It had been foreseen, of course. This moment, this fulcrum upon which the future rested. Vrook knew, as he stood among the rubble and tall grass that once had been the Enclave, that today the Exile had to be stopped, and the fate of the Jedi, of the very Galaxy itself, hung in the balance. That much was known. Whether she would survive the encounter, however, was not.

Kavar stirred beside him. "How was she when you saw her on Nar Shaddaa?" he asked Zez-Kai. He had been the last to see her before coming to the Enclave.

Zez-Kai frowned. "Weary, I think. And though she shined with the power of the Force, I think she drew it from her companions, not from herself. She is sill not healed from Malachor."

"Yes," Kavar agreed, "I saw that as well. She is still angry and confused about what has happened to her. I fear we have done her no favors by our refusal to give her the answers she seeks."

"You are the one doing her a disservice, Kavar!" Vrook growled. A startled tulla bird flew away from them in a panic. "Your inappropriate affection for Pellek Tran blinds you to what must be done."

Kavar rebuked his outburst with a raised eyebrow. "Perhaps. But what we will do is not to done without remembering that she is a sentient being. I wonder if you are blinded to that, Vrook."

Vrook clenched his jaw and stared at the entrance to the Enclave, hand clamped around his lightsaber.

Twenty Years Prior--

Vrook flipped his blade around Pellek's defenses and knocked her weapon clear across the practice ground. It fizzled out with a whine.

"Pick it up, Padawan, and assume the ready position," he said tonelessly.

She silently complied and faced him with blade extended and a dogged expression on her face. Vrook sighed. Her stance was the standard defensive choice, but she should know by now that when facing his preferred lightsaber form, she should choose an aggressive form and try to surprise him with speed. Rather than explaining, though, he simply activated his blade and disarmed her in two moves. She immediately let her guard down, so Vrook yanked her feet out from under her and pinned her to the ground with his boot.

His blade was a centimeter from her face. "Is this how you intend to die, Padawan?"

She stared up at him and he could feel her trying to reach him through the Force. The girl didn't even know she was doing it half the time—she formed Force bonds and connections faster and more easily than he had ever before seen. Vrook knocked her probe away.

"Pay attention!" he barked. "If I were your enemy, you would already be dead." He reached down and yanked her roughly to her feet. "Again," he ordered.

An hour later, she was weaving with exhaustion and bruised from end to end. "Master, why do you push me harder than the others? With Revan, Master Zhar—"

"How Master Zhar chooses to train his padawan is of no concern to you," Vrook snapped. He pushed away the trickle of concern he always felt when he thought about Revan. She was so talented, but there was something about her, some arrogance, that worried him deeply. But she was not his to train, and courtesy required he keep his opinions to himself. "Perhaps if you were as adept with your blade as Revan, I would be easier on you."

Pellek shook her head ruefully. "I doubt it."

He allowed a small smile and placed his hand on her shoulder to direct her back to the living quarters. "We will continue your lesson tomorrow." His hand glowed briefly with Force Heal. She looked at him with surprise, and he inclined his head. "Good work today, Padawan."

Her grin was a gift as she dashed away.

The hours dragged on and still the Exile did not appear. If Vrook concentrated, he could feel her very faintly in the Force, just a mere spark of her presence. He had been able to feel it even in her exile, even when she believed the Council had cut her off from the Force in punishment for following Revan.

"Have you heard anything of Revan?" he asked Kavar, just to break the heavy silence in the courtyard. Zhar had always been able to find her, but he was gone, now, like all the others at Katarr. Kavar was the remaining Master she was most likely to contact.

The man shook his head and stretched, seemingly glad of the distraction. "No, and her silence is worrisome. She has either found the threat of Darkness and been defeated, she is continuing to look, or—" he trailed off.

"—she has joined it," Vrook finished.

Kavar looked for a moment like he wanted to argue, but he finally nodded. Kavar had not wanted to admit that he was wrong about Revan, that they all were, even when half the new Knights went with her to the Rim.

Fifteen Years Prior—

Her face and body were calm, but to his Force senses, tension scattered away from her like water from a kath hound. She made him anxious just looking at her. "Jedi Tran," he began.

"Revan has asked me to join her," she interrupted, her voice as falsely calm as her face.

