen from the table and stood now with one hand braced hard against its edge, "your daughter's gift reached that Akul once already, and it answered her rather than harming her. I do not believe that was chance. I believe, whatever else is happening on this mountain, that bond is real, and worth trusting. I would ask leave for my Padawan to continue the search in your daughter's name, with whatever aid you and your husband can offer her of the high canyons and their paths."

Pav-ti Tano looked, for a long moment, between myself and Olana both, some fierce, complicated calculation working behind her eyes that I recognized as the particular arithmetic of a parent measuring a stranger's competence against a child's safety and coming up, reluctantly, in the stranger's favor, especially with that said stranger is a Jedi.

"I'm coming with you," she said finally, to Olana rather than to me. "Nak-il will stay, in case she comes home on her own while we're still searching. But I am not sitting in this house while a Padawan thrice as young as my husband looks for her without me."

"Then we go together," Olana said, and there was something in her voice — steady, certain, entirely her own — that eased a knot in my chest I had not fully realized was there.

I set a hand briefly on her shoulder, and felt, through the bond, how carefully she was holding herself together against the fear she would not let show on her face. "Be swift, and be careful," I told her, "and trust what you see, even when it frightens you. Especially then. I will hold the valley as long as it needs holding. Find her, Olana."

"I will." A beat, and then, quieter, only for me: "Don't do anything reckless, Master."

"Young one," I said, already turning for the door, already feeling the old, familiar weight of what waited for me at the bottom of that mountain settling across my shoulders, "reckless is rather my whole reputation. I wouldn't want to disappoint the Council's expectations of me now. How do you think would they feel if the dashing Obi-Wan Kenobi did not use his methods?"

She did not laugh, though I saw her try to, but she did roll her eyes then started walking back. Before I can forget, however, I called out her name and when she looked back, I outstretched my hand to summon the evidence bag she was carrying and gave her a quick finger salute before moving down.

Down through the gathering dark of the mountain path with Arfour's urgent binary chattering at my heels, toward a valley that I could already feel, even at this distance, humming with a grief and a fury that had very nearly finished becoming something neither Gantika nor Rosh would be able to call back.
​

---

Olana Chion:

Pav-ti did not slow for her, and Olana did not ask her to.

They climbed the last stretch of the footpath in the deepening dark at a pace that had nothing to do with caution and everything to do with a mother's fear outrunning her own body's limits, and Olana matched it stride for stride. The Tano homestead fell away behind them, its lamplight swallowed by rock and distance within minutes, and then there was only the path, and the cold, and the particular silence of a mountain that had already decided, three days ago, exactly how much blood it meant to keep.

She reached for her Master through their bond once, briefly, and felt him already moving — fast, focused, the valley's turmoil rising up to meet him like a held breath about to break. She did not reach again. He needed the whole of himself for what waited below, and she needed the whole of herself for what waited above, and some small, quiet, frightened part of her understood that this was the first time that had ever been fully true at once.

There was no one, just now, to catch her if her own nerve failed her partway up this mountain. She found, oddly, that the thought steadied her rather more than it frightened her.

"There," Pav-ti Tano said, breathless, pointing toward a fold in the rock Olana would never have marked as anything but shadow. "That is where I lost her. Three days past. I could not make myself go further than this alone."

Olana closed her eyes and let the Force settle the way Master Obi-Wan had taught her, not reaching, not grasping, only listening, the way you learned to listen for a single voice in a crowded room once you'd trained your ear to it. The Living Force first: cold stone, thin wind, small skittering things fleeing the moment her attention neared them, the whole ordinary indifferent business of a mountain at night going about the business of being a mountain.

And beneath that, waiting, the same bright, curling warmth she had felt twice now without ever being able to hold onto it. Closer this time. Close enough to walk toward, if she trusted her feet the way Nak-il had told her to.

"This way," she said, and did not wait to see if Pav-ti followed, though she heard the woman's steps fall in immediately behind her own.

The path Olana's instincts drew her along was not the one the drag-marks and the boundary-stones had shown them three days before. It ran higher, narrower, skirting a drop that made her stomach lurch. She did not slow. Somewhere ahead of her, that warmth pulsed steady as a heartbeat, patient and unhurried in a way that told her, more than any words could have, that whatever waited at the end of this climb was not, whatever else it was, in any hurry to be found by anyone it did not wish to be found by.

It let her find it anyway. That, more than anything, was what told her she was close.

The den, when they reached it, was not a hollow at all but a wide, shallow cave mouth screened by a fall of red-black stone, half-hidden behind a stand of thorned scrub that had grown up undisturbed for what looked like years. Olana felt the Akul's presence before she saw so much as a claw of it — vast, and old, and entirely, terribly awake, the Force around it coiled tight the way a held breath coils in a chest before it either breaks or steadies.

It came out to meet them without hurry, unfolding itself from the dark the way her vision on the transport had shown it unfolding over a much smaller, much more frightened child, and every instinct Olana had spent half a year honing under Obi-Wan's patient correction screamed at her, all at once, to run.

She did not run. She made herself stand, made her feet root into the loose shale and looked up, and up, at a creature built to kill things three times her size without breaking stride, its dark hide seamed with old scars, its eyes catching what little light the dusk still offered and throwing it back gold.

It's afraid, she realized, distantly, the thought arriving sideways the way Farsight always arrived for her. For someone. And beneath the fear, close enough to touch, that same bright, small warmth she had felt through the Force since the transport, patient, and curious, and entirely without malice — though wrapped now with a chill that had nothing to do with the mountain air, in something fiercer.

The Akul's growl rolled low through the stone beneath her boots, a sound she felt in her chest before she heard it in her ears, and behind her, Pav-ti's breath caught sharp and sudden. Olana heard, rather than saw, the rifle come up.

"Padawan Chion—"

"Wait." Her own voice came out steadier than she felt, which surprised her almost as much as the beast in front of her did. She threw one hand back without turning, not quite touching Pav-ti's arm, but close enough that the older woman went still around it regardless, some instinct of her own recognizing the gesture for the plea it was.

She was afraid. She let herself feel the whole shameless size of that fear rather than pretend it away, the way Obi-Wan had told her once that pretending fear away only ever taught it to come back larger — and then, very deliberately, she set the fear down beside her rather than inside her, the way she had learned to set down every other weight the Force had ever asked her to carry.

She thought of Ahsoka's parents, hollow-eyed at their own table. She thought of a herd keening in a ring around a single loss, and a man broken open by his nephew's death, and a village a hair's breadth from war because of a simple misunderstanding. She thought of Obi-Wan, somewhere below her right now, standing alone between two villages with nothing but his own two hands and whatever the Force would lend him, and found, beneath all of it, something in herself that was not fear at all, only a plain, stubborn certainty that she had not come this far up this mountain to be turned back by it now.

She reached out — not with her hand, though it trembled faintly at her side regardless, but with the whole quiet weight of her will, shaped as carefully and as gently as she knew how to shape anything — and let the Akul feel exactly what she meant by it.

I am not here to take anything from you. I am here for her. Let me see her safe.

The Akul went still.

For three long heartbeats it simply looked at her, gold-eyed and unreadable, close enough now that she could feel the heat rolling off its hide and smell the copper tang of old blood caught deep in its fur, and Olana held her ground and did not look away, because some part of her understood, with the same sideways certainty her visions always carried, that looking away now would be the single thing in this whole encounter capable of turning it wrong.

Behind her, she heard the small, sharp click of Pav-ti thumbing the rifle's safety back into place, not fully lowering the weapon, not yet, but no longer poised to fire either — and felt, absurdly, a flicker of gratitude toward the woman for trusting her that far, at least, even now.

Then, low and unhurried, the great head dipped, and behind it, framed in the cave mouth's shadow, small and sleep-mussed and utterly unbothered by the enormous predator she had apparently been using as a pillow, a Togruta toddler sat up and blinked out at them both.

"Oh," Olana said, and felt every careful, disciplined thing she had just done come apart at once into something considerably softer.

Ahsoka Tano regarded her with the frank, unhurried curiosity of a child who had not yet learned that strangers were meant to be feared, montrals barely grown past their first nubs, one small hand still fisted loosely in the fur at the Akul's foreleg. She could not have been past the age of three. She looked, Olana thought, absurdly, wonderfully ordinary; a sleepy toddler blinking awake in the last light of evening, not a mystery four people had died circling, not the center of a storm that had very nearly broken a valley into open war.

Behind her, Olana heard Pav-ti make a sound that was not quite a sob and not quite a laugh, and felt the rifle strap slide loose from the woman's shoulder entirely as both hands rose instead to cover her own mouth.

"Hi," Olana said, crouching slowly, hands open and visible the way Obi-Wan always made a point of doing, though she suspected, for this particular audience, it mattered rather less than her tone did. "Hi, Ahsoka. My name's Olana."

Ahsoka tilted her head, considering this with the enormous gravity, glanced once, briefly, up at the great scarred shape looming protectively over her small shoulder as though asking its permission, and then, without any further warning at all, reached both arms out toward the stranger crouched in front of her.

Olana felt the Force move between them the instant their hands touched, not a vision this time, only warmth, bright and unguarded and entirely without the caution every trained Jedi eventually learned to wrap around their own presence in the Force. Ahsoka's gift sat in her the way sunlight sits in water, diffuse and everywhere at once, and Olana understood, with a certainty that had less to do with the Force just then and rather more to do with simply holding a child who had trusted her completely within seconds of meeting her, some small, unfinished piece of why the Akul had let this little one live, and why, having let her live, it had chosen not to let her go.

Pav-ti reached them a heartbeat later, weeping openly now and making no effort at all to hide it, and Olana surrendered the child into her mother's arms with a reluctance that surprised her, some part of her already, foolishly, missing the small solid weight of her.

