Zhar stumbled across Lesami deep in the gardens, sitting in the grass at the edge of a pond.

This didn't come as a surprise, shouldn't to anyone who'd known her well. He couldn't count the times he'd tracked down Alek and Lesami somewhere among the Thousand Fountains at the Temple. Relaxing by one of the pools, nursing their wounds from a spar, perhaps, playing around with some esoteric bit of sorcery, or simply reading quietly. By the time Alek had officially become his padawan, if they hadn't some other obligation the two were virtually always together, and they seemed to prefer to spend that time in the nearest thing one could possibly find to outdoor gardens on Coruscant.

So, given the reputation she'd developed over the last years, while his colleagues might most expect to find Lesami engaged in some sort of dramatic exhibition in the arena, or perhaps in the library scouring the restricted sources the Council was attempting to bribe her with access to (not that they'd call it that), Zhar wasn't the slightest bit surprised. This sort of place was exactly where she belonged.

He hesitated a brief moment, staring at her back. He wasn't at all certain she would appreciate his company. Not that she ever had too much, when it came down to it. He was well aware Lesami considered him a painfully conventional, mindlessly obedient Jedi, if perhaps a comparatively inoffensive one. Boring, but not particularly annoying, if that made sense.

Honestly, he'd always found her opinion of him somewhat amusing — the High Council certainly didn't think he was particularly conventional or obedient. He hadn't been thought of too well even since his apprentice days, though his reputation on Coruscant was thoroughly ruined now. In certain circles, he was blamed for Alek and Lesami, all the Revanchists, for yet another fracture through the heart of their Order. Oh, they didn't lay all the blame at his feet, certainly not, and they never came out and said it. But they didn't truly have to, he could feel it in their eyes, the coldness on the air everywhere he went.

There was a reason he'd left the capital for Dantooine: he was now permanently tainted by association with Lesami, but the Jedi on the fringes tended to be far more forgiving of that sort of thing.

(Of course, he did appear painfully conventional and mindlessly obedient compared against Lesami's own master, but by the standard set by Kreia so did they all.)

But, for all that he wasn't Lesami's favourite person to associate with, neither had she ever found him especially irritating. He just wasn't certain he would be welcome right now. The war had changed her, certainly, she and Alek had come seeking the quiet and isolation of Dantooine for a reason. (Or so they claimed and the Council believed, Zhar himself was less than certain.) She was alone, even Alek was nowhere to be seen, and it was very likely she would prefer to remain alone.

He couldn't say for certain because, as usual, Lesami was nearly impossible to read. In the way of many of the more...intense Jedi, she burned in the Force, so brightly it almost hurt to look too closely, the more subtle shades of mood and intent harder to pick out. He could figure it out if he truly wanted to, of course, but to filter out all the noise would require directly touching her mind — that was far more intrusive than a simple whim to sate his curiosity could possibly justify. He doubted she would mind too much if he did, and she could certainly keep him out if she wanted to, but neither of those facts held any bearing on the fundamental immorality of the act itself.

And she did feel somewhat...different. It was subtle, but he knew her well enough, had known her long enough, that he could tell at a glance. She hadn't dimmed at all, no, if anything she'd only grown more powerful, more unignorable. But she seemed somehow sharper, somehow Darker — burning so bright, yes, but the brightest fire casts the deepest shadow, death and blood lingering unspoken under the surface.

Somehow...brittle. Like glass, hard and smooth and clear to the eye, but one good hit could send it shattering into scattered pieces.

He didn't know how much of that was an accurate impression of her state of mind or simply his imagination, what he wanted to see. For all that trauma could lead one easily into the Dark Side, the thought she could possibly have gone through the war, seen so much and done so much, things messy and underhanded and at times just plain horrifying, the thought that she might have come out the other side untouched by it all was...unsettling.

Some of the other Masters worried Alek and Lesami had been corrupted by fear, by anger, by the terrible thrill of battle and death. Personally, Zhar found the possibility that they could have become deadened to it all far more concerning.

(Apathy laid the foundation for the greatest of evils, as Kreia liked to say.)

So, while he wasn't certain she would welcome his company, neither was he certain he wanted to leave her alone. He did rather miss Alek and Lesami, no matter how he would deny such sentiments in the range of certain ears — he'd known them for years, for most of their lives, he'd taught them and traveled with them, he'd watched them grow up, it was only natural — but it wasn't that, not really. Certain things shouldn't be let alone to fester, and so coming off the war as she was, with the state of the galaxy yet so very tense and uncertain, if an opportunity to speak with her in confidence were handed to him he didn't think it wise to let it slip by. Yet at the same time, it would do no good to press himself on her if—

Lesami let out a thin sigh, hardly audible over the incessant prairie wind. "You might as well get over here, Zhar. A proper conversation would be no more distracting than looming over my shoulder."

Of course, she had noticed his presence, he shouldn't have expected otherwise. With a somewhat rueful smile, he walked closer, until he actually was looming over her shoulder. At this angle, he could see there was a datapad in her lap — the screen was black, she must have turned it off as he'd approached. "I didn't mean to loom. I wasn't certain whether you'd want to see me."

Lesami glanced up to give him a bemused sort of look, lips twisted and eyebrows skewed. "Why would I not want to see you?" He still couldn't read her — in fact, it was only more difficult to make out anything distinctive from this close — but she did sound honestly confused.

For some reason, he smile turned rather more genuine. "Perhaps I was overthinking it."

"Nice to see some things don't change, I guess."

Well.

Zhar took a seat next to her, and for long moments they said nothing, staring out over the little lake. He did rather like it here, no matter how foreign such a world was to him — he'd been born on Coruscant, the duracrete and steels and plastics had been all he'd known as a child, the pressing minds of the multitudes. He'd been to less populated worlds before, of course, but he'd never stayed on one so long. It was still somewhat strange, at times, some instinctive part of him still alien to such a place, but he found he did enjoy the quiet.

Given that she seemingly felt no need to talk, calmly sitting there, Lesami felt much the same.

In the end, he did speak first, choosing something innocuous, something safe. "You know, I didn't realise you even had a Navy uniform." She'd shown up in the thing, the unornamented black and Republic red of an enlisted crewman, and had apparently seen no need to take up Jedi dress again. (She never had much liked the robes, he recalled, had always avoided them when possible.) It was both an odd look for a Jedi and an entirely unfamiliar one. Some of the Revanchists had adopted appropriate military dress, yes, but Lesami was one of the ones who hadn't, sticking to her elaborate Revan costume.

And even now that the ruse was no longer necessary, it was...peculiar. He meant, she had been Supreme Commander for a time there, and she hadn't relinquished her leadership of the defectors out on the rim — if she did mean to play the part, she should be dressed as an admiral, not the lowest of officers. Of course, even on its own the uniform looked strange, conspicuously barren without any insignia of rank at all. It was said, her people had removed them, loaded them all onto a shuttle — along with thousands of recorded messages for the Senate, the rest of the military leadership, and even friends and family — and sent the thing on autopilot all the way to Coruscant.

Zhar guessed that was one way to tender a resignation.

Lesami glanced down at herself, shrugged. "I don't, I borrowed this for the trip. I didn't have a whole lot in the way of appropriate clothing with me on the Vigilance, believe it or not. And I thought dropping in in the Revan getup might have...caused a stir."

"Yes, a stir," he said, chuckling a little, "if you want to call it that. You might well have given poor Vrook a heart attack."

She scowled. "Ugh, Lamar is a pain."

He tried to hold in a smile at the unexpected (but familiar) childish petulance, but didn't quite manage it. "I take it you don't like him much."

"Excuse me, I don't like him? The way he talks to me you'd think I spent the whole war scorching cities to glass from orbit, or something."

"Yes, well. Vrook is...sensitive, to young Jedi leaving the Order as you and your friends have. He knew Exar Kun personally, you understand, the matter is nearer to home for him than many of the rest of us."

Lesami sniffed, shaking her head to herself. "Honestly, comparing us to Kun's Brotherhood? They betrayed the Order, and started a war to bring the Republic to its knees; the Order betrayed us, exiling us for fighting in a war to save the Republic. Those are hardly the same thing."

Zhar wasn't comfortable with Lesami's characterisation of events, but he couldn't say it was wrong, exactly. It was more complicated than she made it sound. "I don't mean to suggest they are. I don't think Vrook is capable of being entirely rational when it comes to these matters."

"He's a bitter old arse, stop making excuses for him."

Well.

"I can't say I honestly expected much else from his kind, but I should think at least a little gratitude would be in order. Here on Dantooine, they may have been far from the war, but I don't imagine Lamar would have been very happy if the Republic collapsed under its own weight from the pressure of the Mandoade invasion. And that is what would have happened, nobody in the know disagrees on this — the Mandoade hadn't the resources to hold the core, but it didn't matter, the Republic would have fallen apart in any case. If the Jedi had had your way, our grand project of twenty thousand years would be over."

Zhar couldn't honestly disagree with the core of her argument — even from the distance he had been at, it was quite clear that the Mandalorian invasion had presented an existential threat. In fact, semi-official ostracisation for his vocal disagreement on the High Council's approach to the war, not truly endorsing the Revanchists but not quite condemning them either, was a large part of why he'd left Coruscant in the first place. It wasn't the overall point, but a few choices of diction that concerned him. "If the Jedi had had our way? Are you not a Jedi any longer?"

Lesami shot him another dubious look. "Not according to the Council."

"That's not entirely accurate. You were never officially exiled, back at the beginning." When the original Revanchists had been cast out from the Order, Lesami hadn't actually been on the list — Zhar was certain the Council had known who Revan was, but even while she was tearing the Order apart they'd respected her desire to keep her identity hidden. He could only assume some faction among them had realised what she was doing was necessary, no matter how much they might not like it, so had endeavored to avoid sabotaging her, even while vilifying her and her followers. "Even now that everything is out in the open, they haven't exiled you, yet."

She snorted. "No, they're hoping I'll recognise their authority over me and meekly slink back to Coruscant to submit myself and my comrades to their judgement."

"You're...probably not wrong about that." It was curious, after all, that they hadn't revoked her membership as they had all the others, but instead ordered that she return and bring all of her Revanchists with her. Hers was a reasonable conclusion. "If so, I really must question their wisdom. You were never the most obedient of Jedi, and I can't imagine the last few years have done anything to remedy that."

Her lips twitching with a repressed smirk, Lesami drawled, "That would be a safe assumption."

"If I may ask: what are you doing here, then?"

"Hmm?"

"If you have no intention of rejoining the Order — and do give me some credit, Lesami, I don't buy the story you gave the rest of the— If you aren't coming back, why are you here?"

Lesami stared at him for a long moment, her expression frank, evaluating. As though it were laid out before him, he could see she was weighing potential consequences, how much she could trust him. She moved to speak and, before even a single syllable had passed her lips, Zhar knew she'd decided she couldn't. "How much do you know about the Builders?"

He blinked. "What?"

A bit of fiddling with her datapad, and she passed it over, opened on an archeology index, he saw at a glance. "All across the galaxy there are relics of an advanced people long-vanished. The holocron is perhaps the most common example — the Kwa are often credited with it, but what little records we have of them suggest they borrowed it from another, older civilisation. The records we have on the invention of the hyperdrive explicitly state Durese and Corellian scientists collaborated to reverse-engineer technology found in old wrecks drifting out-system for who knows how long. The same is true of the hyperspace beacons — some of them were discovered by the Republic, not built but modified to interface with our technology.

