Master Arren Kae thirsted for knowledge.
She was the head archivist of the Jedi order, it was only right that she should. There could be no clarity in the Force without understanding, no true power without comprehension.
Which was why she once again found herself preparing for a flight. The archives were in good hands with her students, but there were things she did not trust to others. She walked through the halls of the temple towards the hangars. Her grey-streaked braid trailed down her back, and her heavy white robes swept across the ornate stone floor.
She sensed a presence approaching her route, moving to intercept her. She narrowed her eyes. She slowed her pace.
"Grand Master," she said.
The diminutive Vandar Tokare fell in step with her. His long green ears were raised at the tips, as they always were when he intended to be difficult.
"Master Archivist," he greeted with a respectful nod, despite having known her since she was an infant. He was young for his species, and still 300 years older than Kae.
"Another visit to the Echani libraries?" he asked. "The general must have very interesting texts in his collection."
She inclined her head. "With a Sith holocron among them."
He hesitated mid stride. She glanced back, mildly pleased to have surprised him. It confirmed that whatever trouble he was digging for wasn't that. He was a crafty old troll, and much better at catching her off guard than the reverse.
"Does he indeed?" he muttered, hurrying to keep pace with her.
"He didn't tell me about it at first, I understand it's one of the most prized artefacts in his family collection. Very interesting, wouldn't you say?"
"And dangerous."
"But not to him. The Echani truly are deaf to the Force."
"And yet they hid it from us."
"As they do all their trophies of war." The Echani were a military culture to the point of obsession. Utterly unlike the Jedi, but she respected their ways. "I am going to convince General Yusanis to give it to me."
"If he will not, you could requisition it," Vandar said. "You have the authority."
"Not without destroying an alliance I spent so long building up from nothing." She lowered her chin and narrowed her eyes. "He's broken Republic law by hiding it, and yet he chose to reveal it to me himself. There is an opportunity here to be... magnanimous."
Vandar gave a disapproving huff. "Does he also see it as an opportunity?"
"I assure you he does."
He gave her a sidelong look she sensed more than saw.
"Hesitant we should be to forgive willful flaunting of the law, no matter how advantageous it is."
"Are you reprimanding me for being too forgiving?" She raised an eyebrow at him. "Master Vandar. I shall have this moment immortalised in the archives for posterity."
"Hrmph. Have you forgiven him for deceiving you over the existence of the holocron?"
"All is as the Force wills it."
He chortled. She dutifully ignored it.
"When you return we will speak together about… matters of the order."
"About Jolee Bindo," she guessed.
Vandar pursed his lips. "And your discretion on the matter."
She scoffed. She refused to act like Jolee had died or committed some unspeakable atrocity. He had simply lost faith. If they couldn't admit that then they only opened the doors for others to walk away as well.
Vandar knew she felt that way. The council wanted the records on him quietly sealed, but she was the head archivist, and they couldn't tell her how to run her own archives. That left them circuitously trying to talk her into it.
"Safe travels, my friend," Vandar said when they reached the hangar bays.
She bowed. "May the Force be with you, master."
"And with you."
She boarded her ship and left the Jedi temple behind.
The echani worlds beckoned, promising knowledge.
General Yusanis was highly respected among his people. He was retired, but like all Echani, retirement lasted only until battle called again.
He was a hard man. Clever, composed, and more inclined to listening than talking. Kae had moved in similar circles as him for years but only recently had they come to actually know each other. The Echani said true understanding could only be found in conflict, in which case they were learning to understand each other very well. Like two firaxan sharks fighting over the same unfortunate swimmer.
The sith holocron was no such thing. It was the broken remains of a fallen Jedi's personal holocron, taken after he was defeated by an echani warrior. She suspected Yusanis knew it too, but he wouldn't say.
In the fine halls of his great libraries she negotiated with him for the item's return. She knew full well he had laid the trap simply for the challenge of it all, the chance to test an opponent and mine them for information. Privately, she had answered his call for the same reason.
They discussed a great many things besides the artefact itself. His libraries were extensive and he was as much a scholar as a warrior.
He did not touch the Force, but he affected it still. His drive to test and strengthen himself sent reverberations through the Force further than he could imagine. She watched with interest, how the shadow of his choices fell upon so many.