The Akul did not growl at the exchange. It watched instead, still and enormous in the mouth of its den, and when Pav-ti finally looked up from her daughter's face to meet its gaze directly for the first time since her nerve had failed her here three days before, something passed between woman and beast that Olana did not have the words for and did not try to reach after. Understanding, perhaps. Or something closer to permission, freely given at last rather than merely wrested away.

"We have to go," Olana said gently, when the moment had run its course, glancing toward the darkening sky and the valley she could not see from here but could feel, faint and unsteady, through the bond. "Master Obi-Wan needs us. Both villages do."

Pav-ti nodded, gathering her daughter more securely against her hip, and it was only as they turned to go that the Akul moved. Not toward them, but past them, falling into unhurried step at their flank with the calm, deliberate patience of something that had made up its mind about where it meant to walk tonight and did not intend to be talked out of it.

"It's coming with us," Pav-ti said, not quite a question.

"I don't think we could stop it if we tried," Olana said, and found, watching the great scarred head swing low to nose gently at Ahsoka's dangling foot, that she did not particularly want to. "I think it's coming because she is."

They began the long descent together, mother, Padawan, child, and the beast people had died over and two villages had nearly gone to war believing was their enemy, Olana, walking at its flank with Nak-il's whistle still clenched forgotten in one fist and Ahsoka's small hand fisted trustingly in the front of her robes where Pav-ti had passed her back for the harder stretch of the path, felt her Master's presence settle far below, sharp and taut with the particular tension of a crisis mid-breaking, and knew, with the same plain certainty that had carried her up this mountain in the first place, that she would reach him in time.

Hold on, Master, she thought, and quickened her pace toward the valley. We're almost there.
​

---

Border of Rekai and Vorok, at the same time
POV Restored (Obi-Wan Kenobi):

I do not believe I have ever run so hard in my life, before or since.

The path down from the Tano household was not built for speed — narrow, switchbacked, treacherous with loose shale in the deepening dark — and I gave it rather less respect than it deserved, trusting the Force to place my feet where my eyes could not quite manage it fast enough, letting momentum carry me down slopes I would, under any calmer circumstance, have picked my way across with considerably more caution.

I felt the valley's mood before I ever cleared the tree line, the Force below churning with a violence of feeling that bore no resemblance at all to the wary, grieving unease I'd first sensed on our landing days before. Anger, sharp and close to the surface. Grief, curdled past patience into something with teeth. And beneath both, the particular electric readiness of people who have decided, whether they fully know it yet or not, that they are about to do something none of them will be able to take back.

I broke from the tree line at a dead run, and found the valley floor already alight with hand-torches and the harsher glare of hunting-lamps, two crowds facing each other across perhaps thirty meters of open ground where, days before, I had sat and shared a cold ring of stones with two leaders still willing, however reluctantly, to talk rather than fight. Rekai's hunters stood in a loose but purposeful line, blasters and spears both in evidence, Kakal Rosh at their fore with an expression I did not have time to fully read before the first shot rang out.

I did not see who fired it. In the single suspended heartbeat after the bolt left whatever weapon had loosed it, was that it was answered — a second shot, a third, the crowd on both sides surging forward with the terrible, formless momentum of people who have stopped thinking in individuals and started thinking only in sides.

I did not draw my lightsaber. I have turned that choice over as well, since, and I do not believe I would make a different one if given the chance again; a blade drawn in that moment, however righteously intended, would have read to both crowds as a third side entering the fight rather than an attempt to end it.

Instead I reached, with both hands and the whole of what the Force would give me, and threw up a wall.

The effect was instantaneous as I felt the Force flowing through my fingertips, but one of my sloppier ones. A proper Force barrier, the kind Master Windu could conjure with scarcely a raised eyebrow, is a controlled, deliberate thing, shaped and held with precision. What I raised across that valley floor was closer to sheer, desperate will given form, a shimmering wall of pressure that I drove between the two crowds with every scrap of strength I had left after three days on that mountain and a dead run down it, and I felt it cost me something as it went up, a hollow, scraped-out feeling behind my sternum that I did not have the luxury of examining just then.

Blaster bolts struck the barrier and dissipated, as if swallowed by the Force. A thrown spear, some Rekai hunter's desperate contribution to the chaos, struck it and simply stopped, hanging suspended a bare meter from a Vorok herder's chest, and I reached with what remained of my strength and turned it gently, deliberately aside, letting it fall spent and harmless to the grass.

"ENOUGH."

I do not often raise my voice. I have found that shouting tends to cost more credibility than it buys. But I put everything I had left into that single word, let the Force carry it to the furthest edges of both crowds, and watched, with a relief I did not fully feel until several seconds after the fact, both lines stumble to a ragged, startled halt.

"I apologized," I said, into the silence that followed, my voice raw now, considerably less commanding and considerably more simply exhausted, "for every hour of the past three days that we did not spend explaining to either of you. That failure is mine, and I will own it fully. But I would ask you, both of you, to hear what I have to say before one more shot is fired here tonight, because I promise you this dispute was never about a boundary line, and it was never about grazing rights, and it most certainly was not worth a single life more than it has already cost."

Rosh was the first to lower his weapon, though I do not think it was my words alone that did it, I saw his eyes go, instead, to the pale shape of Gantika pushing forward through her own people's ranks, her face carved from something far grimmer than the tired warmth I'd watched her wear at the Relele feast.

"Explain, then, Master Jedi," she said, and her voice, for the first time since I'd met her, held no careful evasion in it at all. "Explain quickly. I do not know how much longer I can hold my own people back from finishing what someone else's blaster bolt just started."

I looked between them both: Gantika's grief-worn patience, Rosh's raw and unhealed anger, thirty-odd faces beyond them lit by hand-torches and lamplight and the particular, terrible readiness of people who had very nearly done something none of them would have been able to undo, and I began, as plainly and as honestly as I knew how, to tell them the truth I had spent three days climbing a mountain and the fruits of our investigation.

I told them that we discovered Rosh's nephew as a corpse; the kybuck herd. I told them of a poacher that did not belong to either village. I told them, at last, of Pav-ti and Nak-il Tano, and of a daughter almost a week missing, and of a bond between a small child and an ancient predator through the Force. I looked at the First Hunter, and gave him the truth. It was an Akul that killed his nephew, not a fellow Togruta, and indeed it was the Akul that was the source of their troubles from the start.

The anger in both crowds begin, slowly, imperfectly, to curdle into something closer to shared bewilderment, the particular, disarming realization that the thing you had convinced yourself to hate was never, in fact, your true enemy at all.

I was still speaking, still working to hold that fragile, newly reforged peace steady beneath my hands, when I felt it — a familiar presence.

Every face in that valley turned as one toward the sound that followed: a low, rolling growl, not aggressive, I understood at once through the Force, but almost — impossibly — protective.

The Akul came down out of the trees at an unhurried, almost stately pace, easily the largest living thing I had yet seen on Shili, dark hide scarred with the marks of what I now understood to be a long life spent guarding rather than merely hunting, and every face in that valley turned to it as one, thirty-odd Togruta caught between the fear they had carried up this mountain in their own hearts for long, blood-soaked days and the plain, bewildering sight now walking calmly down out of the dark toward them.

Olana walked at its flank, Pav-ti Tano a half-step ahead of her already breaking into a run, and I felt my Padawan's presence through our bond settle, even at that distance, into something bright and steady and entirely, gloriously satisfied, tempered, I could tell even from here, with an exhaustion that told its own story of what the last three hours had cost her.

The Akul slowed at the valley's edge and lowered its great head, and I watched, along with every other soul gathered there, as it permitted Pav-ti to gather her daughter fully into arms that had not held her in three days, and did not, I noted, so much as growl at the crowd of frightened, weapon-bearing Togruta now staring at it in open, thunderstruck silence.

No one spoke. No one, I think, quite knew yet what there was left to say.

Gantika was the first to move, crossing the open ground between the two lines with the unhurried, deliberate gait. She stopped a few paces from Pav-ti and her daughter, and knelt, slow and careful on old joints, until her eyes were nearly level with Ahsoka's own.

The beast did not so much as tense at her approach. If anything, I thought, watching the great head dip fractionally lower, it seemed almost to be waiting for her.

Gantika said something then, low, in their native language, and whatever it was, it was not meant for me, nor for Rosh, nor for the crowd of frightened faces still watching on either side of us. It was meant for the child, and perhaps, I thought, for the creature standing sentinel over her, and it carried in it a weight I did not need the language to understand — old grief, older hope, and something that sounded, even filtered through a tongue I could not fully follow, remarkably like relief.

Rosh had not moved from where he stood at the head of his own people, and when I glanced toward him I found his face caught in an expression I did not think he fully understood himself yet — grief still raw and unhealed at its edges, but something else moving beneath it now, uncertain and unwilling and entirely too large to simply set aside in a single evening.

"Master Jedi." His voice, when it finally came, was rough. "You said this creature killed my nephew."

"I believe so," I said, carefully, aware that this was ground I could not afford to walk carelessly across. "I believe your nephew's death, First Hunter, was the tragedy of a man who stumbled, through no fault of his own, into the edge due to daring. Your nephew fought honorably against the Akul, but that was before young Ahsoka had ever bonded with the beast. I do not believe it was malice. I believe the Akul was driven by self-preservation and survival, just like all of us. If the Togruta must kill an Akul as a rite of passage among your hunters, is it also not the right of an Akul to defend itself?"

I did not press him further. There would be time, in the days and weeks ahead, for Vorok and Rekai to find their own way to whatever peace this night had only begun the long work of building. That work was not mine to finish for them, however much I might wish, standing there in the trampled grass with the last of my own strength spent thin, that it were.