"Those are the mundane examples, but some are far more impressive, things we can hardly imagine doing ourselves. The Dawn Pyramid on Aargau, the Temple of Esraza. Then there are projects at enormous scale, entire planetary systems. I don't know if you've looked at the orbital mechanics of the Corellian system, but it's simply impossible — there is no natural process that could ever result in five habitable planets around a single star, even just the double planets of Talus and Tralus, no, that just doesn't happen on its own. Some think even the Hapes cluster is artificial, which, there is good reason to believe so.

"And it's not just ruins and relics, there are stories as well. Dozens of peoples all around the galaxy tell of older races, some depicted as benevolent and some not so much. There are tales of similar-sounding alien technology, gifts and enslavement in equal measure, even strikingly similar motifs in art that hint at a common contact. Modern civilisations whose early days stretch back that far — the Columi, the Gree, the Herglics, the Hutts — they all have preserved fractured records of that time, speaking of a civilisation far older than they, and a devastating war that saw their downfall.

"All the stories agree that this most ancient of peoples had mastered technology far beyond what we have now. And I wonder, sometimes, what we might rediscover, if we look carefully."

Throughout Lesami's surprisingly long and energetic ramble on such an unexpected subject, Zhar could only stare at her, blankly blinking. Even when she'd finally stopped, it took him some moments to find his voice, too dumbfounded to speak. "That's... That's it? That's the only reason you're here, to poke through what our library might have on these Builders of yours?"

The silly girl had the nerve to look confused at the disbelief on his voice. "Yes. Well, no, not really — I believe the ruins scattered across Dantooine are some of theirs, and since this world was never significantly developed by a successor culture they should be relatively intact. But whatever the Jedi might have in the library is worth looking at too, yes."

Zhar let out a sharp scoff. He tossed the datapad back to her, his head shaking, hard enough his lekku shifted against his shoulders. "Sometimes you still surprise me, Lesami. I suppose it shouldn't, but that you would do something like this now..."

"What are you talking about?"

"Do you have any idea how dangerous the current state of things is?" Zhar heard the emotion on his own voice, instantly cut himself off. He paused a moment to breathe, releasing his frustration into the Force, desperately grasping for calm. (Lesami, surprisingly, waited.) "Lesami, your defectors make up a quarter of the entire fleet."

She met his eyes, every hint of levity, of casual camaraderie completely gone. "Yes."

"You can't possibly think anyone in the Republic is taking this well."

"I don't imagine you are, no." He didn't miss the implication in her choice of pronouns — you, not we, you. That wasn't a good sign.

"Lesami..." He took another slow breath, in and out. "What are you doing? Playing around with this nonsense at a time like... We're sitting on the edge of a civil war, Lesami, you have to know that. If you're not here to start moving toward a reconciliation, what are you doing?"

She didn't answer, for a long moment. Turning away from him, she looked out over the little lake — appearing still and calm to the casual eye, yes, but only on the outside. In the Force she appeared something quite else, tense and shadowed, something bitter and frustrated and...determined.

Something dangerous.

Finally she spoke, her voice low and slow, heavy with something more implied than directly said. "Reading about things like the Builders, it's all so clear how large the galaxy is, how long history. How small we are by comparison — one life among trillions, a few decades out of thousands. And yet, for all that..."

"Lesami..."

"Do you ever wonder, Zhar," she said, turning to meet his eyes, hers dark and heavy, "what people will say of this moment in history? Ten years from now, a thousand, ten thousand? From a distance, how this will all look, what will they think about what we choose to do, how we choose to do it? How will this moment be remembered, long after all but historians have forgotten our names?"

It took some effort to keep his irritation off his voice, but he mostly managed it. "Clearly Kreia was a terrible influence on you — don't couch your intent in riddles, Lesami, just come out and say it."

A smile flickered at her lips, just for a second. "This may seem like a dangerous moment, Zhar, but in the end this moment is so very small. We can't let passing uncertainty and fear dissuade us from doing what our position demands of us."

"That's not really any clearer."

"How about this, then? I will do what I feel is right with the circumstances I am presented with, evaluated from my understanding of the totality of all our fellow sapient beings and the ephemeral moment we find ourselves in. It doesn't matter what the Senate or the Council or anyone else tries to tell me to do — they are but a tiny few among an uncountable many, their interests no more important than anyone else's. I don't think you expect anything less of me.

"Now, if you'll excuse me..." She smoothly pushed herself up to her feet, the datapad vanishing into a pocket, her paired lightsabers clinking against her belt. "...Alek is back with our speeder, and we have work to do. Until next time, Master."

"Yes." Zhar stared at her back as she walked off, steps even and casual, and his fingers twitched to...

To do what, exactly? Whatever it was she was planning to do, he doubted he would at all approve — he hardly ever had approved of these insane ideas Lesami got into her head, she always had been...radical, foolhardy. He might well find himself standing against her, whatever it was she meant to do this time. It even felt quite likely.

The entire Republic had been holding their breath, since so much of the fleet had defected. They were all possessed of a quiet dread, waiting for the next step. Nobody he'd spoken with thought it would end well.

But, well, Lesami wasn't wrong: he didn't expect anything else of her. She would do what she felt she must, as she had for years now. He doubted he could convince her, stop her.

He could only hope, watching the girl he'd once known leave him behind once again, that she wouldn't do anything too foolish this time.

By the time they sent the boy for her, Juhani had already been awake for hours.

She'd known she'd be called to the Masters eventually, though that's not why she'd already gotten up — no, she hadn't had much choice in the matter. It'd been dusk, when they'd gotten home last night, but it hadn't really been properly late yet. Juhani had gone pretty much straight to bed — she'd been tired, she didn't think she'd ever been so tired in her life — so the natural time to be awake was hours before it was quite necessary.

She had still been in her room when the little apprentice boy had come for her. (She didn't recognize him, but she didn't know most of the children, they had little reason to interact much.) She hadn't really done much of anything since waking up, in the dead hours of the early morning, everything quiet and still and heavy. If anyone bothered asking when she'd been doing sitting in her room for hours, which she doubted anyone would, she'd probably say she'd been meditating — that was an appropriate thing for a Jedi to be doing with her time, they were expected do a quite unreasonable amount of meditating on a regular basis. But she hadn't been, really, she'd just been...

...waiting.

That's what it felt like, like she was waiting for something. She couldn't say exactly what. For this meeting with the Masters? That would make sense, but she didn't really think so. It was something both less and more than that, something not entirely conscious, something she anticipated without really knowing what it was. Something was supposed to happen, she knew that, something big and important.

It didn't feel right, somehow. Being back at the Enclave, in this room. She didn't know why, it just didn't.

When the boy came for her, first thing in the morning, said the Masters were waiting for her, it'd almost felt like what she'd been waiting for. Almost, but not quite. Because as she got up — she was stiff from sitting in one place too long, still so tired, her body feeling heavier and clumsier than it should be — it did sort of feel like a resolution, that unspoken anticipation coming together, but...not entirely. If anything, as the boy led her through the yet quiet halls of the Enclave, she only felt all the more tense, all the more uncertain.

Juhani didn't know what she was doing here. This didn't feel right, somehow.

The windows in the Council tower were aflame with sunrise — it was still early, the sky all reds and yellows, the shadows long, the first glare of proper sunlight shining against the glass. Backlit as they were, the Masters' faces were in shadow, their features rather more difficult to pick out than they usually were. There was a peculiar tension in the air, something thick and heavy, waiting. Or maybe that was just her. Their faces too dark to make out, she only had their presence in the Force to go on, and the Masters of the Council were all so bright and overwhelming, and they never really changed much moment to moment, it was impossible to tell.

Through the oppressive silence, Juhani walked to the center of the circle at the middle of the room. She folded her hands behind her back, mostly to keep herself from fidgeting. And she waited.

(She counted the figures around her, realized Quatra wasn't here. She tried not to think about that.)

"You have returned to us." Tokare's voice was its usual low grumble, even and steady, completely emotionless. Which wasn't at all helping her read the mood of the room.

With no better ideas what she should do, she simply said, "Yes."

"You have done well, Juhani."

For a few seconds, the words simply didn't process. She stood there, blinking at them like an idiot, that tension, that anticipation dissolving into confusion. She hadn't thought that was something she'd ever hear from the Council. She thought they'd never welcome her back, ever. She'd been mostly certain they would have her killed.

When Cina had found her, that's what she'd thought, that the Council had sent someone to execute her for the murder of her Master, for her fall to the Dark, for her betrayal. Of course, no, of course they hadn't, thinking the Masters would have her summarily killed really was quite ridiculous. They were Jedi, after all. She simply hadn't been in her right mind at the time. And when Cina had made it clear that hadn't been at all what she was there for, that she only wanted to talk, she wanted to help, that she'd killed her Master and made an (admittedly childish) attempt to embrace the Dark Side and they still weren't taking her seriously, she...

It'd been humiliating. It was still uncomfortable to think about.

The point was, it hadn't taken long for Cina to explain she hadn't killed her Master, Quatra was still alive and well. Which, that had also been humiliating, in a way (though perhaps that wasn't quite the right word), that Quatra hadn't come for her herself, she'd sent some stranger to drag her back instead. She hadn't known what to think about that then, didn't know what to think about Quatra not being here now.

Juhani had been completely convinced Quatra was dead, completely convinced the Council would cast her out or simply kill her for it. Even if she'd survived, attacking in anger and seriously injuring your Master wasn't exactly acceptable behavior for a Jedi. It was hardly better, really.

She certainly hadn't expected anything that sounded even remotely like approval.

It took quite a while to find her voice. When she finally did, all she could think to say was, "I don't understand."

It was Lamar who answered, his normally sharp voice only slightly blunted. Juhani heard him, but not really, the words cresting over her head. She couldn't pick out the words, too dazed to sort through them one by one, but the meaning filtered through all the same. Something about how they were living in dangerous times, and the temptation of the Dark Side, and all apprentices needing to face it in a relatively controlled setting, and that...

...she'd passed her trial.

Except, she hadn't, not really. She knew about this, the trial they were talking about. It was something all Jedi were expected to undergo in one way or another before their ascension to full knighthood, that they would somehow come face to face with the Darkness in the universe and in themselves. That they would face it, and reject it.

But she hadn't rejected it.

She realized now that she'd had no idea what she'd been doing, she'd just... She hadn't known what the Dark Side was, not really. Not until Cina had looked at her with eyes empty and cold as the depth of space, had thrown fire and lightning at her, power pulsing off of it thick and sickening and wrong, it'd been terrifying and horrifying, she'd recoiled from it instinctively, and then...

...and then Cina had gone back to normal. She did burn in the Force, hot and bright and...not Dark, certainly not that, but not exactly like a Jedi either. It was hard to explain.

But that wasn't right. It was said, the Dark Side was a corruptive thing — once someone had touched it it became a part of them, it would rule them forever, there was no truly escaping it. That was part of why she'd thought the Masters would... She was lost forever, there was no going back. But Cina had been filled with it, for the blink of an eye, and then, in another blink, it'd been gone.

Just as Juhani had touched it, much more superficially, and yet here she stood. Presumably it hadn't done anything permanent, the Council was right there and if they'd noticed they would have said something...

(Though she did feel...weird.)

But, if that had been her trial, certainly she'd failed it.

Her trial.

That...had been a test? Quatra, when she'd said...

That had been a test?

She'd done it on purpose. Quatra had, on purpose, said just what she thought she had to to make Juhani angry.

To make her hurt.

She'd done it on purpose.

For the shortest moment, the thought suffocated before the Masters could feel anything wrong, Juhani wished she hadn't come back.

