AN:What I have for the Potentium is a bit sketchy, so I filled it out quite a bit, hopefully this jives well with canon. I suspect I may have stepped beyond the bounds of the canonical. Umbarans are near human, so the extended lifespan is a stretch, but considering Master Yoda is 900 when he dies, perhaps not too much.

Thanks to silverflight8 for your critique, and I will think on how to best soften the tone of the Council, because there is a certain amount of hardness there. Three years of war makes casualties just numbers to a certain extent.

Thanks everyone for reviewing. On to the chapter!

Anakin found himself in a bit of a quandary. He wasn't usually in the position of giving advice. Especially about meditation. If anything, he was probably the last person to be consulted about troubled meditation. And yet, here he was, trying to figure out why Xanfer, someone he'd never met, was having trouble meditating. He was out of his depth. But there was something, maybe. The Force was telling him he needed to understand this. Besides, this was Seranth's Master. He'd known her since she was three, and he'd ventured down to the crèche for the first time when he was ten. He owed her this much, at least.

He didn't try to actually meditate. That he knew was pointless, but most especially here. The Living Force did not require meditation, it required action. There was a reason it was called the Living Force. Concentrate on the here and now. The whispered command came from somewhere inside the Living Force. It also came in the form of Qui-Gon's voice. He struggled to obey, but just as it was nearly impossible for him to let everything go, so that he could meditate with the Unifying Force, it was also difficult to let the uncertain future go completely in favor of concentrating on the now.

It is not necessary to completely abandon thoughts of the future, but they must be in the background. Concentrate on the now, but you do not have to do it to the exclusion of everything else, Anakin. It must be your main focus, not your only one. The Living Force is not so harsh a master as the Unifying Force.

He nodded, and looked at Obi-Wan, but Obi-Wan wasn't opening himself to the Living Force. He couldn't hear the voice. Anakin heard a chuckle. Tell him this: Don't center on your anxiety, Obi-Wan.

"Don't center on your anxiety, Obi-Wan," he said to his Master, and Obi-Wan raised one eyebrow.

Keep your concentration on the here and now, where it belongs, Qui-Gon's voice insisted.

"Keep your concentration on the here and now, where it belongs," he said, even taking on the slightly admonishing tone he'd heard in Qui-Gon's voice. Obi-Wan scowled at him, thinking it was some trick or another of his, but he started following the advice, at least.

He turned his attention to Xanfer, who was trying to do what Obi-Wan would call a proper meditation. "That," he said with a slight amount of distain, "is not how you meditate here."

Palpatine looked across the desk in one of his many offices, this being one he used only in his role as a Sith. Jander Xantel and Leinea Shellan, two of Dooku's dark acolytes, were standing uncomfortably across from him. He was fully hooded, so they couldn't look at much other than the dark recess where his face would be. Xantel was Falleen, and his green skin was typical for one of that race, though he was not, by human standards anyway, at all handsome. He had found Falleen to be an interesting distraction, so he would keep this one around until he failed to be entertaining.

Shellan was a human female, with enough Force potential to be useful, but not enough to become a Sith, a Jedi, or a threat. It might be possible to make use of them in his quests with Skywalker and Devor. "You have been of use to Lord Tyranus. You may be of use to me. Will you work for me?"

They considered, but not for too long. The alternative would be their deaths. Whether they realized that remained to be seen. "We will. Lord Tyranus's death was at an unfortunate time."

He nodded. Their lack of reservation at agreeing to continue working for the Sith marked them as corrupt or stupid, and he didn't tolerate stupidity. "I have a mission for you then."

Seranth sat in her cell. Her food had been brought for the day. She was sure that it was brought at erratic times to ensure that she didn't have any concept of time passing. She shuddered as she thought of the Sith Lord who had ordered her capture. He was kind enough to leave her alone, or maybe it was just that he was too busy to bother with her now. She didn't even know what planet she was on now—just that it wasn't Boz Pity. She thought back to the day she'd been brought here, not using the Force to clarify the memories, that was a mistake she wasn't about to repeat. It might have been easier if she was surrounded by ysalamiri, but it would have felt worse. She was cut off from the Force, just as effectively as if the deed had been done by force, and it was more forceful because it was by her own decision.

Meditation was actually not a Force power, but a focusing tool, and so she was allowed to use it, so long as she didn't try to touch the Force. She supposed that it would have been possible if she had wanted to succumb to the dark side, but it wasn't what she wanted. So she used meditation to focus herself, allowing the memories to drift alone in her mind while she examined them, trying to find more about them. She had almost given up when she'd thought she was going crazy, but she had woken with a renewed sense of determination. It was odd, but she didn't question it, she was going to use it to her best advantage.

First was the waking, she pieced it together slowly. The image of Grievous standing over her with a bucket in hand came first. She hadn't noticed the bucket before. He'd thrown water on her to wake her. The physical sensations of shock were there, but distant. The memory couldn't hurt her. He had come to her, picked her up, and carried her out of the ship. The ship was old, one of the kinds that made her feel sad for some reason; perhaps she had taken a similar transport when she'd gone to Coruscant.

