Concerned, I sat up and propped myself against the headboard of the bed. "What was it?" I asked gently, running a tendril of her hair between my fingers. "A battle?"

She shook her head distantly. "No, it was a person actually."

"Who?"

She turned her face to the side for a moment to think – just enough for the moonlight to illuminate the contours of her face and highlight her expression. It made it easier to see her eyes, but it didn't do much to stop the uneasiness budding in my chest.

"On Dantooine," she said at last, turning her gaze back to the window, "the masters didn't know what to do with me. I was powerful in a raw sort of way – not like the other students. Some were nervous around me, others were proud of the mere opportunity to try and shape my abilities. All of them saw me as a challenge, and many of them even considered me a danger.

"I had many, but there was one who was different – one master who looked at me like I was the answer to all our problems; like I wasn't a thing to be harnessed, but a tool to be used. Her whispers used to fill my head and her teaching was… different."

"What do you mean, they filled your head?" I asked apprehensively. The entire phrase sounded eerie – like something that might have happened during their stay on Korriban in the ancient temples. It was chilling.

"She used to put words right into my mind like telepathy." Dae clarified. "It was normal – she did it to teach me when we were apart. She had an unusual mastery of the force. I've never heard another Jedi talk about half of the things she did. They weren't dark necessarily, but they were different – blurring."

"Blurring like–"

"They didn't always follow traditional ideas of the Order. They didn't oppose the Code, but it was certainly a different interpretation. The galaxy stopped being clean-cut good and evil, because it's not. Everything turned shades of gray. I'm evidence of that much. Lines blurred," she shrugged in conclusion.

"This woman… she sounds like a strange link." I relented, assuming the things and waiting for confirmation. "What's the connection?"

Dae turned around to look at me in the darkness. "She was there, Carth," she said, "at the beginning of it all – long before the Mandalorian Wars, long before Malak and I found the first star map, long before the notion of being anything other than an ordinary Jedi had even come close to entering my head. She planted the seeds and watered them. I remember the person I was back then – smart, compassionate, humble, submissive, self-sacrificing. I was everything the Order could have wanted. Pride wasn't my downfall. Greed wasn't. Something else caused me to fall – and it all starts with her."

At first I didn't say anything and she let me work through that statement in silence. I looked hard at her and tried to find Revan in her face, like I had done a thousand times before, and just like every other time, I couldn't see it. There was no "dark lord" lurking in her character. What she said was intriguing; because the Jedi hadn't changed the essence of who Revan was when they captured her. They didn't have enough power over the force to do that – even together. They had simply removed the memories and given her a new start – or tried to at least.

Revan might have been this way when she fell. She was the single most admirable person I'd ever met – there was no darkness in her. Only light. Only wisdom and honor. I wasn't even sure if it was possible for that character to have led Revan down the paths she followed, but maybe… if logic compelled her. I couldn't think of anything that could make that justifiable.

"Do you think she's still alive, this master of yours?" I finally asked.

Dae nodded in response. "I wouldn't doubt it. Even if we wanted to, we probably couldn't find her though; not unless she wanted us to – not unless it served her purposes."

As Dae shifted towards me I inserted one last question as she dissolved into my arms. "What was her name?"

"Kreia"

I locked that name away in my mind, and made a conscious decision to let it go for now – until it was useful, because I was sure someday it would be. For now though, I wrapped her tightly in my arms as she settled against my chest and I breathed in the smell of her hair, because for the first time it felt fleeting, even though I couldn't say why.