I looked instead to Olana, who met my eyes across the valley's width with something unguarded and entirely young shining through the exhaustion on her face, and found, for the first time in three long days, something in my own chest ease at last, if only by a fraction.

The valley had not yet decided what tonight would come to mean for either village, long after the torches burned low and the dead were properly mourned and the living had time to sit with all of it. That reckoning, I suspected, was only just beginning.

But the blood had stopped. The blasters had lowered. And somewhere in the trampled grass between two villages that had very nearly broken each other over a fear neither of them fully understood, a small Togruta child slept soundly against her mother's shoulder, one hand still curled loosely in the fur of the creature that had, in its own fierce and misunderstood way, kept her safe every single hour since the mountain had first claimed her.

Whatever came next, I thought, watching Gantika rise slowly from where she knelt and turn to face the assembled crowd at last and spoke in a tone both solemn and proud.

She then turned to me and repeated it in Basic, "Ahsoka is Jedi."

While I had confirmed it earlier, I smiled in relief. Hope endures, after all.​

---

Author's Note:
And there you have it, Ahsoka Tano has now appeared! This sequence was inspired by the Tales of the Jedi origin episode for Ahsoka. Quick question, would you guys like R4-M17 adressed as R4 or Arfour? Let me know to avoid confusions hehe.

I also post the story in AO3 as Constellations under the name Kanoisms, I posted the chapter a day earlier there because QQ was down. Might be posting the conclusion of Ahsoka/Shili arc this week to make up for not updating sooner!

 

[Jao]

The formatting on chapters 1.1 to 1.3 are borked.

 

[Sakumo]

The formatting on chapters 1.1 to 1.3 are borked.

Click to shrink...

Hi! How so?

 

[Jao]

Hi! How so?

Click to shrink...

There are giant gaps inbetween words.

 

[Lillie Jones]

Thanks for the chapter

 

[TheCrowGod]

This is good, but you keep calling r4 he and she.

 

[CharlySalazar]

Loving it so far! Thxs for the chaps

 

[Sakumo]

Thanks for the chapter

Click to shrink...

Thanks!

This is good, but you keep calling r4 he and she.

Click to shrink...

Fixed! R4 is a he.

Loving it so far! Thxs for the chaps

Click to shrink...

Thank you as well!

 

[Sakumo]

There are giant gaps inbetween words.

Click to shrink...

Will double-check this soon, maybe formatting error, thank you!

 

[Sakumo]

Shili, Border of Vorok and Rekai Villages, 32 BBY
Ahsoka Tano:

Everyone was looking at her.

Ahsoka did not much like being looked at, not by this many people all at once, though she had decided that it was easier to accept it if she kept one hand fisted in Ashla's fur while she bore it.

Her new friend purred as Ahsoka patted the large cat and giggled once it showed its large belly. One of the villagers made a sound of surprise and Ahsoka laughed again, wondering why they were afraid of Ashla.

That was the name she had given the Akul, somewhere in the long, patient dark of the den — Ashla, because it was the sound the wind made through the thorn-scrub at the cave mouth on quiet nights, and because it seemed, in the small and certain way three-year-olds are certain of things, exactly right. Ashla did not mind the crowd either, so far as Ahsoka could tell, though she stood very still and very close, the great scarred head held low enough that its breath stirred the loose fringe of Ahsoka's montrals whenever she shifted her weight.

Mother was crying again. Ahsoka had counted four times now that Mother had cried since the tall girl with the nice smile — Olana, she had been told, though the word sat strange and unfamiliar in her mouth, like a new tooth — had carried her down out of the rocks. Ahsoka did not think Mother's tears were the bad kind. She had learned that grown-ups cried both when they hurt and when they were glad, and it seemed like her mama was definitely not hurt; her face right now was doing the glad kind, even though the water still ran down it the same as the bad kind did.

"She is a Jedi," Elder Gantika said, and there was something fuzzy in the old woman's voice that made something in Ahsoka's chest go light and bubbly, the kind of feeling that usually came right before a giggle got away from her whether she meant to let it or not. The whole people seemed to understand the words, their torch fires guttering low now that the shouting and the frightened noise had gone quiet, and Ahsoka looked from old woman Gantika's weathered, pleased face to Mother's wet, glad one to Father's, which was doing something strange she did not have a name for yet — proud, maybe, and afraid, both at once, the way he sometimes looked when she climbed too high on the terrace wall and he did not stop her climbing even though his hands twitched like he wanted to.

"What is Jedi?" she asked, because nobody had actually told her, and it seemed, given how many people kept saying the word like it was a gift, an important thing to know the shape of.

It was not Mother who answered, nor Father, though she had turned to both of them expecting one or the other to know. It was another voice instead; low, warm, and carrying just enough of a smile in it that Ahsoka decided, before she had even found the face it belonged to, that she liked it.

"A Jedi," the voice said, "is someone who tries to protect the people who cannot protect themselves. Who travels a very great distance to be a teacher, or a healer, a guardian, or a messenger; or, when the day calls for it, someone who helps two sides that have forgotten how to talk to each other remember how."

The crowd shifted, parting the way water parts around a stone, and Ahsoka saw the man properly for the first time, tall, and pale in a way none of her family or her neighbors were pale, wrapped in cloth the color of good, plain sand with a darker cloak thrown loose over it, a strange curved handle hanging quiet at his hip. His face was young but tired in the particular way Mother's face went tired after a long day tending the herd-beasts, and there was dust from the mountain still caught in the crease of his boots.

He came down onto one knee in front of her, so that his eyes were not so very far above her own, which she liked rather better than being looked down at from a great height the way most grown-ups looked at her.

"Hello there, young Ahsoka," he said. "My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi."

Ahsoka considered him the way she considered most new things, carefully, and without hurry, and with one hand still curled fast in Ashla's fur for the comfort of it. She waited for the fright to come, the way it sometimes did with strangers, small and cold and quick behind her ribs.

It did not come. What came instead, soft and certain as sunlight that Mother sometimes make her sit in, was something that felt very much like the warmth Ashla gave off from beneath her scarred old hide on a cold night, not the same, but close to it that some small, wordless part of Ahsoka relaxed all at once, the way a held breath finally lets go.

She did not know yet what to call that feeling, or what it would come to mean for the whole shape of her life from this evening forward. She only knew that the strange, tired, kneeling man was kind, and that Ashla — enormous, ancient Ashla purred at the sight of this Mister Obi-Wan and the man did not show any fear, giving the Akul at friendly pat just like Ahsoka did.

"A Jedi possesses a deep connection with the Force, Ahsoka," the Jedi-man said with a patient tone like Father, "and that is where our abilities derive in. The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together." Ahsoka did not really understand most of the things he said but she bobbled her head up and down and pretended to be serious.

As if looking through her, Mister Obi-Wan then tossed up a rock into the air, but instead of coming down, his hand controlled the rock, making it float much to Ahsoka's surprise. "I can do that too!" she declared with a proud voice.

Mother and Father did not believe her when she first said that, so she took a small rock of her own and did the same magic as Obi-Wan did, and Ahsoka looked at the faces of her parents, which were now surprised.

"Yes indeed my young friend," the Jedi said with another of his kind smiles. "Your connection with the Force is strong, stronger than I was certainly." He then turned to big-girl Olana and said something to her that Ahsoka did not hear. Olana then pulled out something from her bag and gave it to Mister Obi-Wan.

"Force-sensitives encountered by the Jedi must undergo testing to see their Midi-chlorian counts," he said, now talking to her parents about 'grown-up stuff' that Mother would always tell her. Her mama then nodded her head, as did her dada so Jedi-man then sat down beside her.

"This might sting a bit, Ahsoka, I am getting a sample of your blood."

The sting came and went quicker than she expected — a small, bright pinch at the pad of her finger, gone almost before she'd finished sucking in a breath to be upset about it. Mister Obi-Wan held up a tiny glass thing afterward, no bigger than one of Father's carving tools, and inside it something glowed, faint and blue-white, like the deep part of a flame right before it went out.

"There," he said, and he said it the way Mother said the word when she'd finished combing a massaging Ahsoka's lekkus — like the hard part was over and only the good part was left. "All done. You were very brave."

"I didn't even cry," Ahsoka informed him, because it seemed important that he know this.

"You did not," he agreed. "I've known Padawans twice your age make considerably more fuss over considerably less."

He fed the little glass thing into a flat silver box no bigger than a dinner plate, and the box hummed, and thought about it for longer than Ahsoka had patience for, so she went back to patting Ashla instead, who had flopped down fully in the trampled grass now and seemed entirely unbothered by the hum or the box or the crowd still watching from a careful distance. When the box finally made its small chiming sound, Mister Obi-Wan went very still, looking at it, and then looked up at her parents instead of at her, which was how Ahsoka knew it was grown-up news again.

"Ten thousand, five hundred," he said. "Per cell. That is—" He stopped, and start again, gentler. "That is a very high count. Higher than most Force-sensitive infants, my Padawan and myself included."

Ahsoka did not know what a cell was, or why a number should make Mother's hand fly up to cover her mouth again, or why big-girl Olana made a small sound like she'd been the one to get the finger-prick. But she understood, the way she understood most things that mattered, through the shape of it rather than the words — that something about her was unusual, the way Ashla was unusual, the way a two-headed thing in the old village stories was unusual, and that unusual, here, meant something good.

She decided she liked that. She tucked it away next to Ashla, and Olana, and Jedi in the small part of her that kept the important new words safe.

"Mister Tano, Lady Tano." Mister Obi-Wan knelt again, the way he had for her, except now he was doing it for Mother and Father both, which struck Ahsoka as very polite of him. "I would not ask this of you lightly, and I would ask you to take whatever time you need before answering, though I understand the hour presses us. The Jedi Order would welcome your daughter, if you are willing. We would raise her, train her, teach her to understand this gift so that it serves her rather than frightens her. But it is a great deal to ask of any family, and I would never ask it to be answered quickly, nor lightly."