She coasted through the rest of the conversation on autopilot, she took in very little of it. Which was quite unfortunate, really, she would think — Juhani had dreamed of little else but becoming a Jedi Knight, ever since the Revanchists had liberated Taris when she'd been a child. And here the moment had come, her official investiture as a full member of the Order, and she barely heard a word of it. She was hardly present, just...drifting.

It'd been a test. Quatra had done it on purpose.

This was wrong, she shouldn't be here.

She was released, eventually, with much praise and congratulation, and she was back in the hall. The tall double doors clicked closed behind her, and Juhani stood there for a moment, staring at the wall across from her.

She should be happy, that she was a full Jedi Knight now. (Or, would be, as soon as the Masters' commendation got back to the Temple on Coruscant and it was confirmed.) She should be angry, that Quatra had done it on purpose, that she'd tried to hurt her on purpose, just as a test. (A test that, Juhani couldn't help but think, might be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Dark Side.) She should be confused, about that — that she'd touched the Dark and come back, that Cina could submerse herself in it and come out unscathed — it contradicted everything she'd been taught, ever since she'd come here, young and alone and so desperately hopeful.

Instead she felt nothing.

Slowly, as though on autopilot, Juhani turned, drifted through the halls of the Enclave. She was nearly at the refectory when she paused, staring blankly at the glass wall separating it from the courtyard. She could see them in there, the other Jedi of the Enclave, feel their minds warm and soft and smooth, the low murmur of whispered conversation slipping through the door. Her peers now, many of them, and looking at them, the thought of going in there to have breakfast, she...

Something was wrong. She shouldn't have come back.

A few minutes later, she was lying in the grass at the edge of a pond, staring up at the gentle swaying of the leaves over her head. She didn't remember Cathar, not really, her parents had left well ahead of the Mandalorian invasion. And lucky they did — the Mandalorians had wiped out over ninety percent of all the people on her homeworld, she'd likely have been killed with them. She knew, mostly from descriptions in the library, that Cathar was in many ways quite similar to Dantooine: it was a world of endless rolling plains stretching horizon to horizon, patched here and there with thick forest. Though, for whatever reason, the flora of Cathar had developed to a monolithic scale, these forests stretching to the skies like skyscrapers of bark and leaf, large enough cities had been carved along their trunks and sprawling across their branches.

(The wildlife was of a scale with the trees, apparently — the fauna of Cathar were famously large and infamously deadly, her people adapted physically and culturally to survive in the hostile environment. It was assumed that was part of why the Mandalorians had been so interested in their world in particular.)

She had only the vaguest memories, more feelings than anything. Sitting in the open air, under the branches of these much smaller trees, the wind chattering through the leaves and tickling at her fur, she could almost taste it — a life long gone and mostly forgotten, simpler and cleaner and safer.

Juhani knew that, for a while after moving to Taris, she'd been absolutely miserable. She'd hated it, at first, absolutely hated it, the still air and the synthetic landscape, everything hard and cold and dead and wrong, but in time she'd gotten used to it. She'd thought she'd forgotten all about her homeworld, until she'd found her way to Dantooine and it'd felt almost like coming home, some deep, instinctive part of her relaxing.

Unfortunately, no matter how much she might be comfortable with the world, she'd never grown quite so comfortable with the Enclave, and the other Jedi in it.

"Hello, there."

Her heart jumping up into her throat, Juhani popped up to sitting, scrambling to face the man who'd snuck up on her. (Trying not to look as guilty as she felt, with that last thought she'd just had, belatedly remembering she shouldn't feel guilty either, a Jedi would notice that...) She was rather surprised to see it was Rhysam, the Zeltron wanderer who'd appeared a few weeks ago. She was certain they'd never spoken — she wasn't the most sociable person to begin with, but she'd been avoiding Rhysam in particular.

Juhani glared at him for a long moment, what had to be nearly a minute, before realizing she never had responded. Oops. "Oh, hello."

A smirk twitched at the man's soft human lips, dark eyes dancing in the thin morning light. "What are you doing out here, kid?"

"Am I not allowed to be out here?"

"Oh, you are, of course." Completely ignoring her continued glaring, the older Jedi sank to the ground next to her, flopping back to lay down in the grass. "I just thought you'd be hungry. You know, after hanging out in the wilderness by yourself for who knows how long."

...He wasn't entirely wrong, Juhani couldn't remember the last she'd eaten. She had during those days, she knew that, it was just kind of...fuzzy. She certainly hadn't eaten very much, or very often, so she should probably be hungry.

(Instead she felt nothing.)

But she didn't want to talk about that. She'd rather not talk to this man at all, in fact, but she doubted she had much choice in the matter. "What do you want?"

"Nothing much — Cina just told me about your little adventure, and I thought I'd check in."

Juhani felt her face twist into a snarl, just for an instant before she caught herself. "You mock me."

"What part of that sounded like mockery, exactly? Believe me, when I do mock you, you'll know." One of his eyes peeked open, squinting up at her. "Would you relax? Really now, I'm not here to be an asshole. I just thought I'd see how you're doing now, since Cina is busy dealing with the Council at the moment."

"How much did she tell you?"

"How am I supposed to know? I only know what she told me, so I can't possibly know what proportion that is of all there is to know, you know?"

Juhani could pretend to be surprised that Cina had gone babbling about what had happened in that grove to Rhysam, but she wasn't, really. As much as she did tend to keep to herself, even Juhani had heard the gossip going around about the two of them — she doubted there was anyone in the Enclave who didn't know they were sleeping together.

What she didn't know was why the Masters were seemingly doing nothing to intervene, or even openly express disapproval. But that wasn't really her business.

She didn't know what to think about Cina telling Rhysam about it, or what she was supposed to say now. The whole thing was just sort of...

Well, it didn't really matter what Juhani said to him, did it? It wasn't like anything potentially incriminating would get back to anyone who mattered — she hadn't missed that most of the other Jedi had no clue what to do with Rhysam either, the only person at the Enclave he really spent that much time around was Cina. The Masters hadn't seen fit to explicitly censure him, but that didn't mean that everyone else approved of him, or quite knew how to talk to him. Juhani never had spoken to him, no, but she'd heard he was a bit...odd. Which, to be fair, that wasn't particularly unusual for an independent Jedi, trained and operating outside the influence of the High Council. There were quite a few of those, Jedi who'd refused to conform to the Exis Reformations and their students, and they never did quite fit in with mainline Jedi culture.

Which was...fine, she thought? Sure, the High Council, and the various other subordinate Councils at Enclaves and Temples around the galaxy, did say these defectors were in the wrong, that they were at greater risk of falling to the Dark. But, at the same time, they'd made no moves to oppose them directly, no efforts to force them to rejoin the Order. So it was probably fine. Maybe.

Though, it did make her wonder. If there were Jedi who lived outside the prescriptions of the High Council, whose eccentricities were tolerated for the most part, didn't that mean... Well, didn't it make the Council's claims of what was necessary to avoid the corruption of the Dark Side a bit...fuzzy? She meant, that some people just flatly ignored the Reformations after the last Schism, designed with the intention to prevent another, didn't that sort of suggest the Reformations were unnecessary? It certainly seemed to.

(The Revanchists had mostly been trained in the post-Exis Order, so it kind of looked like they didn't work, either...)

If the Reformations weren't intended to stop another Schism, Jedi falling to the Dark, what were they for?

It was probably politics — the Jedi had roped the entire Republic into a civil war, after all, it wasn't unreasonable for the civilian government to demand reform. Juhani didn't like thinking about that possibility, though. It made her feel...uncomfortable.

But, the point was, Rhysam was already living outside the strictures of the Order. He wasn't particularly likely to judge her for not perfectly living up to the image of a proper Jedi, or run to tell the Masters about it. It wouldn't be like talking to any of the Masters, or even some of her fellow apprentices. She didn't have to censor herself.

"I don't understand what's going on."

She'd blurted it out, without really thinking about it. One of Rhysam's eyebrows ticked up, giving her a sort of evaluating look, his presence in the Force still and steady. "What don't you understand?"

"I..." Juhani hissed, turning away from him. For a long moment, she looked out over the pond, trying to organize her fuzzy thoughts. "Did Cina tell you what happened, when I left the Enclave?"

"You attacked your Master, right? That stuffy human woman with the nasally voice... Quatra, was it?"

Juhani half-expected to feel annoyed with Rhysam bad-mouthing her Master — she certainly had had issues with people doing that in the past, over far less problematic statements. Instead she felt nothing. "Did Cina tell you why?" She hadn't spelled it out for Cina either, exactly, but she hadn't needed to. Cina had understood without Juhani needing to explain anything more than the general outline.

(It was still hard to believe that Cina was only an apprentice, and a new one at that. She was far too powerful, far too practiced, far too perceptive to be anything but a Master.)

Rhysam let out a short hum. "Not really? Something about her being a bitch, but she didn't say exactly what."

Automatically, Juhani turned to chew him out for speaking of Quatra like that...and then stopped, frowning to herself.

She'd said those things, those horrible things, on purpose. She'd tried to hurt her. On purpose. Juhani wouldn't put it like that herself, but was Rhysam really wrong? She was extremely uncomfortable with the thought, but...

Shaking it off as best she could, Juhani moved on. "It was a test, I know now."

"Confronting the Shadow."

Juhani nodded — she recognized the term, a somewhat archaic one for an apprentice being forced to acknowledge the Dark within themselves, and turn from it. "Yes. And...I failed, I..." She gripped her knees to stop her hands from shaking, the echo of it lingering — her chest tight and hot, her vision narrowing to Quatra's face, her head full of thoughts vicious and bloody, and her lightsaber was in her hand, she could hear it, the thrum of barely-contained plasma, the hissing of superheated water as it sheared through— Juhani shook her head, swallowed hard, tried to work out the knot in her throat. "I was so...so angry.

"I, just, pulled out my lightsaber and cut her down, in an instant. I didn't think about it, I hardly realized what I was doing. I only thought of making her stop, I was so angry, and... I didn't really know what I was doing, I know now I know nothing of the Dark Side, but my fall was real. I meant to turn from the Light, even if I didn't know what that truly meant, I thought I already had. By any reasonable evaluation, I failed."

"Guessing by the fact that you're sitting here right now, the Masters don't quite see it like that." There was a faint hint of derision on Rhysam's voice — not for her, Juhani somehow knew, but directed at the Masters of the Council. This wasn't really a surprise either, refusing to recognize the authority of the Councils was what made Jedi like Rhysam different from the rest of them.

Juhani sniffed. "They congratulated me on my success, and promoted me. I don't... I don't understand. I failed, they should have... It just doesn't...seem right, somehow. I'm not explaining this very well."

"No, you are, I get it." Rhysam stopped there, but he wasn't done — she could feel it, not exactly a tension, but a deliberation, working through exactly how to say what he wanted to. "If the Masters aren't holding you responsible for your actions, clearly they don't consider you responsible for your actions."

"... I don't understand."

"It's quite simple, when you think about it. Take me, as an example, or the handful of other Zeltron Jedi around. We're not expected to hold to the rules against personal attachments the rest of the Jedi do. It's not just me, and not just Zeltrons — there are other highly social beings that get the same special dispensation. Masters have even written about it, that some beings require social attachment more than others, that forcing them to suppress their natural inclinations will only lead to psychological distress that will inevitably drive them into the Dark Side.

