((Okies, Skywalker05: you wanted to know more, here it is. I have been planning this for a while but it was hard work to get it to sound right which is why it took so long to write it, so sorry for the wait. I know it was a bad point to stop.
Any comments and suggestions would be greatly received since this is
my first fic – ignore the rubbishness.
Oh and I forgot the disclaimers last time so they stand for the last chapter and this one too: I own nothing. Nada. Wish I did.))
As she wandered into the trees, carefully avoiding slipping into the swamp and murk that made up the remains of Yavin 4, Karaa kept her mind blank. It wasn't hard: she was numb, alone without hope or fear any more. She could feel nothing but detached calm since her friends were killed and now her only hope of salvation had been dashed. It was an easy way to walk, just wandering with barely a thought in her mind other than staying out of the slow, suffocating death that falling into the swamp would give her. It didn't take long, not by her own reckoning, before she reached an almost dry patch of ground about six feet in diameter, centred by a gnarled tree that lifted the mud above the water table. There she sat, curling into a ball against the knotted roots, wishing she could cry and release the grief that gnawed at her mind even though she could no longer distinguish it from any other emotion. Instead her mind wandered, taking her to the past which had led her to such a position of loss and failed dreams.
For around two centuries after the time of Luke Skywalker the Jedi Academy had risen in strength and prestige, quickly aiding the Senators and world rulers in clearing the galaxy of filth and danger and bringing it into a new, clean age of peace and happiness. With the end of the Empire many people had been left homeless and grieving but during the two centuries afterwards the wounds healed and people found themselves new ways of lives in far distant settings to the past gloom and fear of the war. Fear was lessened and fell quickly leaving behind only trusting people and easy pickings for the Bounty Hunters and troublemakers: the Jedi saw to it that the dangerous ones were stopped and that the innocent were allowed to live in peace. It was a glorious age.
But all good things come to their downfall in the end. A weak man came to the ruling of the Jedi Academy and the peacekeepers of the galaxy fell into slothful ways since they were not required to do so much. The traditions began to be forgotten and it took less than a century of weaker and weaker leaders for the Jedi to fall out of strength and favour. Three centuries after the time of the infamous Luke Skywalker a band of Jedi realised the trouble that they were in. Those eight people attempted to call the Jedi to return to the strength and power that they once had had – but it was useless since the others did not want the work that such a change would bring. This caused internal strife among the inhabitants of the Academy forcing it to concern itself even less about the outside world and more about what was going on among them.
When eventually a man chose to become Emperor once more, the Jedi were his first port of call. With a secret army of people recruited by force and bribery he stormed the Academy and quickly killed the few who stood up to him: the eight who had called for the return of strength to the Jedi. The others had become so weak that it was simple work for him to turn the others to the Dark Side of the Force leaving him with an army of Sith behind him. Leaving behind the corpses of the true Jedi and many of his own warriors – some strength at least had remained in the Jedi – he turned to Coruscant and began a war with the many other worlds.
In the time of peace in which the galaxy had been in there was only a very minimal army, none of whom had seen real action in battle, and so with the remainder of his army and his new Sith warriors he found it an easy task to begin his takeover. Planets and moons fell to his dominion, his army and power rising with each battle in which he placed himself, and his Empire grew. The worlds were soon full of Sith who were placed there to ensure that the Empire indeed had control and the evil warriors quickly found themselves the object of great deals of fear due to their cruel and vicious ways of dealing with any rebels.
Eventually the Emperor grew old. In that time there had been many rebel attacks, each put down with cruel and painful ways of death for the perpetrators and especially the leaders. The Empire became full of fear and mistrust, the money and power quickly flowing to the Emperor and the people struggling to carve a living on the meagre remains of what they could grow and build. It was a harsh life: water was polluted, food sources destroyed, people lived out on the streets or in hovels once designed for animals. When another man challenged the Emperor for control of the Empire things merely became worse: during the fighting that went on in the Imperial palaces the people in the outside world were given no aid at all and it became a downwards spiral.
It was into a failing, destroyed world full of fighting and starvation that Karaa and her friends were born. They banded together as a crude form of safety from the dangers that were all around them, learning quickly how to protect themselves. That was the usual way of life for anyone in the galaxy: fight and steal to provide enough to stay alive. Karaa's grandmother gave the children an old book before she died: it was from that book that they learnt about Jedi and how to use the Force. Together they became another pocket of resistance against the Emperor until the fateful day on which Seera and Devrin had been killed.
Floating back from her musings on the past to her surroundings Karaa gazed blindly at the trees around her. She saw little, lost in her despair against the galaxy that she lived in – although she had never called it home. Soft rustlings from the area around didn't register with her as she let herself drift off to a nightmare-filled sleep, waking often only to roll over and fall back into a glazed stupor.