Vrook clenched his jaw on the sharp retort that threatened. He had hoped Pellek would be less susceptible than the others to Revan's persuasion. "Why?"

"Why? How can you ask me that? Can you truly pretend, Master, that you don't know what Revan brought to you, what Revan told you about the Mandalorian threat?" Vrook could see the effort she made to control her outrage, to keep her aura the sky blue of its natural state.

"I mean, Jedi, why has she asked you, specifically, to join her? What do you bring to her fight?"

"You know my abilities better than anyone. I may not have been your most adept student, but I can connect to people." She grinned self-consciously. "Apparently, it's a rare talent. Revan wants me to be her General for the troops on the ground. Malak will manage the Fleet." She closed her mouth with an almost audible snap, apparently realizing that she was giving valuable information to the enemy.

"We have forbidden it. You must not act against the Council's edict." He sounded utterly cold, even to his own ears.

Her eyes narrowed. "I came here to explain where I was going, as a courtesy to my old Master," she said icily. "I am not asking for permission, Vrook."

The use of his name without the honorific was shocking in its discourtesy and wholly unlike his former padawan. He snapped, "Well, I see that Revan has another disciple, and all it took was a little flattery to the Force abilities of a mediocre Jedi. I thought better of you."

He might as well have slapped her. Vrook had been a hard master, he knew, but he had never been cruel. Pellek turned without another word and walked out of his chambers.

The next morning she had left for the Rim.

Vrook felt her when she arrived on Dantooine. She was a stronger presence in the Force now, and he could feel her clearly even though she was still quite a distance from the Enclave. "She is near," he announced to the others.

Kavar raised an eyebrow. "I thought you did not bond with your padawans."

"I don't," Vrook protested. "I didn't. But you know as well as I do that the girl can make a Force connection without a bond. I did not break that connection."

"Then why do it now?" Zez-Kai burst out suddenly, eyes wide. "Who are we to sit in judgment of this Jedi, to tell her that she is dangerous, a wound in the Force? How can we strip her of the Force like she is not even human?" His voice pitched toward panic.

"Enough!" Vrook growled. "Do not let your self-hatred control your actions." Zez-Kai started to protest, but Vrook cut him off with a sharp gesture. "No, do not deny it. You have been hiding from yourself and your duties when you should have been trying to keep the Order alive! We sit in judgment because there is no one else to do it!"

Kavar sighed. "Vrook is right, my friend. We do not understand what happened to the Exile at Malachor, and we are too diminished now to find out. But you know, we all know, that she has become a threat to the Force itself. We must do this."

"You would do this, Vrook? To your own?" Zez-Kai was pleading, incredulous.

"I must," he whispered.

Zez-Kai was silent for several long moments, and he deliberately allowed them to see the anger he struggled to control. "It is wrong. There must be another way. But I will not let you do it without me."

Ten Years Prior—

Vrook had prepared himself, but he still was shocked at the transformation in Pellek when she arrived at the Council after the war. Everything about her, from her stance, to her expression, to the way she clenched her lightsaber, rang with tragedy, as if she had personally slaughtered her own family. She returned a triumphant General, but she was defeated inside. And there was something else he didn't understand, some emptiness in her aura. She was hollow, broken. She has come to ask for forgiveness, he thought.

Until he saw her eyes. They were as hard and uncompromising as the crystal in her blade. He knew then that she had not come for forgiveness, but for punishment. She was not sorry for what she had done, not now, not even now, after all that had happened, after Malachor V. . .

Vrook could never remember later what he said to her. It had taken him weeks of mediation to purge himself of the anger that coursed through him at the sight of his defiant pupil. She was not Dark, as Revan now was, but she was no longer a Jedi. He told himself that it was anger he was purging. But in the darkness of his chambers, he knew the truth.

When she impaled the stone with her blade, she had stared right at him. And he was afraid of her.

It was almost anticlimactic when she finally entered the Enclave. Even though Vrook had seen her weeks before on Dantooine, he had still expected the giant of his memory, the Force void who threatened the very existence of life itself. Instead, he saw only a grown version of his last padawan. His most beloved padawan. The only one with whom he had permitted a Force connection.