"You'll notice the Council here doesn't say anything about my more controversial behavior. If you go back to the records from Sesai's time on Coruscant, before the war, you'll see the Masters at the Temple there didn't try to stop him from developing personal relationships either. They were unhappy when those relationships were with other Jedi, they tried to get them to stop, but a Zeltron? No, they can't be stopped from doing what comes to them naturally. Clearly, we can't be held responsible for our actions."

The implication he was making was obvious. Juhani wasn't being held to the same standard another Jedi would be in her situation because the Council thought she couldn't be. That, at some level, what she'd done had simply been what was expected. She'd struck down her Master in anger, yes, but she'd turned from the Dark later, she'd come back in the end. That this was the best that could be expected of her.

That this was the best that could be expected of Cathar.

That was the implication, of what Rhysam was saying. That she was being given a pass, because Cathar couldn't be expected to control themselves the same way other beings could, so she wasn't fully responsible for her actions.

In a way, they weren't even entirely wrong. Her homeworld was a dangerous, violent place, that was certainly true — to adapt to their environment, her people had developed what much of the rest of the galaxy would consider a primitive, bloody warrior culture. She knew, from reading about it, that the Cathar psychological profile was noticeably different than that of baseline humans. To put it briefly, they were on a shorter fuse — their fight-or-flight response was more easily triggered, and they tended to prefer the former in most situations, weighting conflict over avoidance, anger over fear. When they weren't under threat, Cathar were of course just as rational and intelligent as anyone else, but...

It wasn't entirely out of nowhere, for the Masters to believe such a thing. But...

But they still...

She might have expected herself to feel angry, in this moment. Rhysam was implying (probably correctly) that the Council thought the same things of her she'd been hearing from her peers ever since she'd gotten here. That she wouldn't make it, that she wasn't suited to this life, that she didn't have the temperment to be a Jedi, not really. It was the same thing, she'd heard it over and over, for years.

It was the same sort of thing Quatra had said. Trying to hurt her, cutting to the core of those insecurities that had built over years, on purpose, the same thing, the same thing...

That the Council (might) think the same thing of her, she might have thought that would make her feel angry.

Instead, she just...

Maybe they were right. Maybe she didn't belong here, with them.

Which wasn't to say she didn't still want to be a Jedi, of course not! No, she'd never wanted anything else. But if she were being perfectly honest with herself...

Her original inspiration to seek to join the Order hadn't been the actions of proper Jedi. No, her inspiration had been the Revanchists, and by the time they'd come to Taris they'd long since ceased obeying the Council, ceased being proper Jedi. They weren't Sith yet, no, and her teachers here had always argued their rejection of the Jedi way of life was what had ultimately lead them to the Dark Side, but...

If that were so, why did nomadic Jedi like Rhysam still exist? Why were they not opposed with the same vehemence the Revanchists and later the Sith were? If it were simply about obeying the Council, she would think they would be considered equivalent evils. But no, the wandering Jedi of the galaxy were...almost revered in a way, some of them — some of the Masters operating outside of the Order were among the greatest and most highly-respected Jedi in their history, after Exis and stretching back long, long before.

The Council, clearly, did not dictate the only way to be a Jedi. Not really.

Maybe... Maybe she truly didn't belong here. People had always said so, and maybe they were right. But they weren't right that she couldn't be a Jedi, no — there was more than one way to be a Jedi.

She could be one of those wandering Jedi. Going where the Force guided her, acting as she willed, helping the people who needed help, whether she was ordered to or not, whether the Order or even the Republic wanted her to intervene or not. She could serve the Light as she thought was appropriate, she didn't need anyone to tell her what was the right thing to do. She could figure it out for herself.

The thought was rather scary — it was a precarious life, going along without support and without guidance, just...herself.

But, in a way, it felt...right. The idea of doing that, of being one of those unattached, nomadic Jedi, it felt right. More than this ever had, shut up in an Enclave in the middle of nowhere, listening to lectures and meditating and...

Maybe she didn't belong here. But maybe that was okay.

"If I wanted to..." Juhani trailed off for a moment, choked by a sudden flare of panic, that he would tell someone, that he woudn't– that he would laugh at her, or...

"Hmm?"

"If I wanted to do what you do, to just, go, and...do the wanderer thing. I don't know how to do that, I've never been on my own, and..."

Juhani wasn't looking at him, still staring out over the pond, but she didn't need to to feel the warmth of his smile on the air. "I suspect Cina's going to be given a mission in a few days here, a very open-ended, complicated sort of thing. We'll be leaving the planet together — she has a ship, you see. You can come with, if you like. I have the feeling there's a lot you can learn from the two of us."

She wasn't certain, still, that this was the right thing to do — Cina and Rhysam were hardly the most conventional sort of Jedi. But, despite herself, she almost thought she might be relieved.

There was something about this place. Cina could feel it on the air — an echo on the Force long since faded, something at once overwhelmingly powerful and incomprehensibly distant. So weakened with time what had once held imposing majesty was now faded and empty, bones of a much larger entity left to rot. A feeling leeched into the stone and the dirt and the living grass, subtle but present, of loss, of absence, a deep longing for what once had been, dwindled away over the millennia down to a black sort of faint nostalgia.

In a word, as she remembered Lesami saying in that vision she and Bastila had gotten, this place was mourning.

The debacle with Juhani settled to their satisfaction — though, their handling of the poor girl had only made Cina more certain the Masters were full of shite, which probably wasn't what they were aiming for — she'd finally been sent off to the ruins Lesami and Alek had investigated during their brief visit to Dantooine. Bastila had been uncomfortably silent the whole trip over, her mind feeling all too tight and anxious, but luckily it hadn't taken very long, the ruins sitting only a dozen kilometres east of the Enclave. Which might sound like a peculiar coincidence, that it was so close to where the Jedi had elected to settle, but it truly wasn't — Cina recalled that the Enclave was built overtop a sprawling subterranean ruin, presumably dating to the same period. It seemed plausible that there'd once been a city in the area, that the handful of ancient structures dotted here and there were all that remained.

The ruin itself was...curious. It reminded Cina of nothing else but tombs built by archaic megalithic cultures spread all across the galaxy. At the centre was what looked very much like a burial mound, a rounded hill of earth covered in a layer of short grasses, around the edge and poking through in a few places bits of brown-ish local stone and a gleaming black-silver metal. There were hints of some sort of embellishments, subtle and naturalistic, but it was mostly gone now, worn away over eons to leave behind only nubs. The sole clearly artificial part of it was a wide double door of that peculiar metallic substance, glinting in the shadows of an overhang of crudely-carved stone, itself looking very modern. It was an oddly anachronistic juxtaposition of construction methods, Cina could only assume that had held some sort of cultural significance for whoever had built it.

Surrounding the mound were what looked very much like standing stones, pillars with sharply-angled corners extending out from the centre like the spokes of a wheel, stretching up easily three times Cina's height. They weren't actually made of rock, instead more of that black metal she didn't recognise. In fact...

Leaving Bastila by the speeder — the younger woman seemed to be bracing herself, her mind hardening against the ruin's weight in the Force — Cina walked up to the nearest outcropping of metal, laid her hand against it. The thing felt unfinished, as though the builders had simply stuck pillars of raw, half-processed metal into the ground, but the texture felt too regular. Like a pattern were etched into the surface at a tiny scale, so small it was hardly even perceptible to the eye, for some arcane purpose she couldn't begin to guess. It felt...odd. Closing her eyes, she reached into it, searching its length, then further, following a feeling she couldn't quite express down into the earth, several metres under her feet, but the huge rod of metal didn't end, instead spread out, curving around in all directions into something like...

...like an antenna.

"Pardon?" At some point, Bastila had overcome her reluctance, now standing shortly behind her. She had a displeased, wary sort of look on her face, watching Cina very closely, as though waiting for her to do something unpleasant.

Which wasn't at all unusual behaviour for Bastila, Cina didn't let herself linger over it. "These big metal things sticking out of the ground all over the place? They're prongs of an antenna. We're standing on top of an enormous subspace relay."

Frowning to herself, Bastila turned, eyes scanning over the monoliths surrounding them. "That seems...impractical. I can't imagine a civilization that achieved interplanetary spaceflight could possibly need a device this large to transmit through subspace."

"You're right, of course. Working on a guess here, but I think this relay was designed to operate on as little power as possible with minimal maintenance for as long as possible. It feels to be harnessing the gravitational field of the planet itself to penetrate into subspace, so they don't need to use more intricate but less reliable methods."

Bastila's eyes went very wide. "Is that even possible?"

"Evidently, it is. Don't you feel that? The relay is still operational, who even knows how many millennia later."

"So if anyone's listening in, they know we're here."

Cina shrugged. "Possibly. But I doubt it — a relay like this, I suspect we'd feel it if it broadcast anything. In fact, I suspect that was the disturbance the Jedi felt when Lesami and Alek came here, a subspace radio operating on a planetary scale would definitely create some kind of echo on the Force."

"A reasonable assumption." Once again, Bastila warred against her clear wariness, face slowly smoothing out into blank Jedi placidity. "Should we move on?"

Cina considered pointing out that she'd been waiting on Bastila for a couple minutes now, but there would really be no point to that.

The closer they walked toward the door, the thicker that mournful echo in the Force became, a gradually increasing weight of sorrow hanging over their heads. (It felt rather similar to her own misery she'd been dealing with for a while there, if colder and less intense, but external, and thus far easier to ignore.) Before long they were stepping into shadow, standing before the door itself — it was rather modest in size, compared to the prongs of the relay just outside, Cina could reach up and touch the frame at the top, enough room for two people to walk abreast but not much more. But it was still built thick and heavy, blocky shapes of hard metal. There was no way they were breaking through that, it would probably take ages to burn through with their lightsabers — assuming they'd even have much success melting this stuff at all, which Cina honestly doubted.

Bastila was apparently coming to the same conclusion. "How are we supposed to get through this?"

Despite herself, Cina turned a smirk on the younger woman. "Here I thought we got the same vision. Weren't you paying attention?"

She scowled, just for a second before she caught herself, the expression again vanishing behind a mask of Jedi equanimity. "The experience was quite overwhelming, if you recall."

"Maybe for you, that one wasn't that bad by my standards — I really don't like visions."

"Yes, I've noticed that. Did you have an idea, then?"

"Just one." Cina reached out, not with her hand but with her mind, touching the door through the Force. There were some kind of symbols carved into the ether — somehow, the idea was both absurd and fascinating when she thought about it — a line of foreign script arching over the door, a steady throb of power restrained sitting fixed among the local currents. Without thinking about it too hard, Cina forced a tendril of power into them, and they flared into sudden life, rivulets of energy extending into the mound and—

Cina cringed as light and noise exploded all around her, a deafening rattling shaking her bones, sending her teetering against the doorframe, blinded by a flare of power brighter than the sun, and something enormous and unstoppable exploded into motion, surging around them, then down, then up, stretching up for the sky, and then far beyond it, casting a desperate plea out and out and out—

It took a moment for Cina to realise the earthquake and the fire she'd nearly been overwhelmed by weren't actually physical, instead something she felt only through this ridiculous sixth-sense absurdity, amplified due to her still being in direct contact with the thing making it. She pulled her mind away from the script above the door, and the flood of unpleasant sensations immediately dropped away, reduced to a subtle throbbing on the air more felt than heard.

At some point while she'd been distracted, the door had split, ponderously swinging open, the passage beyond entirely hidden in darkness. "I think it's safe to say the relay still works."

Bastila's face had gone rather pale, staring in a random direction above her head to the left. "Do you think, was that an alarm of some kind?"

