This story takes place in the very, very distant past of the GFFA, before the foundation of the Republic and the Jedi Order. It is an adaptation of Victor Hugo's famous novel Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) in the SW universe. Given the timeframe, you can safely assume that all elements of worldbuilding you don't recognise are mine (or suggested by friends on another website).

Preface

A few years ago, while visiting or, rather, rummaging about the Temple of the Kyber during the renovation works that that sought to rescue this vestige of Jedha's fading glory, the author of these lines found, in an obscure nook of one of the meditation rooms, the following word engraved by hand upon the wall:

UZH

These letters, now black with age and deeply graven in the stone with scorch marks imprinted around their forms, as though with the purpose of revealing that they had been carved with fire, struck me deeply. For in the tongue spoken by our ancestors in the days before the advent of the Republic, they form the name of the living energy field that the Jedi call the Force, but also the word that the Sith favour to name the thing they crave above all: power.

I questioned myself; I sought to divine who could have been that soul which had not been willing to quit this world without leaving a mark of his presence upon the brow of the ancient shrine.

Afterwards, the wall was whitewashed or scraped down, I know not which, and the inscription disappeared. For it is thus that people have been in the habit of proceeding since the foundation of the Republic. All traces of our civilisation's past are erased, mutilations of our venerable monuments come from every quarter, and the deeper origins of the age-old enmity between the light and the dark are lost to history. A day will come when the worlds that host our most sacred sites will be destroyed; the populace will forget their significance and it will require decades, if not centuries, to rebuild the knowledge that we will have foregone.

Thus, with the exception of the fragile memory which I here consecrate to it, there remains today nothing whatsoever of the mysterious word engraved within the gloomy cell of the Temple of the Kyber – nothing of the destiny which it summed up. The being who wrote that word upon the wall disappeared from the midst of the generations of sentience many millennia ago; the word, in its turn, has been effaced from the wall of the temple; the temple will, perhaps, itself soon disappear from the face of the galaxy if the new swell of the tide of darkness whose coming began today on Tatooine is allowed to prevail.

It is upon this word that this book is founded.

Gali Juta

643rd Keeper of the Whills

991st year of the Galactic Republic

Endnotes

This preface is an almost word-for-word pastiche of the preface to The Hunchback of Notre-Dame/Notre-Dame de Paris.

'Uzh' is the RL Armenian word meaning 'force' or 'power'.

The 991st year of the Galactic Republic is 41 BBY. You can draw your own conclusions here :)