Father's hand found Mother's. Ahsoka watched them look at each other for a long moment, the kind of look that didn't need any words in it at all, the kind she'd seen them share over her own head a hundred times when deciding something too big to say out loud in front of her.

"She almost died on that mountain," Mother said. "Twice over, near enough. Once to the Akul, if the Force hadn't reached for her first." Her hand came to rest, light as a bird landing, on the crown of Ahsoka's head. "I don't pretend to understand what she is, Master Jedi. But I understand that this valley nearly broke itself because of suspicions and slights, and I would rather she grow up somewhere her gift is simply known. Expected. Not a mystery."

"I built this house with my own hands," Father said, and his voice had gone rough in a way Ahsoka didn't like the sound of, though his hand stayed steady on Mother's shoulder. "I had thought to teach her the joints and the grain of good wood, the way my father taught me." A breath. "But a man builds a house to keep his family safe in it, Master Kenobi, not to keep them in it regardless. If the safest place for her is beside people who already know what to do with what she carries, then I would rather lose the daily joy of her than lose her safety."

Ahsoka did not understand all of it. She understood lose and did not like the shape of it in her chest, a small cold stone dropping somewhere behind her ribs, and she opened her mouth to say so: to say she didn't want to go anywhere that wasn't home, that Ashla was here, that she liked the terrace garden and the carved toys on the shelf and the smell of Mother's hands after herding, and then she caught Olana's eyes on her, kind and steady, and something in that look made her close her mouth again and simply listen instead.

"Then with your blessing," Mister Obi-Wan said, "I will take her to the Temple on Coruscant, where she will be safe, and taught, and never alone. You will be permitted to know she is well. In time, when she is older, there may be visits — the Order does not forbid a Jedi from knowing where they came from, only from letting it anchor them too heavily to what they must become." He paused, and something in his face gentled further, the tired lines of it softening the way Father's did at the end of a long day when he finally sat down. "She will not be unloved where she is going. I give you my word on that, on my honor as a Jedi."

Mother cried again, the glad kind, Ahsoka was fairly sure, though it sounded an awful lot like the other kind too, which confused her enough that she decided grown-up crying simply didn't follow any rules a person could count on.


​

---

Elder Gantika came to her last, after the torches had burned down lower still and most of the crowd had begun, slowly, to drift back toward their own fires: Vorok's people one way, Rekai's another, though Ahsoka noticed, with the particular attentiveness she gave to things grown-ups didn't think she noticed, that a few from each side lingered at the edges a while longer than seemed needed, talking low to people they hadn't talked to in a long while, if her parents' stories about the trouble were anything to judge by.

The old woman knelt the way Mister Obi-Wan had, though it took her longer and her joints made a small unhappy sound doing it, and she set one weathered hand, warm and dry as sun-baked clay, against the crown of Ahsoka's head.

"Little one," she said, first in the old tongue and then, seeing Ahsoka's small frown, in Basic instead, slow and careful. "You will go very far from this valley, and you will not remember much of it, I think, once you are grown; the mind is kind that way, to the very small. But the valley will remember you. Whatever you become, out there among the stars, you were born of this ground, and this ground does not forget its own, however far they wander."

She pressed something small and cool into Ahsoka's palm and closed her fingers gently around it — a single curved tooth, smaller than the ones on the string in Mother's house, polished smooth by years of handling.

"My own, when I hunted my Akul. I have no daughter of my own to pass it to. I think it has been waiting, all this time, for you instead."

Ahsoka looked at the tooth, small and pale in her palm, and then up at the old woman's face, lined and tired and fond all at once, and did not entirely understand why her own throat had gone tight and strange, the way it did right before tears she didn't want came anyway.

"Thank you," she said, the way Mother had taught her to say it to elders, and Gantika's answering smile was the first one Ahsoka had seen cross her face all evening that reached all the way up into her eyes.

Mother held her a long while after that, out past the edge of the firelight where the grass was cool and the crowd's noise had thinned to a murmur, and Father sat close beside them both with one hand resting, warm and heavy, on Ahsoka's back.

"You'll be good," Mother said, into her montrals, not quite a question. "You'll listen to your teachers, and you'll eat the things they give you even if they're strange, and you won't go wandering off toward every interesting-looking creature you meet, the way you did with—" her breath caught, half a laugh and half something else, "—the way you did with Ashla."

"Ashla's not strange," Ahsoka said, muffled against her shoulder. "Ashla's my friend."

"I know, little one." Mother's hand smoothed slow and careful over her lekku. "And I am glad of it, truly, more than I know how to say. But out there you'll meet a great many strange and wonderful things, and I need you to promise me you'll be careful with the wandering, even when your heart tells you to trust something right away."

"I promise," Ahsoka said, though she privately thought that her heart had been right about Ashla, and did not see why it would suddenly stop being right about things just because the things got stranger.

Father pressed something into her other hand — small, carved, a sleeping squirrel no bigger than her thumb, its lines worn soft and warm from handling. "I made this the week you were born," he said. "Meant to give it to you when you were old enough to stop putting everything straight into your mouth." A small, crooked smile. "Consider it early."

Ahsoka closed her fist around it, the carved squirrel in one hand and Gantika's tooth in the other, and found, between the two of them, that the cold stone feeling behind her ribs had gone a little smaller, a little easier to carry.

Ashla came to say goodbye in her own way, no words, only pressing that great scarred head low against Ahsoka's chest, nearly knocking her flat with the gentle, enormous weight of it, and Ahsoka wrapped both arms as far around the thick fur of its neck as they would go, which was not very far at all.

"Be good," she told Ashla in their own quiet language, very seriously, the same words Mother had just given her, because it seemed only fair to pass them along. "'ll come back and visit, I promise."

Ashla huffed, warm air stirring her montrals, and did not argue.

The walk to the ship was shorter than Ahsoka expected, and dark enough that she rode most of it on Olana's hip with her face tucked into the crook of the older girl's neck, watching the torches of the valley shrink and scatter behind them like fallen stars that had decided, after all, to stay on the ground.

The ship itself was round and silver and smelled like nothing she had ever smelled before — something sharp and clean underneath it, nothing at all like wood-smoke or herd-grass or her own small bed at home. She was still deciding whether she liked the smell when a small round droid came trundling out to meet them, all blue and silver and one bright, curious optic swiveling straight toward her, chirping and whistling in a string of sounds that meant nothing to Ahsoka at all and yet seemed, somehow, entirely friendly anyway.

"This is R4-M17, we call him Arfour for short," Olana said, crouching so Ahsoka could see properly. "He's Master Obi-Wan's astromech. He keeps the ship flying, and he worries about us too much more than either of us probably deserve."

R4 gave an indignant little trill at that, which made Olana laugh, and the droid rolled a slow, careful circle around Ahsoka's feet, dome tilting this way and that, before extending one small manipulator arm and very gently, very deliberately, booping it against the tip of Ahsoka's nose.

Ahsoka's whole face lit up. "It's funny," she announced, delighted, reaching out to pat the droid's dome the same way she'd patted Ashla, though R4's shell was cool and smooth and hard under her palm, nothing like fur at all, and she giggled at the strangeness of that too. R4 trilled again, something that sounded, even without words, remarkably pleased with itself, and rolled a slow circuit of the cabin as if showing off for an audience of exactly one very small, very new passenger.

"I believe," Mister Obi-Wan said from somewhere behind her, "that you have made a friend for life, Arfour. Do try not to let it go entirely to your head."

Ahsoka watched the droid a while longer, tracking its slow progress around the cabin with the same patient, unhurried attention she'd once given a beetle crossing the terrace wall, until the ship's engines began their low, steady hum beneath her, and Shili's torches and mountains and all four months of a trouble she had never fully understood began, slowly, to fall away beneath the viewport into dark.

She meant to watch it the whole way. She meant to keep her eyes open until the valley was nothing but a bright coin swallowed by black, the way Olana had once described her own first launch from Coruscant, back before Ahsoka had any notion that this would someday be her own leaving too.

But the day had been very long, and the seat beneath her was warm, and Olana's shoulder was soft to lean against, and somewhere between one blink and the next, with the carved kybuck in one small fist and Gantika's tooth in the other and a droid's cheerful, distant beeping still chasing her down into sleep, Ahsoka Tano closed her eyes and did not open them again until morning.
​

---

Aboard the Jedi Cruiser, en route to Coruscant, 32 BBY
Olana Chion:

Ahsoka slept the whole first day of the journey, curled small and boneless in the spare bunk Olana had helped Master Obi-Wan pad out with two flight blankets and, at her own quiet insistence, the stuffed loth-cat some well-meaning Vorok herder's wife had pressed into Pav-ti's hands at the very last moment before the ship's ramp closed.

She found her Master in the cruiser's small common area not long after, seated cross-legged on the floor in a loose meditative posture that he had, if Olana knew him at all, almost certainly abandoned the moment true meditation proved less interesting than simply thinking aloud at whoever happened to wander past. He cracked one eye open at her approach and patted the deck beside him without otherwise disturbing his pose. She assumed that their cruiser was on autopilot or that Arfour was in the pilot's console, keeping watch.

"She's sleeping soundly?"

"Dead to the world," Olana confirmed, folding herself down beside him. "I don't think she woke once when we hit that patch of turbulence over the equator."

"Small mercies." He was quiet a moment, and she felt, faint and companionable through their bond, the particular unhurried stillness that meant he was turning something over rather than avoiding it. "What she did in that den, Olana, it was an exceptional display of Force abilities, an instinctual grasp than most Knights my age can claim."