Her sky blue aura was still there but—cloudy, perhaps. Or lit by an indirect sun. And there was something Dark connected to her, something that hid itself when he tried to see it clearly. She was not herself Dark, but at her core, she still carried the void that she had created at Malachor. Vrook forced away his last hope that she would be healed when she came to them, that they would not have to do what they must.

Her eyes flicked to his, and they were as hard and pale as they had been ten years prior.

"You must have many questions," Zez-Kai began.

"Or perhaps you have come for revenge?" Vrook asked. It had been a joke between them years ago. She had claimed as a youngling that she would surprise him someday and get revenge for all the poundings he had given her on the practice floor.

He thought he saw her smile at the memory, but her voice was hard when she demanded to know why they had stripped her of the Force.

Vrook sighed irritably. "For the last time, we did not cut you off from the Force. You were merely deafened to it, because of what happened at Malachor."

"What I did at Malachor, you mean," she said flatly.

Zez-Kai continued to try to explain. "When you returned to us, we saw what had happened. You carry all those deaths at Malachor with you and it has left a hole in the Force."

Pellek looked around at them, disbelief plain on her face. "But. . .that makes no sense. I can feel the Force again. I found two Sensitives and taught them how to feel the Force! How can I be a—a void when I can do that?"

Vrook was surprised and suddenly hopeful. If this were so, perhaps they were wrong after all? He tentatively felt the Force around her and he could clearly see that she had bound herself to at least five others, two of whom were new to the Force. But then he saw that Pellek did not herself touch the Force, but absorbed it from those around her, like a parasite. He sighed. "Yes, you can feel the Force, but you cannot feel yourself. It is the teaching of these new Sith, and they have learned it from you."

She stared at him with wide eyes. "No, that's not true, I'm not—"

"You are a breach that must be closed. Within you, we see something worse than merely the teachings of the Sith."

Kavar spared him from saying the words himself. "Within you, we see the death of the Force. You must leave, and you must leave without your connection to the Force. It must be done."

"Forgive us, but it is necessary," Zez-Kai whispered.

Pellek backed away, unlit lightsabers raised against them like wards. "No, I can't give up the Force again." She looked at him, finally, and the hardness was gone from her eyes. "Master, please—"

"You will feel no pain," he said. He would be certain of that, at least.

"Enough!" A cloaked figure strode into the courtyard. Before any of them could react, the woman swept her arm across the Enclave and knocked them all to their backs. Pellek fell and did not move.

"Kreia! I thought you died at Malachor!" Kavar exclaimed.

Vrook looked between Kreia and Pellek. "This is your Master now, Exile?" he whispered to her still form. But when he looked more closely, he changed his mind. Kreia positively reeked of the Dark, of an insanity that was ten times as frightening as Revan or Malak had been. She was the shadow on Pellek's aura, but he did not think Kreia controlled her, yet.

And then he saw something else, something so subtle he almost missed it. The bonds that Pellek had made flickered. She was not simply taking the Force from her companions—she was giving it as well. It was barely anything—she took much more than she gave, but it was something. Perhaps her wound could be healed after all. Perhaps he could—

Kreia's angry words rose to a shriek. "Do you wish to feel the teachings of the Mandalorian wars? Let me show you. See it through the eyes of the Exile!"

Yellow lightning hit Vrook squarely in the chest and he felt something rip inside of him. He thought he screamed, but he couldn't hear himself. He collapsed to the ground, felt Kavar and Zez-Kai do the same. The pain was unbearable, it would kill him, it was tearing the Force away—

He reached desperately outward and felt a whisper from Pellek. Master?

He couldn't form words, could only send his sorrow. He had failed Pellek, betrayed her when she needed him the most. He had accused Kavar of blindness, but it was he who had been blind.

Her forgiveness washed over him like a cool stream. Through dimming eyes, he saw that she was still sprawled on the grass. Though she didn't move, he felt her tug on their Force connection, pulling him toward her, toward the Light that surrounded her.

The pain engulfed him, but the Light was stronger.

With his last, he sent her his love. She had saved him, at the end, and he knew without question that she would survive. The Force had more for her to do.

Faintly he heard, There is no death; there is only the Force.

The Light was so bright—

END