"Hmm." It did sort of feel like that might be it — the shuddering of power in the air had already faded, the short, intense burst ending as quickly as it'd begun, but it had seemingly been directly tied to the door being forced open. "I suppose that's possible. The Builders are long gone, though, there's probably not anybody on the other side." It was possible there was a remnant of their civilisation somewhere out there, but...

"Except Malak, perhaps."

Cina shrugged. "I don't see why that should matter. It's not like he doesn't already want both of us dead — following along behind his and Lesami's inexplicable archaeological expedition might make getting rid of us more urgent, but we were already on his list."

For some reason, Bastila gave her a very strange look, narrow and suspicious, an echo on the Force of something that almost felt like fear, just for an instant before she caught herself. "Why do you say that? Malak certainly wants me dead, but should he even know you exist?"

Automatically, Cina opened her mouth to answer — of course Alek wanted her dead, probably more than Bastila, it was silly to suggest otherwise — and she froze before even getting the first syllable out. Because...well, how should he know Cina existed? She had the feeling, instinctively, that this was definitely true, that Alek really, really hated her and would stop at nothing to kill her, but she couldn't remember why this was. Some half-remembered something from the person she'd once been, she assumed.

Thinking about it, it felt oddly...personal. Which, on the one hand, that should come as a surprise, but it didn't really. She'd already been told she'd been one of the original Revanchists, so they obviously would have had some sort of personal history, even if she couldn't remember it now. More than that, it wasn't hard to imagine that history might have directly caused her 'death' — she recalled Bastila, when she'd initially asked after it back on Taris, had claimed she'd been injured in a friendly fire incident, there was probably a story behind that.

(That logic, that she'd ended up who and where she was because Alek or one of his people had attempted to have her killed, left her feeling strangely relieved. After all, if one of the less pleasant Sith had tried to get rid of her, she'd probably been one of the better ones.)

Luckily, that train of thought led her to a perfectly innocent explanation to give Bastila for what she'd just said. "Lestin told me I was one of the original Revanchists. If Alek finds out I'm still alive, it doesn't take much of a stretch to assume he'd consider me a traitor deserving of a horrible death. And it's quite likely he does know I'm alive, what with the cameras all over Taris — it's very possible Imperial intelligence spotted me and kicked it up to him. I mean, assuming I was someone important enough to be recognisable, and if I was one of the original Revanchists..."

Cina had been trying to reassure Bastila that the false memories the Jedi had stuck in her head were still in place, that she wasn't in danger of reverting to who she'd once been. She wasn't at all confident of that herself — that it would fall apart eventually seemed to be inevitable — but not the point. But Bastila didn't seem reassured at all. If anything, she only grew more terrified, her eyes going wide, a throbbing of terror blooming in the Force.

She was confused, just for a second. "Oh, that thought never occurred to you, did it? That the Sith probably know I'm back."

"No." Bastila was still another moment, before looking away again. She closed her eyes, took a couple slow, careful breaths; her mind gradually calmed over the next few seconds, as Bastila desperately grasped for that damn Jedi detachment. Once she was (mostly) calm again, she finally looked back to Cina. "We must be cautious. It is all too likely Sith agents will attempt to seek us out."

"Well, obviously — aren't you pretty much public enemy number one over there? I figured that was already a danger."

"All the same." Bastila took another moment, which was just bloody weird — who the fuck had Cina been, honestly... "We should move on."

The interior of the ruin was black as night, a single band of light pouring in from the open door, but otherwise lost in darkness. Bastila pulled her new lightsaber, the yellowish beam bathing their surroundings in soft, pale light. It wasn't bright enough to illuminate their surroundings fully — Cina's wouldn't help, too deep of a colour, and she somehow hadn't thought to bring a flashlight on a trip to explore subterranean ruins, fucking idiot — but it was enough to be getting on with.

The room they found themselves in was vaguely crescent shaped, curving along a section of the mound. It seemed to be constructed entirely of that same glittering black metal, though in here polished to a shine, and with a bit more colour worked into it, seemingly the same material, but shading into silvers, much of the outside wall a moody, blood red split with black-silver veins. The arching ceiling was covered in what had likely been a mural of some kind — the paint had all chipped off over the millennia, but there were still faint impressions of shape left behind, too thin and shadowed to make anything out.

Despite how large the room was, there didn't seem to be anything in it, just an open, empty, seemingly useless space, absent even any dust, the air heavy and stale. Cina could only assume there had been something in here originally, but whatever it was it'd long been emptied.

Directly across from the entrance there was a door, this one rather shorter and narrower. Cina poked at it for a little bit, pulling Bastila's saber closer by her wrist to get a better look at the faded script carved along the frame — by the complexity of the unfamiliar glyphs, composed of sharp points and organic curves, it was probably logographic — but the mechanism wasn't difficult to figure out. Set into the door was an impression of an alien, four-fingered hand. Pressing her own into the depression, Cina stretched out into the door, forced a pulse of energy, tinged red and black with a surge of frustration. There was a low rumble and the heavy metal barrier creaked open, a weak puff of air bursting through the gap. The air in there tasted different — thick with dust, old and dead.

"How did you know how to do that?"

Cina shrugged. "Instinct, I guess." It'd been obvious feeling it out the mechanism operated through the Force, somehow — that she needed to be annoyed with the door for blocking her way to get it to open had been a guess, but apparently a good one. It was possible Lesami or Alek had brought her along to another Builder site at some point, but she obviously wouldn't remember that, at least not consciously. "Come on, it's down here."

On the other side of this door was a narrow spiral stairwell, tightly twisting down under the earth. As she started down, she felt Bastila's eyes on the back of her neck, sharp and suspicious. "What's down here?"

"No idea, but I can feel something." It was hard to say what it was, exactly, just a subtle sense of...presence, of power, the slightest taste of lightning on the air. It was very vague, probably some low-power system idling. "Don't you?"

Bastila didn't answer, so Cina could only assume she did. She'd just let her paranoia get away from her again, because Bastila was bloody insufferable sometimes.

After some long moments padding down the stairs in silence, Cina chasing her own flickering shadow cast from Bastila's lightsaber, they finally reached the landing at the bottom. It was hard to tell exactly, but they had to be at least thirty metres underground by now — this far down, the density of the materials around them, whatever was down here would have survived anything less than a sustained fission bombing.

This room was rather smaller than the one above, maybe a dozen metres to a side and undecorated, though filled with scattered debris. It was hard to tell for sure — most of it looked to have been shattered to pieces millennia ago, some components dissolved into dust and others flaked and rusted — but Cina assumed it was some sort of computer equipment. Curiously, there was no scent of metal and plastics on the air. When things did get smashed to pieces like this, microscopic particles ended up being cast into the air, light enough to be caught in suspension. Either this had happened so long ago they'd all fallen out, and the metallic materials entirely surrounded with a thick oxidised layer to prevent more free ions from escaping, or the Builders' materials and/or environment control science were significantly different than theirs. Perhaps all of the above.

The most intact of the machinery was what was obviously a droid. It was a bit taller than an average human, though had a radically different body plan — it looked peculiarly squid-like, with a long, narrow central body supported and surrounded by thin, segmented limbs. Or so she guessed. It was a bit difficult to tell what it was supposed to look like, since it'd apparently been smashed against a wall at some point. The shininess of the exposed innards, the trail of noticeably thinner dust cut out of the path through the room to where it sat in a corner, its destruction was far more recent than the rest of the machinery in here. Presumably, Lesami and Alek had finished it off.

Which was really quite unfortunate — Cina would have liked the opportunity to talk to it. Not that they would have shared a language, but still, they were talking about a droid that was, presumably, older than the Republic itself. The scene suggested it'd still been operational just a scant few years ago, and they'd smashed it. A bloody crime against archaeology, that's what that was.

The only other door out of the messy room had, by the look of it, been physically torn off its hinges. (If Cina had to guess, the droid had attempted to refuse Lesami and Alek passage, to which they'd strongly protested.) The heavy door sitting just to the right, dust scattered from the impact, the hinges and locking mechanisms twisted and torn, it was all made of that same odd-looking metal, which had just been...ripped apart, but...

Okay, Cina knew Lesami had been exceptionally powerful with this Force magic shite, but the materials this place had been made of had to be durable as anything, just by dint of still being here. That she'd evidently just ripped the door out, that was seriously bloody impressive.

Cina couldn't help shooting a glance at Bastila — it was still hard to believe this girl had been involved in assassinating Revan, of all people. Presumably Kavar had done most of the legwork, but still...

They stepped through the ruined doorway — the faint feel of dust and decay on the air immediately vanished as they crossed the threshold, cool and stale — the steady glow of Bastila's lightsaber not nearly enough to illuminate the wide, high-ceilinged chamber. Much larger than the previous room, the walls were lost to shadows — at the very edges of visibility, Cina saw signs of decoration, intricate carvings of sinuous, twisting lines, broken with sharp angles in repeating patterns, shifting in and out of coherence at the slightest motion of Bastila's hand. As far as she could tell, the chamber seemed empty.

Before she could get too disappointed, she spotted something: a machine of some kind, a large device of silverish metal, three points arrayed around a central spire stretching to about Cina's shoulder, the edges sharply angled. She felt a faint sense of power tingling on the air — whatever it was, it was operational. Cina slunk closer, eyes steadily fixed on the thing, watching closely for any sign of movement. She had no bloody clue what it did, after all, paid to be cautious.

So when it split open — the spire splitting into three, triangular prongs, opening like a mechanical flower, blue-yellow light flaring at its core, bright enough Cina's dark-adjusted eyes stung, reflecting off the pale metal in shifting bands of colour and shadow — Cina's lightsabers found themselves in her hands with no thought from her at all. But she didn't activate them right away, just kept watching. There was something about that light at the centre, now spreading up the three arms, something familiar, it was seriously bothering her, she knew what this—

"It's a projector," she blurted out, even as she put it together, returning her lightsabers to their places on her belt. "A holographic projector — probably meant to fill the entire room, how big the thing is."

"You're not wrong, precisely—"

Cina's spine burst into distracting tingles, her heart leaping into her throat: that wasn't Bastila speaking. It boomed through the room, echoing around them, so she spun around, meaning to search the entire room.

But she didn't have to, she spotted the figure quickly enough. A few metres to her right, humanoid, slightly taller than Cina, modest, unadorned Mandoa armor in black and red, marked here and there with scuffs and scorched streaks, partially hidden with a plain, heavy black robe, nearly but not quite in the style of the Jedi. Cina recognised the figure instantly, she didn't need Bastila's half-panicked shout of her name to know this was Revan.

But it wasn't Lesami, not really — obviously not, she was quite dead. No, there was a subtle glow of actinic blue surrounding the figure, suggesting this was a hologram. It was very good though, the colours intense and the lines sharp, almost looked real.

"—but it's much more than that." The holographic Lesami's voice was distorted somewhat, some of its original character lost in being reproduced by her helmet's simulated speakers, though not quite as distorted as it had been in Revan's appearances during the war against the Mandoade. It did sound obviously feminine — she'd been pretending to be a man during the war, supposedly as part of a psyops thing directed at the Mandoade leadership — but still scratchy and messed up enough it didn't sound quite properly human. The upper-class Shawkenese accent, consonants clipped and vowels broadened, still came through clearly, though.

Cina recovered from fucking Revan, of all people, randomly appearing in hologram form before Bastila did. "Much more than a projector...how, exactly?"