"You mean her bonding with the Akul." She drew her knees up, resting her chin against them. "Is it really that rare, Master? Force Empathy's one of the first things Padawans get drilled on — I remember Master Jastus Farr having us read a bantha's mood off its ear-set before he'd even let us near Master Boondara's lightsaber salle."

"Reading a bantha's mood, yes. Any trained Jedi manages that, given patience and a willingness to be nipped once or twice while they learn the knack of it." He stroked his beard, the small, familiar habit she had long since learned meant he was assembling his thoughts into some more careful order than his usual banter required. "What Ahsoka did was considerably further along that same road than reading a mood. She reached into the mind of an apex predator and she did not merely calm it. She was understood by it, and it by her, clearly enough that it altered its own behavior around her for the better part of a week. That is not empathy, Padawan. That is communication. Genuine, two-directional communication, with a species that has never, to my knowledge, been recorded managing it with anyone."

Olana turned that over for a moment, watching the stars smear past the viewport in their long silent hyperspace streaks. "How many Jedi could do that? If they trained for it their whole lives?"

"Fewer than you'd think. They even have an exclusive designation of their own called the Jedi Beast masters." He considered the question with more gravity than she'd expected, and when he answered, it was slower, more careful, than his usual easy cadence. "As of now, excluding them it would be Master Yoda, certainly. Though I suspect there is very little in this galaxy Master Yoda cannot eventually coax the Force into doing. Shaak Ti, I'd wager — perhaps the Togruta species have an affinity for the art. Knight Ki-Adi-Mundi, Cerea's Jedi Watchman is another, on his better days, though I've heard it said his gift runs more toward sentient species than beasts. And of course, Qui-Gon Jinn, though animal bonding was never his particular specialty so much as a happy byproduct of how deeply he feels every living thing around him. Beyond that handful, I genuinely could not name you another Jedi in the Order today, Knight or Master both, who could walk into a wild Akul's den and be greeted the way our young charge was greeted."

"And you?" Olana asked, though she already half-suspected the answer from the faint, rueful color rising along the back of his neck.

"I am above average," he said, with the particular dry precision of a man choosing his words to sound rather better than his meaning, "Competent on a good day, with an animal in an agreeable mood." He huffed something that was not quite a laugh. "I have a holocron on the subject I've made honest, dedicated use of for the better part of a decade, and I can, when circumstances demand it, generally convince a nervous or hostile creature that I mean it no harm. What Ahsoka managed in that cave was not convincing. It was kinship. I don't believe I have ever once achieved kinship with anything more temperamental than a kudana, and even then it takes a considerable time."

Olana laughed at that, surprising herself with how easily it came after three days of climbing a mountain strewn with the dead. "Is that the holocron you listen to sometimes, during meditation? The old one, with the green color and diamond shape?"

Something warmer moved across her Master's face at the question, the particular fondness he wore whenever a memory surfaced that he was glad, rather than merely willing, to share. "That one belongs to a rather different chapter of my adventures before I was Knighted. I came by it on a mission with Master Fay, not so very long before my Knighting: we were defending an old Jedi archive-outpost against a rather determined band of treasure hunters, alongside a Knight I'd never met before nor have seen much of since. Zao, his name was and comes from a species called the Veknoids. Blind as a stone, and one of the finest chefs I have ever had the privilege of tasting his stew."

"Blind?"

"Entirely. He fought by using the Force and the lightsaber hidden from a traveling cane, which I confess unsettled me rather more before I'd seen it than after — there is something particularly humbling about watching a man best three armed mercenaries without once needing to look at them." Obi-Wan's mouth curved, remembering. "When the fight was won and the outpost secured, he pressed that holocron into my hands as thanks, and I have tried many times to return it to him. He always refuses. 'The Force already willed it so,' he tells me, every single time. It was some while later I learned the Jedi Master who first recorded that holocron had been Zao's own teacher. I think he meant it, in his own quiet way, as a kind of passing-on."

"What's on it?"

"Force Repulse, in the main — advanced applications of telekinesis, offensive and defensive both. Master Fay encouraged me to study it properly once I'd shown some early aptitude for the Jedi Guardian's path, and it has been the truest specialty I've built for myself in the years since. Animal Bonding earned itself perhaps a distant second, more out of curiosity than any great natural gift. Master Windu, of all people, was the one who first suggested I take it up properly, on the theory that a swordsman who cannot hear what the Living Force is telling him is only half a swordsman at all."

Olana considered the shape of that a moment — her Master's whole small, quietly accumulated inheritance of teachers and gifts and secondhand holocrons, each one handed down or half-stumbled into rather than chosen outright — and found herself smiling before she'd quite decided to.

"So," she said, "your teacher is an ageless near-Human who rescued you off a burning transport, your Padawan — yours truly — is apparently blessed by the Unifying Force that gets visions every now and them, and now you've gone and found a three-year-old who might grow up to out-bond every Beastmaster the Order's produced in a century. I'm starting to think you're just unlucky enough to keep stumbling into interesting people, Master."

"An astute and generous reading of events, my dear Padawan." He gave her a sidelong, amused look. "Though I notice you have very neatly only described your connection with the Unifying Force and your burgeoning talents as a Seer, you are far more remarkable than that."

"I'm not remarkable. I'm reliable. There's a difference."

"There is not," he said, with a firmness that startled her rather more than his usual teasing ever managed to, "the slightest difference at all, and I would ask you not to let me hear you draw that distinction again." Then, before she could find an answer to that, the familiar, easy grin resurfaced, undercutting the gravity just enough to let her breathe around it. "Besides which — if my old master is a legend, and you a Seer, and my future grand-Padawan destined to charm apex predators before she's out of nappies, I find myself rather in danger of being remembered as the least interesting Jedi in my own lineage. A lightsaber and a stubborn refusal to be on time for anything, that's the whole of my legacy, I fear."

"You could be our chauffeur," Olana offered, entirely too cheerfully. "Someone has to fly the ship."

"Cheeky brat," Obi-Wan said, without any real heat in it at all, and reached over to muss the top of her head. She let him, this once, and did not complain.
​

---

Author's Notes:
Poor Obi-Wan at the end LOL.

Terms:
a.) Animal Bonding — The Force ability required to control an animal. Once calmed, the animal could be used by the Force user in various ways, including as a mount or guard beast. Exists in both EU and Canon.

b.) Force Repulse — An extremely powerful telekinetic Force power similar in function to Force Push, and perhaps even more to Force Blow, but on a far larger scale, akin to that of Force Wave, Force Repulse was no more or less than a gigantic telekinetic explosion. Exists in both EU and Canon.

c.) Holocron — information-storage devices used by both the Jedi Order and the Sith that contained ancient lessons or valuable information in holographic form. Exists in both EU and Canon.

d.) Jedi Beast Master — a title reserved for Jedi Masters with a proficiency in controlling the minds of beasts. Additionally, Beast Masters worked to improve upon the nature of beasts, sometimes using alchemy or science to give rise to new creations. Exists in EU.

e.) Zao — a blind, elderly male Veknoid Jedi Master, and an accomplished chef, who served the Jedi Order during the final years of the Galactic Republic. In spite of his blindness, he remained a formidable and lethal adversary, wielding his unique long-handle lightsaber with frightening accuracy. Exists in EU.

Bonus:
a.) Ashla — The light side of the Force, which was referred to as "Ashla" by Bendu. It is also Ahsoka's codename during the reign of the Galactic Empire.

b.) Life and Death — The episode title of Ahsoka's origin story in Tales of the Jedi TV show.​

 

[Renko]

My Reaction:

 

[ulkapind]

My Reaction:

Click to shrink...

I have a time travelling ship I can rent you. Just 400 credits an hour.

---

A pretty nice chapter. It was very enjoyable, read through it before I realised what had happened.

Lol at Obi-Wan, the negotiator, being the least interesting Jedi of his lineage. Felt a bit like Kakashi's "there are ninja younger than you stronger than me", of course, in a much less horrifying context.

Baby Ashoka is cute. Off to boarding school so young.

 

[Sakumo]

My Reaction:

Click to shrink...

Originally, this would've been an 8k something chapter, complete with Ahsoka seeing the Temple for the first time and Obi-Wan and Olana duo encountering Stass Allie (the Jedi Healer who would check/confirm Ahsoka's Midi-Chlorian count, Ahsoka assigned to her new creche, and ending with Obi-Wan trolling the Council about Ahsoka's age (canonically, Ahsoka should be close to four y/o instead of three) and getting away with it, but it felt too...much for some reason.

Lol at Obi-Wan, the negotiator, being the least interesting Jedi of his lineage. Felt a bit like Kakashi's "there are ninja younger than you stronger than me", of course, in a much less horrifying context.

Click to shrink...

To be fair to SI!Obi-Wan, he will get a more substantial backstory next chapter

 

[Sakumo]

Jedi Temple in Coruscant, 32 BBY
Obi-Wan Kenobi:

'Feel the Force. Let it perceive your surroundings, and trust it to guide your movements. Let your thoughts be centered in the here and now.'

I was at the middle of going through my usual saber katas when I heard the Temple Dojo's doors open with a familiar hiss. I quickly sensed through our training bond that it was Olana, and she was not alone.

Removing the training helmet that I was wearing, I recognized my apprentice's companion as Ferus Olin — the apprentice of my childhood friend Siri Tachi.

"Padawan Chion, Padawan Olin," I greeted, maintaining a decorum of formality as they approached and bowed. "Just finished Chemistry class, I assume?"

"Don't get me started about that," Olana complained as she crossed her arms while Ferus gave me a sheepish smile. "I got a 76 percent in our last test, Master. What good is Chemistry when we go on field missions anyways?"