Late on a warm evening in the lofty towers of his library, they argued about the Jedi code. The moons of Eshan shone through the open windows, making his white hair and silver eyes practically glow.
"Of course, your stringent code weakens you," he said, reclining on the low seats with his legs crossed. "I have seen it in other Jedi."
"Have you indeed?" she asked, arch and mildly amused at the presumption. She stood at the windows, enjoying the cool breeze, and holding a nearly empty glass of claret. "Tell me of the weaknesses of the Jedi, General."
"Your code ties control of your primary weapon to your emotions. Imagine an infantryman who cannot trust himself to fire his blaster if he is troubled. A swordsman whose grasp of his weapon is compromised because he spent the night before thinking of a pretty woman. You would not call him a warrior at all."
"A shallow understanding of the code, and the Force. A Jedi, or indeed a Sith, who tries to wield it without some guiding principle is little more than a child trying to fire a canon. And the Force is no mere blaster."
"So a breach of your code takes control of the canon out of your hands?"
"It is rarely so simple. But if you object to the existence of rules in general then I will have to find the handbook of your own army in this library and throw it at you."
"It's not the same thing," he chided. He got up to join her at the window. "Soldiers don't live by regulations when they are at home with their families. You are flesh and blood the same as anyone else, Master Jedi, with the same needs and follies. And yet you must pretend otherwise, or lose yourself."
She scoffed. "I see you have fallen victim to a common misconception, that where the body goes the heart and mind must also follow."
He raised an eyebrow. "Am I wrong?"
"Of course." She raised her glass and drank the last of her wine. "The Jedi are forbidden only from attachment. Nothing more."
The corner of his lip turned up with a rare smile. "And you can indulge the whims of the flesh without becoming attached to them?"
"I understand if your own philosophy doesn't give you the same strength of will."
Challenge shone in his eyes.
She smiled at him, calm and defiant.
It was, she later reflected, a strategic error.
He had a wife and children. She knew she wasn't at risk of an attachment and he wasn't either, not with any depth. Neither help any delusions on that subject. That didn't make it better.
It had been cleaner in theory. An elegant manoeuvre around each other, with equal chance for pleasure as for challenge. In practice if felt heartless to so clinically sunder someone else's vows.
"What of your wife?" she asked some days later. When sharing their bodies had become more than a single opportunity seized, and was looking perilously like a habit.
"It's none of her business," he said.
They were in his chambers. She was in the under layer of her robes, stripped of all the decorations of rank. As was he, in a simple tunic and trousers, sitting on his bed.
She stood before one of the book shelves, her hands behind her back and her eyes sightlessly resting on the names of war-makers long dead.
"She may see your betrayal differently," she said quietly.
"She won't question me. She conceded long ago in our relationship." He sighed. "She isn't my equal."
Her brow furrowed. It didn't sit well with her. But weren't her actions declaring the same of this woman she didn't even know? Was this the grand sum of her non-attachment?
She glanced at him over her shoulder. He did not look as though he shared her doubts.
"Is that the spirit of echani wedding vows?" she asked. "They are binding only until a victor is declared, and then the other is a hostage to a dead relationship?"
He looked up at her, his lips thin. "A little late for you to be raising these concerns, Master Jedi."
She looked back to the books. "Indeed."
"Don't worry. I can do as I wish."
Her respect for him withered and died. A little of her respect for herself did the same.
"As can we all," she said.
She raised her head and walked out.
The halls of the Jedi were the same as she left them. She returned to her libraries and the places she felt most useful to the galaxy.
The matter of Jolee's departure remained. The discussion had grown beyond the single incident to how they handled all Jedi who left the order. She argued long and hard with most of the council about it.
She wasn't even convinced that she was correct on the wider issue, but the answers she got when she pushed the others for justification were not satisfactory.
The order was afraid. It had been since Exar Kun fell. It haunted them, framed every action and checked every word, even though none would admit it. They weren't afraid of dark side users, but of themselves. What they might become. Many clung to the light not because it was right but because they feared being wrong.
It was a fascinating intersection of faith and works, how theory became practice. It was not a foundation for a strong order.