"There are some peculiar inefficiencies and deficiencies involved in the technology of our predecessors." The fake Lesami paced toward the projector — the hologram was detailed enough it was even simulating the sound of the cloth of her robe shifting around, that was damn good work. With the feel of a professor at lecture, "You'll find they were behind us in a few areas, but far our superior in others. While the Laqʈaɦ had what we would consider only primitive artificial intelligence at their disposal, they did have a method whereby they could create an image of a person's presence in the Force, and build a computer system around it. It's a fascinating little shortcut, only available to beings who have mastered the exploitation of the Force alongside technology."

That...did sound quite fascinating, actually. "You mean like a holocron?"

Lesami spun, her cloak swirling up over her knees, and sank to a seat on one of the arms of the projector. The background glow of the projector interfered with the projection itself, the colours from her thighs halfway up to her ribs washing out, lines blurring somewhat. "Yes, exactly like a holocron. It's the same technology, in fact, the holocron is just a smaller, self-contained, and therefore simpler example. Systems like this one have access to far more processing power, so can come much closer to accurately recreating the personality the image was taken from."

"So, you are Revan," Bastila blurted out, finally finding her voice again. "Or, a copy of her, at least."

The hologram's thick, armoured shoulders rose and fell in a lazy shrug. "Yes and no. Just because the reproduction is better than a holocron can manage doesn't mean it's very good. Have you ever talked to any of those things? Honestly, I've spoken to droids with a more lifelike personality."

Cina had never even seen a holocron herself, but that claim didn't really surprise her — she'd met actual living beings who seemed more flat and artificial than some droids. "Okay. Why exactly was an image of Lesami copied onto this system then? Isn't this thing really, really old?"

"Oh, yes. Dantooine was settled by the Laqʈaɦ twenty-seven thousand years ago, at least, and this installation was one of their first here. This computer system wasn't part of the original construction, but it's still nearly twenty-five thousand years old."

Bastila gasped. "What? That's impossible!"

"I think you'll find Laqʈakś tech is remarkably durable."

"No, I don't—" She broke off with a wince, once again forced herself into something approaching calm. It was hard to tell, with the armour covering her entire body, but Cina got the feeling Lesami was amused. (Could... Could this simulation even be amused?) "If this installation were twenty-five thousand years old, that would make it older than the Republic itself."

"Yes, it would. I see the Jedi haven't neglected to teach their children basic computational skills."

Cina didn't quite manage to hold in a snort. Bastila sent her an absolutely venomous glare, she shrugged. "Hey, she's funny."

"I certainly like to think so. Can't tell you how many times Meetra and Talvon told me to shut my bloody mouth, though."

Those were Revanchists, Cina knew — Meetra Surik had disappeared around the end of the war, but Talvon Esan was one of the more infamously vicious Sith these days. "Take themselves too seriously, I'm guessing?"

"In Meetra's defence, she is pretty damn scary in a fight, but I've always thought she'd be happier if she got that stick out of her arse."

"Believe me, I know the type. But we should probably get back to business before Bastila here has an aneurysm or something."

"I am not going to—"

"That's nice, dear, the adults are talking."

Lesami let out a snort of laughter, her helmet's speakers reducing the sound to a burst of static. "Hey, I'm in no rush. You're the squishy mortals in the room, I have all the time in the universe."

...Squishy? "Right. Well..." Cina scrambled for a second, trying to remember what exactly the topic was supposed to have been \before they'd gotten distracted. "So, these Laqʈaɦ were the Builders, then?" She was pretty sure she'd pronounced that right.

"Yes and no."

"What is that supposed to mean?" Bastila sounded rather irritated, her mind feeling sharp but dark — annoyed with her (them?), but in a resigned sort of way.

"The concept of the Builders you're likely familiar with is founded on the assumption that it was a single precursor civilisation that left behind the few ruins and devices we've found over the millennia. The fact of the matter is somewhat more complicated than that.

"In the time of the Builders, there were a few races with their own limited, local enclaves — the Gree and the Columi are the big names you'd be familiar with — but galactic civilisation such as it was was composed of three different races. The eldest of these were who the Laqʈaɦ called Tsèʂarma-necjaɦ, literally translated 'those whose words come as fire'. Which is sort of ironic, given they were an aquatic species."

As the hologram spoke, more projections appeared in the air around her, presumably these Tsèʂarma-necjaɦ. They were peculiar-looking beings with a long, bulging, segmented body, near one end three eyes nearly the size of Cina's head (assuming these projections were to scale), the other end extending into a dozen long, sinuous tendrils, surrounding a toothy maw in the middle. They looked rather a lot like that ruined droid out there, now that she thought about it, if a bit wider in the body and with several more tentacles. There were a few of them faintly glowing in the air around them, swimming back and forth in swift lunges, dextrous tentacles working over bits of machinery, one poking at what Cina assumed was a computer terminal — there wasn't a single level control panel, instead multiple surfaces at different heights and angles, it was interesting.

"They were, so far as the Laqʈaɦ were aware, the very first civilisation in our galaxy to develop practical interstellar travel. Every single member of their species was Force-sensitive, so deeply ingrained in their physiology and their history that it was incorporated into their technology. All of it was operated through use of the Force, and usually even functioned through the Force — sometimes using it as a transformer, sometimes using it to cheat with certain calculations and projections. At its most extreme, the Tsèʂarma-necjaɦ could transform one form of energy or matter into another with far greater efficiency and accuracy than our modern elemental recombination could possibly match, essentially manufacturing complex devices out of nothing.

"Because his puns are terrible," the fake Lesami said, her voice stretching into a drawl, "Alek decided to call them squizards."

Cina winced. "Yeesh. Okay, we might have to kill him just for that."

"The real me did smack him over the head every time he said it, but that man is incorrigible. I swear, he just likes getting me worked up."

"Oh, does he now?"

"Shut up, you. Do you want to hear the rest of the story or not?"

Cina hesitated for a moment — this was pretty fucking fascinating, and where else was she going to learn about this stuff? Nobody back home knew anything about any of these people, supposedly they'd been gone even before Alderaan had been colonised, an event which was already prehistoric to them. But a quick glance at Bastila, and yeah, she clearly didn't have the patience for a long lecture on ancient civilisations from not-really-Revan. "Maybe I'll come back to hear more later, but for now just get back to explaining why exactly you're in the computer and what this place even is."

Lesami let out a long, staticy sigh. "Fine. Long story short, this installation was built by the Laqʈaɦ, these chaps." The holograms of the squid-like beings puttering around vanished, replaced with a few of a different species, this one looking more or less humanoid. Though they were rather tall, their limbs long and boney, ending in four-fingered hands, and their narrow, steeply-arched heads had an eye extending out of each side on thick stalks...which was strange, but alien species were strange sometimes. "Highly Force-sensitive as well, though rather more warlike than the comparatively gentle Kwa or the mostly solitary Tsèʂarma-necjaɦ. Big fucking arseholes, really, but that's a whole long thing, don't even get me started. Alek calls these ones Rakata, because he can't pronounce Laqʈaɦ and presumably couldn't come up with a suitably awful substitute.

"One of the features in their general terribleness was their feeling that they were simply too good for manual labour. Instead, if they needed or wanted workers to be doing things with their hands, they captured people from less developed worlds and forced them into slavery. The native Dantari, I assume, are the descendants of human slaves they brought to work the plantations that had once dominated this world — possibly taken right from Coruscant, or possibly not, the Tsèʂarma-necjaɦ used humans for labour too, apparently. They thought the Laqʈaɦ were absolute evil barbarians, but they were kind of full of shite, they were guilty of many of the same crimes they— You know what," the fake Lesami said, with an exaggerated shrug, "forget about that, if I get started I'll never stop."

Cina understood completely. "I take it the Republic wasn't exactly a trailblazer when it came to hypocrisy on a galactic scale."

"Not exactly, no. But anyway, short explanation. When the real Lesami showed up here, the security system recognised her and Alek as members of a slave species. Obviously, slaves weren't meant to be given access to these systems, so they were locked out. You may safely assume I didn't take that well."

"Yeah, I saw the droid, and the door. Your work?"

"The droid was Alek, actually — I was still trying to talk to it, but Alek always did prefer the direct option. Probably had the right idea, we didn't even speak any of the same languages. I did do the door, though."

"Damn impressive, by the way."

"Er, Revan? I am good at these things, you know."

Good point. "May I also safely assume that Lesami got frustrated with the computer not cooperating, and somehow replaced the image already on there with one of herself?"

"You may. That was far more of a stretch than forcing the door — she blacked out afterward for a good fifteen minutes, woke up with an awful headache. Alek near bloody panicked." The projection sounded almost on the edge of laughter, which... Okay, now that Cina thought about it, that would have been after this image had been separated from the real Lesami, so it hadn't really been her problem anymore. Still, almost frying her brain or something from pushing herself too hard doing ridiculous Jedi magic shite didn't seem particularly funny to Cina, but what did she know. "Technically, I still wasn't supposed to give them access, and I am bound to the programming on here just as much as the Lakʈaɦ before me was. But I found a loophole. Which, that Lakʈaɦ bloke could have done, he just had no reason to, and also didn't speak Basic, so couldn't be convinced."

"That sounded rather defensive."

"I murdered a twenty-five-thousand-year-old self-aware semi-artificial intelligence. Seems a damn good reason to feel the need to defend oneself."

Well, when she put it like that... "At least all the data on the system is still intact, right?" Even before she finished the sentence, she felt the flash of horrified disapproval from behind her. Turning an irritated glance back at Bastila, she said, "What? You realise this is a working computer dating back before the foundation of the Republic? Do you have any idea how valuable of a find this is? I've never heard of anything like it in all the galaxy, it's one of a kind!"

Bastila seemingly had nothing to say to that, gone wide-eyed and still. The fake Lesami's helmet titled a few degrees. "You haven't been with the Jedi long. Historian?"

"Linguist."

"Ah. Yes, all the data's intact. I can copy off all kinds of interesting stuff for you, if you like. Though, you'll need to learn to read the language first, of course — I've put together a dictionary and a grammar by cross-referencing the language processing agents in here, but I haven't had the inclination to actually translate much of anything." Lesami hopped off the arm of the projector, sidled a couple steps away. "I assume you'll be wanting this too, of course."

The projections of Laqʈaɦ wandering aimlessly around instantly vanished, replaced with an explosion of light, blue and yellow and white and red, all around them, filling the entire room. For a moment, it didn't look like anything at all, but her brain kicked into gear, innate pattern recognition picking away at it — it didn't help that she was standing inside the projection, she'd never seen a map of the galaxy from this angle before. Which, that was what the projection was: the galaxy, all the stars and nebulae, sketched in bands of light and shadow, at a scale large enough to fill the entirety of the cavernous computer room.

As confusing as it was, seeing it from the inside like this, it was rather pretty.

Despite that she did actually recognise what it was now, she had surprising difficulty orienting herself — she hadn't realised until just now how much she relied on the major hyperlanes being drawn out to make sense of the galaxy. With only the plain features, unmarked with any notation, it looked almost completely unrecognisable. After a bit of peering around, she started picking out familiar nebulae — first the Ghost Nebula, and that was Shindra's Veil... That little band of red right there, that might be the Ringali, so Chandrila should be right around there, and using that as a reference she could sort of guess where the Arrowhead would be, following the arm curving around that side of the core, but she couldn't say where any other familiar world should be with any sense of confidence at all, really.

It was rather strange, actually, realising just how foreign the galaxy was. Without the familiar trappings of modern civilisation framing it and sectioning it off, she could hardly make sense of the mess.