Turning off my lightsaber and deactivating the training droids, I approached them with an air of amusement. "Chemistry is quite one of the more versatile subjects a Jedi must learn, you know. In the future, once you become Knighted and you're escorting a Doctor who asks for your help to retrieve a medicine for her and she starts listing out the chemicals — you then need Chemistry to understand the compounds and the things she is talking about." Upon seeing her unimpressed gaze, I decided to give another example. "When you're faced in a particularly dangerous mission that needs the more martial matters of a Jedi, a local defense force might need your help understanding the components of explosive residues, or perhaps why are toxic nerve agents dangerous as weapons of war, or why lead exposure can prove fatal."

Now I see the understanding glint in her eyes as I see Ferus nodding his head. "Let me guess," Olana remarked in a dry tone. "You passed your Chemistry subject with flying colors."

I grimaced. "Not exactly. Believe me, Padawan, I initially had my own hesitance of studying this particular subject when I was your age myself. I went as far as Biochemistry, Thermodynamics, Environmental Science, and then I decided to shift my focus towards law enforcement and starship mechanics — the field of Peacekeepers."

"If I remember correctly, Master Kenobi, Thermodynamics and Biochemistry are mostly exclusive to those training to become Jedi Healers and Jedi Researchers," offered Padawan Olin. "For you to go that far is quite the dedication."

"Believe me, Padawan Olin, I failed twice in my introduction to Chemistry," I said with a laugh. "But I guess I was too stubborn to quit. Ask your master, and she will supply endless of stories when we were young. Speaking of which, what are you two doing in here?"

"Oh right, we wanted to use one of the spare training rooms to work on our forms," Olana replied cheerfully. "Battlemaster Bondara, and Master Cin Drallig have gave their permission since I can't find you earlier. By the way, Master Drallig would be here to supervise us, but since you're already here, I doubt he'd stick around."

"Ah, that's right," I remembered. "I came to check on Ahsoka in the creche, she seems to be adapting well with her clanmates." I spied Olana smiling at the news and found myself smiling as well. "You should visit her as soon as you're not busy, my Padawan."

My apprentice agreed as she and Ferus Olin walked to the center of the room and waited, with Ferus sitting and meditating while Olana was humming something while her eyes were closed. Master Cin Drallig, one of the senior lightsaber instructors in the Temple, would enter the room a few minutes later and indeed he was surprised to see me.

"Obi-Wan Kenobi," the older man said with a jovial smile. "You're a sight for sore eyes."

"And you look as formidable as ever, Master Drallig," I replied with a bow. "I understand that it was you who gave permission to these two Padawans to train?"

"Indeed. Mainly to see how they've progressed since I last trained them," he confirmed with an amused smile. "And also because it is quite amusing for your student get along well with the apprentice of Knight Tachi. Speaking of which," he then turned towards Olin, "I heard your master is out of Coruscant?"

"Yes, Master. She is with Master Gallia."

I raised an eyebrow at that piece of information. Adi Gallia is one of the members of the Council of Reassignment, and rumor says that she is to replace Master Yaddle's seat in the High Council, not to mention she is perhaps one of the Order's top pilots. Siri clearly inherited Master Gallia's talent for flying as she too is a Jedi Ace. For two skilled Jedi to be out of the Temple, it must be a delicate mission that Siri didn't even bring Ferus with them.

Cin Drallig seems to come upon the same conclusion as well when his eyes flickered with interest for a brief moment before mastering his features. "Since Obi-Wan is already here now and he is a Jedi Knight that is able to supervise, I guess my presence here is redundant. I still have a group of Younglings to teach in an hour and it would be best to prepare."

"What if I challenge both Padawans?," I asked with a smile, directing my question to Drallig. "The two of them against myself in a friendly sparring match with you as arbiter?"

"That would be an unfair fight, Master!," Olana hotly retorted as her cheeks got puffed up. "You are literally a Jedi Guardian, of course you'd have an advantage."

"Well, what if I wear my training helmet and only use the Force to anticipate your movements?" I asked. "I would be depriving myself of sight, while also outnumbered, would that be a fair game?"

From the side, I heard Master Drallig gave an amused sound that was between a chuckle and a scoff but Olana has already taken the bait. "Deal."

"What about you, Padawan Olin?"

"I accept too, Master Kenobi."

"Very well then," Drallig says as he stepped forward. "Maintain your distance, and give the sign of greeting first before you duel."

The three of us exchanged vows before I fitted the training helmet back in place. I can sense Olana inching towards the left, while Ferus adjusted to the right. A beat of silence passed momentarily before Master Drallig shouted.

"Begin!"
​

---

It was the Padawans who made the first move, predictably enough, with Olana quick to move towards me while Ferus attempted to outflank me from behind. Taking a moment to center myself, I did not unholster my lightsaber until the final second, when Olana performed Shii-Cho's signature sweeping motion, only to be countered by my Ataru guard. When I sensed Olin's attack, I jumped backwards — distant enough to give me space, but close enough to execute an attack of my own when pressed.

"Maintain your stance, Padawan Chion!," I heard Drallig say somewhere in the sidelines. "Padawan Olin, don't telegraph your moves, you're facing someone more experienced than the both of you."

'If you say it that way,' I thought before using the Force to channel super speed and begin my own attack. I must have caught Ferus unprepared as I targeted him first, staggering Olana to the side with a burst of Telekinesis so that she would be unable to join her fellow Padawan from defending himself. As Ferus and myself crossed blades, I noticed from his bladework that the boy was a practitioner of Shien, much like Siri and Master Gallia.

His defensive bladework was promising for a twelve year-old, and while I was admittedly hampering myself and not putting full force on my blows, he seems to parry them just fine.

"I can tell Siri's influence all over you, Padawan," I remarked warmly as I broke our impasse and tripped him on his feet, making him go down with a soft 'oomf'. That was when the Force quickly screamed at me to avoid an attack from my left side as I barely avoided a lightsaber strike from Olana.

"So close," I heard her mutter.

"I am not as blind as you think I am, even with this blasted helmet in my head," I replied as a joke. "The Force is still my ally, Olana."

"Then we'll take the fight to you," she declared. "Ferus, you ready?"

"Yes Olana."

Instead of independent attacks, the two of them synchronized their patterns — with my Padawan executing measured Makashi thrusts while Olin used Form V's offensive bladework. While I was not as good in Soresu than I am in Ataru, I quickly switched forms mid-duel, parrying Olana's lightsaber to the side while countering Ferus's attacks with another. When Ferus tried to close the distance, I used my off-hand to grip on his dominant hand and shoved him backwards just in time to counter Olana's disarming slash, which I countered with sufficient strength enough to send her spiraling backwards and loosening her grip over her lightsaber, which I heard clattering in the ground.

"Soresu?" Olin whispered, surprise coloring his tone. "But I thought Master Kenobi was an Ataru specialist, Olana?"

"That's what I thought too," my Padawan grumbled as I hear them panting, their tiredness now starting to creep in.

Sensing their newfound hesitation, it was Olin who I targeted first, as he was the one who spent most of our duel moving kinetically. He swung his lightsaber, then slashed again, but on the third strike, he went wide and it was prime for me to take opportunity — delivering a swift disarm by knocking the lightsaber away and pointing my blade at his chest.

"Solah, Master Kenobi," he murmured, signaling his surrender.

"Padawan Olin, pick up your lightsaber and get yourself beside me, this is still an ongoing duel," Drallig ordered. I sensed Ferus picking up his blade and running to the side before I recentered myself and focused on Olana, who seemed to be doing a Shii-Cho defensive stance.

"Why the change back to Form I?" I asked, dipping my lightsaber momentarily. "You are doing great progress with Form II, my Padawan."

"That was when I thought I had an edge," she shot back and I can hear her mild frustration. "I never thought you practiced Soresu, when we train, you always use Ataru."

"That's a lesson, my Padawan," I replied, still making sure that I can sense her within my sights. "Never reveal your tricks and always improve on what you know."

Sensing that she let her guard down, I moved quickly, reverting back to Ataru's offensive blows once I got closer. While Olana was one of the best in her age group in using a lightsaber, she still had ways to go as she would finally be disarmed just seconds later as she fell on the ground.

"Solah, Master," she breathed out. "I yield."

"Solah, Olana," I replied, helping her up and removing the training helmet. From the side, I saw Master Drallig clapping slowly, with Ferus clapping as well.

"Still at the top of your game it seems, Obi-Wan," the lightsaber instructor said with approval.

"On the contrary, Master Drallig, like the Padawans, I am still learning. You on the other hand, can defeat me before I can even last for two minutes."

"Nonsense, I reckon you can last for ten minutes," the man dismissed, clapping me in the shoulder. "I've checked Padawan Olin, no lightsaber wounds, and only superficial burns in his robes. I enjoyed the match, Kenobi, and I'll be roping you to teach some younglings soon." After he said that, Drallig left the training room.

I checked the time, it was nearing lunch. "Come," I said, to the exhausted Padawans. "Change your clothes and freshen up, then let's eat and we'll visit a few of my friends, of course. I sense some of them present in the Temple, they are quite good company."
​

---

"Obi-Wan!," boomed a voice of a certain Nautolan with a bright smile on his face, a sentiment I returned just as earnest. Kit Fisto was roughly nine years my senior, and was even the master of my crechemate Bant Eerin, yet with his infectious energy and easygoing demeanor, it's hard to picture that Kit was already a Jedi Master in just his thirties.

"Kit," I acknowledged before seeing the other occupants of the table. "Master Tholme, Padawan Secura, Luminara." Aayla Secura gave a small, awkward wave while Luminara gave a small smile.

"Kenobi," the grizzled Tholme replied quietly. "It's good to see you're back in Coruscant. You did tight, efficient work in Shili."