The newly-promoted Master Vrook Lamar sat across from her in her office, presenting another unconvincing case. He brought up a mission she had gone on years ago, in which she had played the role of spymaster and ended a war by ruthlessly controlling the enemy's knowledge.
"Are your fellow Jedi enemies, Vrook?"
He pursed his lips.
"Would you have ended the war if your allies knew all you were doing?"
"I would not have won if I permitted those with no understanding to dictate my actions."
His brow knitted.
"We should learn from our mistakes, not bury them," she said.
"Jolee made his own mistakes. We won't serve the light by publicising his marriage or its disastrous end."
"That isn't why he left. Jolee saw flaws within the order. If we are afraid of even acknowledging those accusations, then he has more integrity than we do."
"We are not sworn to have integrity, we're sworn to serve the light," a disgruntled Vrook said. He scowled a moment later.
She raised an eyebrow.
"You can talk me in circles all you want, Master Kae, it doesn't change anything."
"You are correct. It changes nothing." She rose and gestured towards the door. "Thank you for your time."
He scoffed and marched out.
She scoffed right back after the door closed behind him. He was too headstrong, too fond of making declarations and too averse to asking questions for her tastes. Voices like his were growing louder on the council.
It troubled her.
She set off down the halls, down into the depths of the archives below the temple. It was cold and quiet down there, in a way that was rare anywhere else in the Jedi temple, where the living Force flowed and bubbled up like a wellspring.
She privately held that fear of falling was itself a type of fall. The Force demanded a great deal of them, it left only a narrow path for them above the great fall down to ruin on either side. Many held that peering into the depths was enough to lose your way.
And yet not having an understanding of your own capacity for cruelty and folly made for poor Jedi.
The council had long ago grown tired of her constant questions.
The Force was quiet, she felt only the echoing trace of herself from the last time she had been here. She went about her work in the ancient record chambers, filled with the words of the dead.
In the stillness she felt the first whisper of a presence not her own.
Her hand stilled on a datapad.
It was tiny, so quiet as to be barely detectable. It was growing within her.
She stood listless as realisation flooded her, draining the blood from her face. Her hands fell from her work.
Close on the heels of shock, came anger. She should have known better. She hadn't planned for this, this product of carelessness. Childish presumption on her part.
She felt so small all of a sudden, a mere mortal speck next to the immovable towers of history. The heights of the Jedi, their sins, their secrets, their foundations. The whisper of a presence hummed inside of her.
She let out a shaking breath.
The masters could wax poetic on the disconnect between healthy and unhealthy levels of emotional attachment all they liked, but the council would not stand for this. Nuance did not survive the conversion from theory to practice. The Jedi had high standards for themselves. As did she.
A bond of this magnitude would destroy her. And she would take down the baby with her.
She stayed down in the quiet of the archives until she had reigned her thoughts in. There was so much to be done, and yet no clear path presented itself, all was a shambles in her head. It took her more effort than it had in years to quieten her mind.
When she had regained her composure, she shielded the presence as best she could in a rush and tracked down Master Vandar.
He had sensed some turmoil in her from the other side of the temple, and was happy to take the time to speak with her.
It brought her back to when she had been a youngling in the order, troubled by a child's doubts. He hadn't changed at all in that time, even as her understanding of him did.
He asked what troubled her. She told him she had a premonition. She was known to glimpse the future from time to time. He gave the same answers he always had, to trust the Will of the Force, and to act on what she knew of the present, not what she feared of the future.
It sounded more hollow than it ever had before.
They meditated together.
He didn't pierce the veil of her shielding. He didn't ask any questions. It was so easy to deceive him.
Curiously, she found herself... disappointed. She had thought she had long ago knocked the order off its pedestal in her mind, she knew they were as flawed as anyone else. Some part of her had truly believed he would have the answers.
The reality of her situation settled upon her shoulders. She planned.
As far as the rest of the order knew, Master Arren Kae assigned herself a mission to a lost Jedi shrine on a secluded world. It was nothing remarkable or noteworthy, except perhaps the length of her assignment.
She landed her ship in a stone courtyard of ruined buildings overrun with vines. Birds called in the distance and tiny lizards crawled between the cracked flagstones. There was no rumble of passing ships, no echo of footsteps. The Force itself was a quiet knot of memory so old it had long ago lost any coherence.