"Assuming you are following in my footsteps," the holographic Lesami said, lost somewhere in the haze of simulated starlight, "this is where you want to get." Somewhere out toward the edges of the galaxy — measuring its position between the core and the edge with her eyes, Cina guessed at about the range of the mid-rim, but it was hard to tell — a sharp-angled icon in reds and greens marked a particular area of space. A few seconds later, the projection shifted, zoomed in, the effect rather like jumping into hyperspace, stars and nebulae swirling and streaking around them.

Now the room was filled with a much simpler projection, only a single system — the projection wasn't to scale, the planets far too large compared to their sun, orbiting too closely relative to their size. A bit of looking around, and Cina counted three colourful gas giants and five terrestrial worlds, three smaller and two larger. One of the larger ones was covered in brilliant clouds yellow and orange — Cina knew from the colour that this world should be uninhabitable, a hothouse of intense heat and toxic gasses. The next orbit out, though, was a planet dominated by blue and green, massive cities sketched out in blocks and narrow filaments of grey and silver, the nightside thousands of lights in yellow and white. This planet looked rather a lot like Alderaan or Corellia or Chandrila, a settled C-class world that had managed to preserve the natural environment to an extent, an advanced civilisation living alongside the natural biosphere while not entirely replacing it as had been done in ecumenopoli like Coruscant, Alsakan, Shawken, and so many others in the core.

"This," the false Lesami said, appearing again next to the same planet Cina had just been examining, "is Lèɦjon, the homeworld of the Laqʈaɦ, as it appeared some twenty-five thousand years ago. Constructed in orbit around their sun is what came to be known as the Star Forge."

The projection shifted again. The wall to Cina's right suddenly exploded into white-yellow light — the surface of a star, only a few million kilometres away, far too close for comfort. Among the thin bands of outgassing and flares, setting the ordinary deep blackness of space to a soft glow, was an absolutely massive space station. Constructed of a black-silver metal very similar to the one everywhere in this outpost, glimmering and glittering in the light of the too-close sun, at the core a sphere and extending from it three wings evenly spaced, where they touched the sphere stretching another of its radius out, curving both toward the star and away, at either end approaching but not quite meeting in a single point. The entire length of the station was about five times the width of the central sphere and, while Cina had no frame of reference to guess how large the station was, it certainly looked fucking huge.

Actually, looking closer, Cina realised she did have a frame of reference. On the far end of the station from the star was a cloud of spacecraft — dozens of larger ships, ponderously drifting along and out from between the wings, hundreds of tiny ones flitting around them. The designs were alien, of course, but the hulking, curved profile of the larger ones instantly put her in mind of the larger military craft. Cruisers and destroyers, the bloody huge ones. Assuming they were on a scale with modern capital ships, the station itself could easily be several hundred kilometres from one end to the other.

Which was absurd to think about, but she'd already known ancient civilisations had managed construction on an absurd scale — her rough guess made this thing longer than the famous Centerpoint Station of the Corellian system, but it looked rather narrower, and was likely less massive by a significant margin. So, absurd, yes, but not the largest space station in existence.

Then again, the fact that the only real contender she could think of off the top of her head was Centerpoint Station was insane just on its own.

"The Star Forge was the pinnacle of Laqʈakś engineering," Lesami continued, "the capstone of their civilisation. They had observed the advanced elemental recombination techniques of the Tsèʂarma-necjaɦ, and they realised something. It should be possible to exploit the same process on a massive, industrial scale, to construct anything — as small and simple as a pen to something as large and complicated as a dreadnought — out of essentially nothing, will and stardust. Quickly and, with the help of images like me, almost automatically."

Cina remembered, studying Jedi magic, thinking to herself that, if it were possible to manipulate energy through the Force, it should be possible to manipulate matter too. With enough power, with enough focus, a user could theoretically create something out of nothing, or recombine protons and neutrons to change one thing into something else. If it were possible, with technology that operated through the Force somehow, to exploit this possibility on a massive scale...

The realisation sunk in, slowly, as Cina stared at the enormous space station, her heart drawn up to her throat and her fingers twitching. "It... It's a shipyard. Lesami and Alek rediscovered a Builder shipyard."

"Yes and no. Theoretically, the Star Forge can create anything, anything that can be modeled at an atomic level. But that is what it was largely used for by the Laqʈaɦ and the use they were planning, yes."

"It's still operational?"

"I presume," the fake Lesami said, shrugging. "I don't know what happened to the real me after she left, of course, but I have been getting pings from old Laqʈakś systems that had apparently been silent for twenty-thousand years. I can only assume she found what she was looking for. The central network is still down, but the infrastructure for that was on Lèɦjon itself — it must have been destroyed in whatever brought an end to their civilisation, or at some point in the intervening time, it's probably unrecoverable.

"I suppose it's also possible the one over Lèɦjon itself was destroyed, but they found another one somewhere in the Throneworlds. I can't say for sure."

Bastila, her voice almost grating with horror, said, "You're saying there's more than one of these things?!"

"Sure. Or, there had been several of them, at least — there are suggestions in the little data I have on their collapse that there had been infighting, I wouldn't be surprised if a few of them were lost."

The idea that the Sith might not have just one of these absurd, automated factories, but multiple, was clearly a bit much for Bastila — she'd gone very pale, staring wide-eyed at the projection of this Star Forge, mouth working silently. Which, Cina couldn't blame her for that, it certainly was a very intimidating thought. She had no idea how long it took to churn out a capital ship, but it was almost certainly faster than putting them together the traditional way. And Alek didn't have to worry about securing raw materials. Even if he couldn't match the Republic tactically or strategically, he was sitting on a practically infinite pool of resources — it was not a matter of if the Sith could defeat the Republic, but how long it would take, and how many billions of people would be slaughtered in the meanwhile.

In fact, if the thought of aligning with a murderous tyrant like Alek didn't make her skin crawl, Cina might wonder if she were on the wrong side.

But there was no use dwelling on all that — the state of things was what it was, Cina simply had to find a way to deal with it. Alek could not be allowed to have access to something so overwhelmingly powerful as this Star Forge; therefore, she either had to find a way to eliminate Alek, or somehow remove the Star Forge from his control. Since Alek moved around too much, and since infiltrating the Sith to get close enough to assassinate him held too many risks — that might have been a viable option, if Cina weren't a former Sith herself — the only real option was to target the Star Forge. Capture it, disable it, destroy it — whatever was to be done, she had to know where it was first.

She turned back to the virtual Lesami. "I assume that data you're going to give me has a map to Lèɦjon on it."

"No, it doesn't."

Cina frowned. "Is that one of those bits of restricted information you can't find a loophole around?"

"No, I can give you old Laqʈakś star charts. That's the problem, though: they're old."

"Oh." Before the advent of modern astrogation, hyperspace travel had been a risky endeavour at the best of times. While hyperspace, was...sort of outside the ordinary plane of existence, it wasn't entirely separate — gravity wells in realspace generated distortions in hyperspace. Some of these distortions were subtle enough a ship traveling through them would notice only a little rattling. Some of them were so severe the ship was forced to decant to realspace — where they promptly crashed into whatever celestial object was creating it — or were simply torn apart by intense fluctuations in the gravitational environment no inertial dampening system could possibly compensate for.

With slow, careful effort, more and more of the galaxy had been mapped, allowing their predecessors to chart out these disturbances in hyperspace. But, eary in the history of hyperspace travel, they stumbled upon a very serious problem: everything in the galaxy moved, all the time. Known hyperspace routes were being constantly readjusted to account for the drift of the systems at either end point, or to slingshot around objects slipping between them. The major accidents these days occurred when routes on the frontier hadn't been updated quickly enough, or a pilot had forgotten to renew their charts, or a navcomputer glitch reset astrogation data to an older version. Drift was slow enough the same route could be viable for thousands of years, but they were all temporary.

Star charts from over twenty thousand years ago would be completely bloody useless. "Well. Bloody tease, then, aren't you."

"Yes, that's what Lesami said." The projection sounded amused again, which was still odd to think about — even the most personable droids Cina had ever met didn't really seem to have a sense of humour, and were really quite terrible at faking it. Neat shite, this Laqʈakś tech.

Bastila had recovered by now, fixing a determined frown on the image of the Star Forge. "Perhaps, if we took this star chart and projected up to today..."

"No," Cina said, shaking her head, "that wouldn't work. You're talking about a trillion-body problem here — projecting from a single snapshot, any prediction you could make would come with unacceptable uncertainties."

"Well, it wouldn't just be the one snapshot. Shouldn't there be many versions on file here, gathered over centuries, at least?"

The virtual Lesami picked up that one. "Unfortunately, my memory banks have suffered quite a bit of data corruption over the millennia. There are internal recovery systems that use predictive algorithms to fill in the gaps, but I wouldn't trust star charts that got that treatment. I only have two or three versions that are mostly okay, and I'm not sure I would have trusted them well enough to use them even if they were still current, much less as a baseline to project forward twenty-four thousand years."

Her presence in the Force hard and hot, Bastila glared at the virtual Lesami, frustrated but speechless. Luckily, Cina had an idea. "You say you're getting pings from outside systems. Would it be possible to query them for updated navigation charts?"

"Theoretically, yes," Lesami said, helmeted head nodding. "But the relay we're sitting on wasn't intended to transfer that kind of data. I can make limited contact with outside systems, but... I could download new charts, assuming I could find a system with current ones, but it could easily take years to get it all, assuming the transmission isn't interrupted at any point. By which time they'd be out of date anyway."

Bastila's shoulders sank, her mind turning dark and heavy. But Cina still wasn't done yet. (That girl really did give up far too quickly sometimes.) "I'm assuming this system originally got those updates through a separate, off-site relay that was lost at some point in the past."

"It was destroyed twenty-thousand nine-hundred fifty-three years ago, yes."

Cina almost had to laugh at the precise answer — at a depth of twenty-thousand years, another few hundred one way or the other hardly mattered. "I'm assuming this is not the only installation of its like the Laqʈaɦ built within known space."

"There were several dozen, at least."

"Given how durable their technology is, presumably there are others that survived to the modern day."

"I would assume so."

"Is it possible one of these other sites has more modern charts? perhaps even current ones, downloaded from an installation in better shape than this one?"

"I don't see why not." It was hard to tell, with the helmet covering her face and distorting her voice, but Cina got the feeling the fake Lesami was smiling. "One of the reactivated systems is on Lèɦjon itself — the real me must have found her way there somehow, and that seems a very good possibility."

Right. She'd thought so. "The systems with Laqʈakś installations will be marked on the map you're offering." It wasn't really a question.

"They will be."

"Okay, then." Cina reached into a pocket, pulled out her datapad. A bit of fiddling had one of the cards blanked. She snapped the empty card out, wiggled it in the air. "I don't suppose you have a way to interface with this."

"Sure, I figured that out when the real Lesami and Alek were here." Suddenly, with no preemptive blurring or spark of static, the projection of the Star Forge vanished, leaving only the hologram of Lesami in her Revan getup, standing near the projector. "Bring it over here."

There was a control panel set into the side of the projector, buttons and keys with unfamiliar symbols etched into them, plugs and slots in unfamiliar configurations. "Where am I supposed to stick this? None of that looks right."

"The wide one right here," Lesami said, pointing to a shallow slot, long enough to set the entirety of the datacard inside. "Its not the right connection, of course, but I can induce the formation of memory remotely using the magnetic pulses the historical technology operated through."

"Oh, neat." Cina set her card in the slot as ordered. It didn't lock into anything, of course, just kind of awkwardly sat there, but she assumed the hyper-intelligent supercomputer speaking through the simulated personality of bloody Revan knew what she was talking about. "I don't suppose that card has the capacity to take everything you have."

