Epilogue

by blueenvelopes

After the Battle of Exogol, an old iconoclast emerges from exile. Fearing history will repeat itself, perpetuating the Jedi and the Sith, he takes matters into his own hands. He finds the lonely scavenger girl with amazing Force in the Tatooine desert and promises, "I can raise the dead." It's an offer he will not let Rey of Jakku refuse.

51. Chapter 51 story notes

Hello and thanks for reading. I apologize for the delay in publishing the last few chapters. My mother recently died and there is a lot going on in my life. This story suffered a bit as a consequence.

This story is my attempt to retcon TROS. I want to amplify and explain the sequel trilogy, and to introduce new ideas, conflicts, and characters that shed a new perspective on the same-old, same-old good-defeats-evil tropes of the SW universe. Very little of this fic is actually new, however. While this story purports to be a sequel to TROS, it is in reality the sequel to my fic Twilight of the Gods. The themes of this story and the ideas about the Force set forth herein are all contained in my prior stories, most notably Rule of Two and Twilight of the Gods.

I think of my stories as contrarian canon—sort of canon with a twist. Pretty much everything I wanted in Episode 9 is here in Epilogue, except for a Leia-Kylo scene. That confrontation will be the climax of my in-progress fic The Searchers, which I expect to return to next. But from a big picture perspective, I really wanted a win-win conclusion for the Republic and the First Order. Basically, I wanted everyone—the good guys and the bad guys—to be heroes in some fashion. Instead of victory at the end, I wanted peace and some glimmers of unity. Instead of Light, I wanted balance. And most of all, I wanted to progress the moral narrative of Star Wars past the Jedi and the Sith.

I make a lot of stuff up, but most everything I write is grounded in the Star Wars canon or in the now abandoned Legends canon. Lady Abeloth is from Legends. Why is she here? Because the story needs a big baddie, an overarching wizard of oz in the background. What if that character isn't Sidious? What if it isn't even my character Plagueis who lurks behind the scenes of Rule of Two and Twilight of the Gods? What if it's a woman . . . and what if she isn't the villain? This summer I read the novel A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes, and it got me interested in the idea of a goddess pulling the strings for the conflicts of men.

The Legends story of Abeloth has the usual undercurrent of misogyny. It focuses on an angry, very powerful female Force user who exists outside the Jedi/Republic constraints. Naturally, she threatens everything and must be contained/destroyed by the good guys. Now, I quite like the idea of non-Jedi, non-Sith female Force users. Like the canon character Mother Talzin, Lady Abeloth captured my imagination. She is dark, she is light, and she is everything that upends the conventional wisdom of the Force. Her motivations and allegiance are suspect. She is frightening for what she represents and how she physically looks. In fact, the ruined face of Darth Maul's Twi'lek love Rhea was directly inspired by Abeloth.

Anyhow, thanks for reading. This ending doesn't resolve everything, but it resolves a lot. The characters have evolved along the way and I hope you enjoyed the journey they took.