She meditated for months on end. She had brought only droids with her and they asked no questions. She grappled with the code and the order's extrapolations of it. The things it did not say as much as the things caught on all the sharp edges of her mind.
Alone in the echoing silence of abandoned Jedi secrets, she carried to term.
When the time came, she contacted General Yusanis. She offered a continuation of their previous shared work, and requested his presence. There was a chance he wouldn't take the bait, so she made it sound like she had found some rare echani item and intended to lord it over him.
Labour arrived before he did.
She had equipped the ship with a specialised medical pod from outside of the order and prepared as much as she could. For all her long months of solitude, it was only when she was lying on a bed with a mute droid measuring her dilation, that the pangs of loneliness struck her. The pain was great, but screaming felt silly. There was nobody to hear, nothing but the unfeeling Force itself, and it would not respond to her pain.
Jedi were solitary creatures by very definition.
She swallowed it down.
Alone she delivered a healthy little girl with thin white hair.
It was more than she could bear. There was already more of a bond between them than she should allow. She should have been strong and left her in the hands of the droids.
The babe cried.
She wasn't made of rock.
She held her baby girl against her breast and let herself crumble. Her body was exhausted and numb from too much pain, but she was strong enough to hold her. She could permit herself a day to nourish the girl.
Icy blue eyes squinted in a red and pudgy hair. She latched onto her breast and nursed. She had Yusanis' hair. Would her eyes darken to Kae's brown? Would she ask her father why that was? Would she share Kae's curiosity, her love of learning? Would she ever know-
No. She would not. She could not.
The little thing was so vulnerable in her arms. This would destroy them both, if she let it.
She hardened her heart.
She severed the fledgling Force bond like an axe shearing a new branch off a trunk. She wanted to weep. She wanted to sink to the ground and wail, to clutch the girl to her heart and never let go. To slaughter any who would touch her or take her away. She did none of these things.
She handed the baby to the droids.
Yusanis arrived several days later.
Kae was centered and calm by then. She had spent the intervening time in a healing trance and focusing on stabilising her Force presence.
She watched his ship land in the ruins next to hers. He walked out, all the same composure and confidence.
She left her ship to greet him, flanked by a droid holding the baby.
All his composure left him. He was more openly shocked than she had ever seen him, more than she had expected. He vacillated between horrified and joyous, asking the most inane questions. Perhaps he was more naive than she had thought. It might work against them. Kae held herself tall and straight, still aching and tired. She kept her composure.
He gingerly took the baby and cradled her in his arms.
"Will you take her as your own?" she asked. "You said once that your wife would not question you."
He looked between her and the baby, crestfallen and confused. "Shouldn't she be taken to the temple to be trained?"
"No. It would destroy us both, in time."
He frowned. "You hold a high rank, you could pull some strings."
"There can be no place for her among the Jedi. Just as there can be no place for me in your life."
"But you'll want to see her," he insisted.
A muscle in her jaw ticked. "I will not."
"I can arrange for-"
"There are no Jedi mothers," she said, hard and final. She broke a little inside. She raised her chin. "The role is antithesis to what we are, to pursue this further would be foolishness."
"Arren." He looked horrified. He shook his head, uncomprehending. "You don't have to do this."
"I do not speak to you as a parent but as a Jedi. I entrust this innocent to you because you will guard her well as you have your own." She held her hands behind her back. "Am I wrong?"
"She is my own, just like she's yours," he snapped.
"I keep my vows, Yusanis."
His brow furrowed. It was a low blow, but found she wasn't above much anymore.
"You vowed to cast aside inconvenient children?"
"I took a vow to stand alone in the Force. To be unattached and unbiased in all things." She refused to bend in the face of his indignation. His growing disdain. "It can be difficult for outsiders to understand."
He held the babe closer to him. He swallowed thickly.
"Alright, Master Kae," he whispered. "You win." He looked so disappointed in her.
She had given up her child. His opinion meant nothing next to that.
"May the force be with you, General."
She marched back into her ship and returned to her life.
A/N: Thank you for reading and reviewing.
Next Time: Master Kae meets Revan