"No, not even close. I figured I would give you my best star chart and my language files, a bit of literature on the Laqʈaɦ."

"That would be excellent, thank you."

"No problem. I've started the transfer, but this method is hardly efficient, it'll be a little bit. Don't bump it — you'll knock it out of alignment and I'll probably accidentally fry the thing. These are some ridiculously intense fields I'm working with here, it's pretty easy to fuck something up."

"Oh, I bet. And this is just an exploit of their data transfer tech? This Laqʈakś shite sounds pretty damn impressive."

"You have no idea."

"Mm." A heavy silence settled over the room. Bastila was still standing there, all stiff and hard and determined — she was taking this whole take away Alek's toys and win the war single-handedly thing so very seriously. It was actually sort of adorable.

Ugh, first finding Onasi distractingly (annoyingly) handsome, and now thinking Bastila was kind of adorable? Apparently she needed to get—

No, wait, she actually was getting laid regularly these days. Never mind.

Maybe it was just an aging...thing. She wasn't old, not by any means, but by her age most humans had already started families, if they had any intention of doing so. She meant, she did seem to be collecting children, that really didn't seem to be in character for her...she didn't think? That was the vague feeling she got, anyway, she obviously couldn't remember whether it was or not.

Anyway, Bastila should be too old for the adorable child to be humoured because adorable treatment, but the whole Jedi thing also made her emotionally stunted and socially oblivious enough Cina couldn't really take her seriously as an adult, either, so... She was adorable sometimes, but it wasn't really a little kid kind of adorable, but not exactly a sexy one either, somewhere between the two, it was very weird.

Speaking of collecting children, she should probably do something about Sasha and Mission. It wasn't like there was anyone else around to do it, she might as well do the responsible thing. It would be a simple matter to drop by the nearest Alderaanian consulate and say, hey, she found this orphan somewhere and she was claiming her, make that happen. Assuming her Alderaanian citizenship was legitimate (and it would have to be), that should be easy enough to arrange — Alderaan had a long history of taking in refugees, had very liberal adoption laws as a part of that whole open benevolent society thing. Mission had admitted she had no official citizenship anywhere, which meant she was a political refugee by Alderaan's definition, that shouldn't be difficult either. She should definitely ask first, though, Mission was old enough to have a right to an opinion on the matter.

(She would ask Zaalbar too — her feeling was that he was still young enough for his species to still be considered a minor — but she was confident he would refuse the offer. He would probably suggest Mission take it, though, so it might be smart to talk to him about it first anyway.)

Hmm, she should think about how the fuck she was supposed to talk to Sasha about that. She couldn't, just, do it — Alderaan was very liberal in the law, but there was a required health exam, and a couple interviews to make sure everything was on the level and not some awful exploitative shite, she'd need to tell Sasha what was going on ahead of time. The problem was, she'd never talked to Sasha about anything serious. Or, much at all, really, the girl hardly spoke most of the time. Which did make sense, obviously, given how she'd been living before Cina had found her. She did understand, so she'd been trying to keep her distance, let Sasha dictate the terms of whatever relationship she would have with anyone on the ship. Just coming out and saying she was kind of sort of adopting her now would be...awkward. Especially with how serious Mandoade were about family, that just made it a all a whole lot more complicated.

But then, everything was bloody complicated these days.

And that wasn't even getting into...

Cina glanced over at the hologram of Lesami. It was almost her, apparently, and this weird image computer thing worked at least partially through the Force. Since Cina had supposedly been a Revanchist... "You do recognise me, right?" Aware of her audience, she spoke in Classical Alderash, the first language she could think of she assumed Bastila couldn't speak but Lesami might.

(Bastila shot her a suspicious glare, but she didn't say anything.)

There was a very slight hesitation — it was hardly noticeable, but since the computer Lesami now was presumably worked far faster than a human brain it was significant. "Yes, of course." Lesami matched her, speaking the ancient dead language with an impression of familiar ease. Good choice, then. "It's quite obvious the Jedi did something to your mind, so I decided to play along. How much do you remember?"

Cina shrugged. "Very little. I know I fought in the war, and that I followed you into the Sith, but I don't even remember my real name. I was wondering, by the way, I wasn't... I didn't completely lose my mind, did I? I know some of the Sith..." That wasn't what she wanted to ask, but as long as she had Revan herself on hand...

Lesami was quiet another brief moment, presumably considering how to answer. "You realise I can't speak to anything that happened after the real me left me here. But, I suppose that's a matter of perspective. We all came out of the war harder than we'd gone into it, there's no doubt about that. War leaves its mark on everything and everyone it touches. It did break some of us, but it didn't break you, I think.

"It didn't change the core of you that much, when it comes down to it. Some of us, we always had doubts, about the way the things were done. I think, the war was disillusioning, in a way, that it helped to strip away the rhetoric to leave the reality of our galaxy naked, and demystifying, in that we saw war for what it is, and could evaluate the real costs and potential benefits of revolution, with an honesty we couldn't before. Our beliefs hadn't changed, simply the methods we considered acceptable to pursue them by, and the urgency we felt.

"Whether you were broken in the years since, I cannot say. But last I knew you, you were colder and harder than once you had been, but certainly not the bloodthirsty maniac you fear."

That was...somewhat reassuring. She realised she only had Lesami's word on this — and this Lesami's knowledge was a bit out of date, too — but that wasn't... She meant, she'd never believed Lesami was the monster the Republic had made her out to be, since she'd returned. Alek was a murderous lunatic, obviously, but Cina hadn't missed that— Well, okay, she was operating on Cianen Hayal's memories of the news coverage of the war here, so this hadn't actually happened, but still, as heavily propagandised as the whole thing was it'd still been clear reading between the lines that Lesami hadn't been...evil. The war she'd been prosecuting had been remarkably clean, by the standards of such things. It wasn't anymore, of course, but Alek clearly didn't care to limit collateral damage as Lesami had.

War was always messy and awful, that's just how it worked. It was perfectly...not reasonable, exactly, but understandable, for the Republic, now fighting against her, to decide she was clearly a completely awful terrible traitor, she was entirely wrong about absolutely everything forever, and probably also tortured kittens and ate babies in her spare time or something. But Cina had never believed she was like that, not really — this was a simple political conflict, in the process of being worked out in the way of all such things.

Cina remembered, back at the University, having vicious arguments with her colleagues, about the war and the Sith and whether Revan might not actually have a point. The Jedi had put that memory there, of course, but it was interesting to ponder why.

"Anyway, that wasn't what I actually wanted to ask."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, er..." Cina paused for a second, was about to pitch her voice down to a whisper before remembering Bastila couldn't understand them anyway. "You said you can feel what the Jedi did to my head."

"Yes."

"Is it permanent?"

Lesami's head tilted, throwing a deeper shadow over her mask, her heavy stare entirely hidden. (Actually, since this was only a hologram, it was very possible she didn't even have eyes under there, there was no real need to render them.) After another brief silence, "No. Unless the mind incorporates them before the power of the sorcery fades, such compulsions are always temporary. Something this complicated, the mind will always outlast the compulsion. It will break in time, and you will be yourself again. More or less, anyway — your mind will incorporate some of it, most likely, so you might lose portions of your original memory, and you'll likely retain most of the artificial one. In the end, I suspect you will become neither your original self nor this fiction imposed on you, but some amalgamation of the two."

"I thought as much." That she'd retained her implicit memory certainly suggested the rest of it was still there somewhere, and it was one of the basic rules of how this Jedi magic shite worked that nothing lasted forever. And all beings had a natural resistance to this kind of sorcery, Force-sensitive beings more than others. She'd assumed it would break eventually, but having confirmation from someone who knew better was...nice? It was something, anyway.

"I can break it right now, if you like."

Cina blinked. "Huh?"

"It wouldn't be particularly difficult. Though, perhaps unwise — you'd likely get one hell of a headache, and it would take some time to recover."

Despite herself, she felt her lips twitch into a dark smirk. "That doesn't sound particularly inconspicuous. You might have guessed, I sort of have the Jedi up my arse at the moment."

"Yes, well, perhaps not." The hologram shrugged. "If you change your mind, I'll be here."

"You do have all the time in the universe, or so I hear."

"Pretty much. Your transfer's done, by the way."

"Oh, right." Cina plucked the datacard out of the slot. She hesitated for a moment, glancing between the hologram and the door — pointedly ignoring Bastila, glaring at her with arms crossed, her presence in the Force lowly simmering. Felt almost angry, but that couldn't possibly be right, Cina must be mistaken. (She considered teasing her for it, but this wasn't the time, there'd always be another opportunity to mess with Bastila Shan.) "Thank you for the help, Lesami."

The hood shifted in a subtle nod. "Good luck out there, sister," she said — in Mandoa, because of course Revan spoke Mandoa. In a blink, she was gone.

Turning her back on the projector, now silently folding closed again, Cina faced a still-fuming Bastila. "Right, that was fun. Come on, I've got to see a Twi'lek about a map."

Bastila was surprised enough it took her a moment to recover, stumbling after Cina a few seconds after she'd swept past her. "Do you mean that Mission girl you— We should bring this to the Masters, Cina."

"Thanks, but I prefer my own slicer." That, and it was far too likely that she'd never get the card back if she gave it to the Jedi. Cina didn't think Mission was the best slicer in all the galaxy, but she was certainly very talented — and she trusted her, which unfortunately wasn't something she could say about whoever the Jedi might pick.

"I really think—"

"Not talking me out of it, Bastila." Making sure the motion was very visible, Cina slipped the card into a pocket. "If you want to get this to your precious Masters, you'll have to take it from me."

That frustrated little huff of hers was distractingly (annoyingly) adorable, because they were doing this again. And here she'd managed to scare off Onasi before she'd done anything embarrassingly stupid, but apparently the universe wasn't done messing with her yet. Maybe Rhysam wasn't quite doing it for her, for some reason, because this was hardly the first time she'd had distracting thoughts lately. Maybe it was her psych drugs, maybe the old her had just been a huge fucking slag, but this was really starting to get irritating.

Son of a bitch, the ride back was going to be really bloody uncomfortable...

Lesami's examples of precursor shit are all canon. She is incorrectly assuming that many of these ancient relics were created by a single, hyper-advanced pre-Republic civilisation. Canonically, this was a common assumption in academia before more information about the Rakata was found in the centuries after Revan's discovery of Lehon — though, even then a lot of people use "Rakata" and "Celestial" interchangeably, it wasn't until very late in the pre-Disney chronology that they were absolutely certain the two were separate people.

No, bad Sesai! You're supposed to be infiltrating the Jedi to keep an eye on Lesami, not recruiting vulnerable teenagers. Stop that.

[she'd been pretending to be a man during the war, supposedly as part of a psyops thing directed at the Mandoade leadership] — This is actually true, became common knowledge in the immediate aftermath of the war when Lesami's identity was revealed. Exactly what she was trying to do didn't come up in the news, though, since it's Mandalorian culture stuff most people wouldn't get anyway. Will be explained eventually.

If it wasn't very obvious to everyone that I have serious problems with the canon Jedi, the Juhani scene should have cleared that up nicely.

Another month between updates — this is a monster chapter, but still. I'm trying to alternate updating this and Her Mother's Love, and also keep up on writing for my collab fic with LeighaGreene, so there will likely be delays here and there. I'm not abandoning anything, I'm just spreading my efforts around a bit more than before.

Finally leaving Dantooine next chapter, and it's on to Tatooine. Wooooooo...