"The sentiment is appreciated, Master." Waving a hand at the direction of the two Padawans, I continued. "Jedi Padawan Olana Chion, my student; and Jedi Padawan Ferus Olin, Siri's apprentice."

"Siri Tachi?" Luminara echoed, "now that's a name I haven't heard since we were Knighted, Obi-Wan." She then regarded Olin for a few seconds, "Where is Siri, come to think of it?"

"On a mission, with Master Gallia, Master," Ferus said with a bow then his mouth quirked upwards as he faced me. "Actually, Master Siri said that I would be under your care, Master Kenobi, for the time being."

"Really now?," I said with amusement. "No doubt this is her revenge against me after all this time."

"Come now, Obi-Wan," said Kit, laughter ringing from his voice. "You know that a Jedi does not hate."

"Right, Kit. But they can absolutely surprise us like the Force."

Fisto gestured for us to sit, but Padawan Secura, feeling emboldened at the presence of her fellow Padawans, beckoned both Olana and Ferus towards another table, presenting them with a strange insect in a jar that she found with Quinlan as we looked on them talking animatedly with each other.

"Strange," Master Tholme said to break the silence. "I could picture Obi-Wan, Quinlan, and Bant on the table years ago, Master Fisto, while you, I, and Fay look on. Now it seems that were watching another generation of Jedi take their place.""

"Indeed. Who else was there on that little group of yours, Obi-Wan, Luminara?"

"Siri, Stass Allie," I supplied, ticking the names off with my fingers. "That rascal Garen Muln, and Taria Damsin."

"Ah yes, Garen," piped up Luminara, "if you and Quinlan were as close as brothers and as thick as thieves, you and Garen argued over such trivial things, Obi-Wan." That remark earned a round of laughter from our side of the table as I sensed the curiosity coming from the Padawans at our left.

Kit seems to have noticed this and urged our apprentices back to our table. "Padawan Chion, your master may not look like it now, but when he was a boy, he was quite the hothead," the Nautolan revealed in between his laughter. "A hothead that was also a bookworm. Oh how Bant would mutter obscenities unbefitting of a Jedi whenever Obi-Wan beat her in Master Lox's trivia games."

"History, sciences, literature, and…poetry," added Luminara, mischief dancing in her eyes as well. "He tried many times to impress Siri when we were young, Padawan Olin, by reciting some pieces of poetry."

I can already feel my face warming and becoming red. "If I remember correctly, Luminara, some of those poems were written by you." Once I said that, the superior look in her face suddenly disappeared.

"Nearly drove Fay mad with all his antics," agreed Tholme. Tholme saw the questioning glance of Secura and he explained. "Master Fay is an ageless Jedi, even when I was a boy she looked as young as ever, closer to looking like a thirty year old woman instead of a centuries-old Jedi Master, yet Kenobi over here managed to give the poor lady a wrinkle, and I swear her brown hair had gray strands when she submitted your name to undergo the Trials."

"That much, I agree with you," I grumbled without heat, "that might be the first time I saw Master Fay tear up when she heard that I was no longer under her care and a Knight of my own, she promptly left for the wider galaxy soon after, and I reckon that was to escape me."

"So you were always close with Master Quinlan?," Secura asked.

"Oh yes, as Master Tholme and Luminara can attest," I remarked, fondness creeping in my tone. "Bant apprenticed under Kit and they usually did their missions located on bodies of water so they're always away from the Temple; Luminara trained with Master Kellei in Mirial as is tradition for Mirialan Jedi; Garen and I were too much similar that we might have killed each other on sight, and Siri had the passion for flying even then, so that left me and Quin doing all sorts of mischief. Even fought a war together."

"War? You never mentioned that," Olana entered the conversation and I saw how Tholme stiffened at the reference of the Stark-Hyperspace War.

"That was about a decade now, maybe twelve years," Tholme said, his face grim. "Obi-Wan and Quinlan were both thirteen at the time, I think. Quinlan and I were deployed on the ground, Fay and Obi-Wan were on the flagship."

"The Order lost two good Jedi that day," Kit declared, his tone unusually somber. "Plo Koon and his student, Lissarkh. Master Tyvokka was not the same after that — losing your student and your grand-student on the same day was hard for him, especially when Lissarkh took a blaster bolt meant for him and Koon died rallying Republic troops."

"There were…dead Jedi?" the shaky voice of Olin asked, the first time I saw the boy display anything other than Jedi politeness.

"Yes," Tholme answered, bitterness creeping in his tone. "Tyvokka was wounded, and had to remain on the ship so Koon offered to lead in his stead."

"Master Plo rallied Senator Ranulph Tarkin's Outlands Region Security Force," I continued, closing my eyes and feeling distant sounds of blaster fire and men shouting like it was yesterday. "And he got hit by a mortar to the chest just before reinforcements from the Judicial Forces arrived. By that point, Master Tyvokka was already healed by Master Fay and he led us the rest of the way."

As I recounted my tale, the air around us became heavier, and even Kit and Luminara — both of whom were not present during the battle — looked shaken.

"Hopefully, the Republic learned their lesson then," I smoothly replied, "with Jedi like Luminara, Kit and the Council of Reconciliation advising our Senate, and the Jedi High Council forming close ties with the Office of the Chancellor, hopefully, we can avert another crisis such as the one we had years ago."

That seemed to do the trick as the mood lightened to other topics soon afterwards.

But even as the unpleasant memories of the war averted, I can sense Olana's curiosity, and perhaps a flicker of genuine surprise across our training bond. Using the Force, I reached out to her, telling her that those scars of conflict had long passed, and I grew stronger because of it.
​

---

Olana and Ferus went back to their classes an hour later, and we would not see each other until after six hours, with them having attended a basic EMT, and droid mechanic courses during that time. After saying my excuses to my old friends, I would find myself in the Room of the Thousand Fountains, having come to love this place as a Padawan when I struggled in my classes, being here helped me refocus, and to reflect without being seen.

That was when my peace was interrupted soon after.

"Come to meditate here, Kenobi?"

I turned around and saw Master Mace Windu approaching me with his ever-present stoic face. As a boy, Master Windu was the embodiment of the orthodox Jedi, an ideal face of the Order radiating authority and strength, a sentiment that stands even now.

"Master," I said, with a bow. "Not really," I added, succinct and straightforward, even I know that it was no time for glib remarks or humorous gestures when the Master of the Order suddenly sneaks up on you, he was about to announce something important.

When Windu merely continued to observe me, I felt a sweat trickle in my brow. "Is there something amiss, Master?"

"Nothing," the Councilor said in reply, but I can see that there was something calculating within his eyes. "I about to retreat back to my room when I sensed your presence, and might as well tell it to you now rather than send a message in your datapad or summoning you in the Council Chamber." Upon seeing my nod, he continued. "Next week, you and your Padawan are on the mission list again — so soon after your last mission, I know, but there is no secret that the Council…highly regards your talents, eccentricities aside."

Not trusting my mouth to speak for me, I nodded again as Master Windu spoke. "Walk with me."

Following the Master of the Order out of the room, it was only then that I started to open my mouth. "Does this have something to do with Master Yaddle's upcoming resignation from the Council?"

Windu gave me a sharp look before giving a grunt, "Correct. Tyvokka will be named as a lifetime member of the Council to replace her, and Adi Gallia will replace Tyvokka's seat as a long-term member, effective immediately once she returns in three weeks' time. Gallia's one of the Order's most active Jedi, Obi-Wan, and she is one of Chancellor Valorum's favored Jedi advisors and has a good working relationship with her, something that Yoda or I do not have."

"So she'll be assigned here in Coruscant, at least until Valorum steps down as Chancellor."

"Exactly, and now we are reassigning some of her mission files to other Jedi. She was supposed to accompany Depa to the Mid Rim, to investigate the Trade Federation encroaching in the planet of Naboo. There are whispers that they are to blockade the planet."

"How solid are the leads that we have?" I asked.

"Very solid. We have ascertained and verified it to great extent," Master Windu replied.

"What they're doing, that's illegal," I muttered. "And a sign of provocation, one does not perform a blockade without having troops, artillery, and firepower to deploy. If gunships start having their way in Naboo, it will escalate into something both the Republic and the Trade Federation would regret."

"A grim but astute assessment, even if we're hoping for the best," the Master praised. "But with Gallia still with Knight Tachi in their mission in the Colonies, I'm assigning you and Padawan Chion to accompany Master Billaba as the Republic ambassadors to talk with the Trade Federation."

"I accept, of course, Master," I spoke, "Master Billaba's wisdom and her experience is a learning experience not only for my Padawan, but for myself as well."

"Good. And one other thing, Kenobi." Master Windu then pulled out something from his robes and gave me a datapad and a commlink with a familiar symbol displayed at the center. "Congratulations, you will be the Jedi Liaison to the Antarian Rangers, effective after you return from Naboo."

What?

"Oh?" I asked, my throat dry, unbelieving of the words. The Antarian Rangers have existed for about five hundred years, maybe longer, and have been one of our Order's most enduring allies since the Ruusan Reformation. To work alongside the Rangers was an honor for most Jedi, let alone become a liaison with them. Deployed in various paramilitary ops including reconnaissance, bodyguard duties, and even the "dirty work", they made the work of a Jedi easier, and in turn, we hold them in high regard for always giving us their aid.

If Master Windu heard me, he did not show as he merely continued. "The Council had deliberated in one of the vacancies, as the previous holder, Jedi Knight Arlingan Zey, has been named the Jedi Liaison to the Starfighter Corps, which Master Gallia herself held."

I blinked, still dazed by the news. "How, Master?"