The fall down the stairs wasn't a particularly pleasant thought either, but it had afforded her with a view of her surroundings; a snapshot she could now examine. She took the moment, made it slow until it stopped. Anywhere, she thought, this could be anywhere industrialized. The details of the memory didn't help her at all; it was as familiar as Coruscant, and as alien. There was nothing that would indicate a particular planet. The designation over the door of the landing bay was even just like those that Coruscant would have used. The memory, sharp and clear, suddenly became her consuming focus. The designation was Coruscanti, because no other planet that she knew of had that many docking bays, even Denon, the planet with the next largest population to Coruscant, at least that she'd been to, only had designations half the length to Coruscant's.

She smiled, and she knew it wasn't a pretty smile, but this was war, and she was on her home turf. The fact that it was the Sith Lord's home turf as well, that gave her pause, but not enough that she wasn't going to figure out how to get out of here. He was going to lose this battle.

Padmé walked into the Senate building, and was almost immediately assaulted by beings from the Naboo Senatorial staff, including a very enthusiastic Jar Jar Binks. The twins were only two weeks old, but it was imperative that she get back to work, with some of the things she'd seen being bandied about on the HoloNews worried her. If half of what she'd seen was true, the Republic was in worse trouble than she'd thought.

"Senator," Jar Jar said, beaming. He was so overcome with emotion at seeing her that he was unable to say more. She had contacted Captain Typho the night before, trying to figure out where she needed to be to do what she needed to do. Just showing up out of the blue was doable, but wouldn't accomplish anything for her. She needed information, and she needed her people prepped and ready to give it to her.

"Let's go to my office," she told him, and her staff swirled around them, dropping tidbits of information that she filed away, knowing she would get full reports about each item later.

They entered her inner sanctum; at least that was the way she thought of it. It was swept for bugs at least daily, and that was done again just before she had arrived. "Mesa so happy to see-in you," Jar Jar said, picking her up in a hug.

"It's good to see you as well, Jar Jar," she said as he put her down. She sat behind her desk, hoping that no one else would try doing anything like what Jar Jar had. They all wanted to touch her, make sure that she was really there, really well and back in their presence. She hated that she had to leave her twins so soon after their birth, but they were in good hands, her parents had helped with Ryoo and Pooja both, and Sola did have the girls, and Anakin and Obi-Wan would be by as they could. She sighed, focusing on her duties here, putting her family firmly out of her surface thoughts. "Aryana, what were you saying about the newest bill before the Senate?" she asked, and continued to rapid-fire questions at her staff until they had nothing else to tell her.

Obi-Wan looked at what he'd made note of only a few weeks ago, and still found it completely unbelievable. "So tell me about the change of the Code," Anakin said from his comfortable slouch on the sofa in Obi-Wan's common room. "It's been so busy that we haven't gotten a chance to talk about it."

"Phanius, a Jedi Master, was responsible for it. He was Umbaran, and they are a rather long-lived species. They seem suited to being Sith, intrigue and secrets and misdirection being their main exports. Umbara is their home planet, inside the Ghost Nebula. Only those of the highest caste, the Rootai leave the planet. For one to be Rootai and Force-sensitive wouldn't be that unusual; but to give that up and become a Jedi is a bit unusual."

"What if he were Sith first?"

Obi-Wan stroked his beard, thinking for a moment. "That seems a possibility, but I don't know for sure. The information condemning him as a Sith is rather sketchy. He lived with the Jedi for about a hundred years before making the claims that the old code was outdated, and needed to be dropped from the curriculum taught to new Jedi and Initiates. At that time, adults were still taken as Jedi if they proved adept enough."

"That was about 2500 years ago?"

"Yes. He did other things, as well, but nothing so outright. He also spent time teaching about the Potentium. He even came up with the name for it."

"What the kriff is the Potentium?"

"It's a viewpoint of the Force, and a dangerous one. It's banned teaching, and I can see the reason for it," Obi-Wan said, and then he sighed, sitting down in one of the chairs. "It teaches that the Force has no inherent good or bad—that there is no 'light side' or 'dark side' and that it is only intent that makes actions good or evil."

"That doesn't sound so bad."

"Initially, no, but it leads to Jedi only having their moral compass to decide whether they do something, and that can all too easily be guided in the wrong direction by someone more knowledgeable, more charismatic, more powerful."

Sudden understanding flashed in Anakin's eyes. "That's what happened, isn't it?"

"Yes, about 2000 years ago, something called the Fourth Great Schism happened," he paused in his telling, letting the words sink into Anakin's psyche. "Phanius left the Order. He became the first of the Lost Twenty, and when he left, he took fifty Jedi Knights with him, fifty that followed his teachings and the Potentium."

Anakin's eyes grew wide, "So many?"

"Yes, and then, he took them to a planet called Roon, and founded the New Sith Empire, and called himself Darth Ruin. There is little after that that I can find, except his death, which was recorded less than a hundred years later. Apparently he wasn't the best ruler for a Sith Empire. The New Sith Wars started from this Empire, about a thousand years after its founding."

"That's almost unbelievable. How many other Sith started as Jedi?"

"Unfortunately, most of them, or at least it starts with a Jedi-turned-Sith most of the time. It's almost impossible to weed out those who would be turned by thoughts of power for its own sake from those who won't."

Anakin looked down. "We need to change a lot of things about the Order if it is to survive."