"Micah Giiet endorsed your name, and Master Tyvokka and Depa were quick to support it," Master Windu explained as we stopped at the entrance of his personal room. "Tyvokka was your superior during the Stark-Hyperspace War and had nothing but praise for you, and you already know that Depa holds you in high regard. Master Yoda declined to vote as is his custom. That left Masters Yaddle, Koth, Rancisis, Choi, Piell, Poof, Qui-Gon, and myself as undecided. Eeth, and Master Piell wished it to be Sora Bulq — who has a good fifteen years of experience over you; Yaddle wished for it to be Qui-Gon, but he declined so she voted for her old student, Jaro Tapal; Rancisis and Poof wanted it to be someone more…traditional like Halsey or Tapal. But Qui-Gon voted in your favor, then Master Choi judged you worthy because of your recent success in Shili and recruiting young Ahsoka Tano. And so did I, as tiebreaker."

My head swiveled so fast and saw the Master of the Order smirking as he said the last part. "You aren't joking," I said, realizing the irony of it. Jinn and I can never, and perhaps will never see eye-to-eye, and yet he had done the impossible again.

"Believe me, Kenobi, I was just as surprised as you are," Windu confessed with a careless shrug. "But while Qui-Gon might be stubborn and infuriating most of the times, even he knows you were the best pick. Sora, for all his mastery of the lightsaber, is too…unorthodox, Halsey's adherence to protocol and meticulousness to the point of obsession will alienate senior Rangers, and Jaro Tapal might command respect, you have the ability to earn the trust of people by just being yourself."

To even be compared with those names was a humbling experience, I thought, and I was not superior to them, not at the very least. Sora Bulq and his prodigious talent with the lightsaber had earned him eternal respect within the Temple as the co-creator of Vaapad alongside Master Windu; Master Halsey, intelligent and precise, always thinking ahead; and Jaro Tapal, who is every inch of an image of the ideal Jedi Knight — a stalwart man with a keen grasp of command.

"I am honored. Truly, Master," I confessed, my voice low and shaky. "I will do my best."

"That is all I ask, Kenobi," the man said as he entered his room. "Now if you excuse me."
​

---

"You've been meditating for quite some time now, Master, do you want a glass of water?," Olana said as she fixed herself some snacks over the counter in our Master-Padawan room. The girl returned a few hours after my conversation with the Master of the Order after accompanying Ferus Olin back to his room with Siri, and I had yet to break the news to her.

But, she had a point, ninety minutes have passed since I closed my eyes and took solace in the Living Force.

"I would be with you momentarily," I replied, closing the holocron which repeated the Jedi Code in a loop sequence. Standing up, I spied that Olana brought Arfour in our room when he is normally at the Temple Hangar, with the rest of the astromech droids.

"I take it that you opened him up during your mechanics class?" I asked with a dry tone.

"Yes, but don't worry, he's not broken, just on sleep mode, he seemed tired after the class." While I doubt that droids felt tired, I did not push the issue, especially seeing the droid did give me a measure of familiarity.

"You have something on your mind, Olana," I finally said after observing my student.

"Kind of?" she replied, lacking her usual confidence.

"Let's hear it, young one," I offered, sitting at the nearby wooden chair while she sat across the table facing me.

"Alright," she took a deep breath then spoke again. "How did you know that you wanted to become a Jedi Guardian? Like, from what I heard earlier, you seemed to have the mind and passion for learning that can rival a Consular, and since I've been apprenticed to you, you could've made an equally-good Sentinel with how good you are as a detective, especially on how we dealt with our last mission. So why the Guardians?"

I considered her question for a few seconds and answered. "I realized it the first time I stood up to my childhood tormentor, Bruck Chun." Seeing her frown, I continued with a smile. "It may not look like it now, Olana, but I was indeed an unpopular child in the Temple, and as Master Fisto eloquently puts it — a hothead. And that lead other children my age to take a disliking of me, I guess. Oh Quinlan and Bant, and my other friends would stand up to me, but that would only make Bruck and his friends target me more. So one day, when he and his cohorts were teasing another Youngling, I acted. I told him off, and they shifted their attention back to me — and their bullying and insults became even more cruel."

I paused briefly, looking at her surprised face before I soldiered on. "That's when I knew — when I understood, that if I become a Jedi, I must be willing to become the shield of others. And now as a Knight myself, I would do it all again, experience the hardships before the comforts. Being a Jedi Peacekeeper, working with local planetary defense forces, and law enforcement organizations made me realize that the work is not done, and perhaps will never be done, but still to do my best to make a galaxy a safer place."

I let the silence linger while Olana processed her thoughts. "I think I want to be a Sentinel," she declared, firmly and with resolve. "Don't get me wrong, Master, I appreciate and will continue to hone my connection with the Unifying Force and my gift as a Seer, but there's something…appealing as a Sentinel, being at the heart of civilization, with the normal people and using my abilities to connect with them more."

It was then that I realized what she was saying, "Do you wish to become a Jedi Investigator? Or perhaps a Jedi Watchman? They are exceptional fields for a Jedi Sentinel to devote their time towards."

"Probably a Jedi Recruiter," she answered thoughtfully. "I get to travel all around the galaxy searching for Force-sensitives and taking them to the Jedi Temple."

"Just like what we did with Ahsoka, then?" I asked, and upon seeing her nod I continued. "Becoming a Jedi Recruiter is an honorable calling, Olana, and most of them are highly-regarded within the Order as members of the Acquisition Division…However, Jedi Recruiters are also one of the more 'polarizing' reputation in the galaxy at large, particularly because they recruit infants and 'take' them away from their families at a young age."

"Oh, I know, Master," Olana said, a certain fervor regaining from her voice. "But as long as a Force-sensitive wishes to join, or their parents willingly gives them up, then I'll consider it a job for me as well, to find the next generation after us."

"You are indeed wise beyond your years, my friend," I said with a smile. "That is why I know you will become a great Jedi."

"Of course," she said, just as confident. "I have a great teacher, after all."
​

---

Author's Note:
As promised, I am now ending the Ahsoka Arc and onto the next arc: The Phantom Menace. We get to meet some of the EU/Legends characters and some shout-outs on some characters (Jaro Tapal, Sora Bulq, etc.), and talk about Obi-Wan's escapades.​

And yep, Plo Koon is dead in this AU, hence why Obi-Wan and Olana found Ahsoka and not him. RIP Master Plo.

Won't be updating this week, still have my Kinetics Exam and Food Technology project (weird that someone currently studying a Chemical Engineering degree writes fanfiction for a hobby, I know) so I'll see you when I see you!

Appendix:
Terms:​

a.) Antarian Rangers — a security force and paramilitary group established around 620 BBY to assist the Jedi Order. Rangers consisted of various different branches with its members constantly preparing for their service to the Jedi. Exists in EU.

b.) Battlemaster — title for the premier lightsaber combat instructor of the Jedi Order's Jedi academy. Exists in EU and Canon.

c.) Council of Reconciliation — made up of five Master Consulars tasked with negotiating with political factions both inside and outside of the Galactic Senate. Exists in EU and Canon.

d.) Form I/Shii-Cho — the first form taught to initiates. Shii-Cho swordplay was simplistic and raw. Exists in EU and Canon.

e.) Form II/Makashi — the most dueling-centric of the seven classical forms. Developed for the purpose of lightsaber-to-lightsaber combat. Exists in EU and Canon.

f.) Form III/Soresu — focused on strong defensive technique to essentially outlast an opponent. Soresu relied on tight bladework and subtle dodges. Exists in EU and Canon.

g.) Form IV/Ataru — characterized by Force-assisted acrobatics. Ataru was an aggressive combat form relying on a combination of speed and agility. Exists in EU and Canon.

h.) Jedi Peacekeeper — the most recognized branch of the Guardian class, these individuals served alongside Sector police and local militias to ensure peace. Exists in EU.

i.) Jedi Recruiter — specialized field of study undertaken by those Jedi Knights that desired to become a Jedi Sentinel, most Recruiters turn their Force abilities of tracking and detection to locate unrecognized Force-sensitives. Exists in EU and Canon (as Jedi Wayseeker).

j.) Solah — a call of surrender used by the Jedi in lightsaber sparring. Exists in EU and Canon.

k.) Stark-Hyperspace War — was a border conflict in the Troiken system that took place in 44 BBY between the Stark Commercial Combine and Jedi Order and the Galactic Republic. The Jedi fought against the criminal conglomeration of pirates, mercenaries, bounty hunters, and assassins, which were united under the charismatic leadership of fellow pirate Iaco Stark. The entire affair was in fact orchestrated by Darth Sidious as part of his larger scheme to control the galaxy. Exists in EU and Canon.

 

[Renko]

If Anakin is still going to come into the picture, I hope Obi will buy off his mum and send her off to a safe planet.

 

[Lillie Jones]

thanks for the chapter

 

[Sakumo]

If Anakin is still going to come into the picture, I hope Obi will buy off his mum and send her off to a safe planet.

Click to shrink...

Knowing Obi-Wan, he'll probably cook up some scheme to help Shmi out of Watto's nose!

thanks for the chapter

Click to shrink...

Thanks for the continuous support!

 

[Renko]

Knowing Obi-Wan, he'll probably cook up some scheme to help Shmi out of Watto's nose!

Click to shrink...

Why can't Obi-wan just nab Anny and Shimi earlier? He can just reason it out as something that compelled him because of a vision from the Force or something.

 

[Sakumo]

Why can't Obi-wan just nab Anny and Shimi earlier? He can just reason it out as something that compelled him because of a vision from the Force or something.

Click to shrink...

Because this Obi-Wan is indifferent at best, wary at worst in regards to Anakin. And I don't know if this was highlighted much, but it is implied and stated in the Prologue that Obi-Wan is fairly recently knighted (around 18-ish months), and six of those months was stuck in the Temple training Olana — remember that the mission to Shili is their first mission outside Coruscant as a duo.