Anakin couldn't help being slightly relieved. The last time he had come home from a mission, the Council had been frantic and the Force in disarray. But there were none of those dark tremors as he landed now. Leaving his ship in the hangar, he headed to the Council Chamber to make his report, and to ask about the distress signal he had received.

To his surprise, there was no one there. The room was in a rare state of emptiness. Perplexed, Anakin went to the next best place, and that was Windu's apartment.

"Where is everyone?" he asked immediately upon entrance. "Where's the Council?"

Windu nodded, as though he had anticipated these questions. His face appeared rather grave. "They are on Endor, investigating," he said. Anakin's brow creased with confusion.

"Why?"

"We thought it would be best not to send any more Knights or Padawans there after what happened, just in case. Of course, we couldn't leave the Temple alone, so I elected to stay behind."

"Why—" Anakin stopped, remembering that he had already tried that question, and started another. "What happened on Endor?"

Windu stopped. "Hasn't anyone told you?" he asked.

"Told me what?"

Windu looked startled, the second rare moment of the day. "Force, I hardly know where to begin," he muttered. "There were…problems, while you were away. Drin—"

"No." The word fell from Anakin's numb lips.

"It's not what you think," Windu hastened to assure him. "Quite the opposite, in fact. But it's a long story; you may want to sit down."

The thing had begun, said Windu, less than two weeks before Anakin's return to the Temple. There were reports from traders and pilots about strange happenings on Endor's surface, movement where there hadn't been and life forms where there should have been none. Ka'ela Brun had volunteered for the mission and asked to take her Padawan with her; since the end of Drin's sentence was so close, the Council had agreed.

"If we had known," Windu added, "we never would have let him go. It would have seemed like asking for trouble."

The Master-Padawan team had traveled to Endor. They did not expect to find anything, and the Masters did not expect them to. But then the Council received a distress signal from their ship, still nestled safely in the underbrush of Endor. It was of the highest urgency, though there was no accompanying message from either Drin or Ka'ela. The Council, perturbed, sent three of their number to investigate, and reached them in that same day.

It didn't take them long to find the ship, and with it, Ka'ela Brun. She was tied securely and gagged within the cockpit—it was only by the purest luck that she had been so situated as to be able to send a distress signal from her position. When she was freed, she blurted out her story.

They had been ambushed, she said. Not long after they had landed, Drin, carelessly searching through the bushes, had found a stairwell carved into the earth, made of black stone. They had been about to explore it when through the trees had stepped the last two people anyone expected to see on Endor.

"There were two of them?" Anakin had already guessed who one of them was.

"He had found another apprentice, you see," sighed Windu heavily. "We were fools not to see it sooner. We were led off the track by Drin's false alarm, and by the time that was over, it was far too late. She had already joined him, and it was only a matter of time before she revealed herself."

"She?" Anakin echoed.

Windu nodded. "She," he repeated.

Anakin found Drin in the med ward late that night, after the hubbub of healers and daytime patients had quieted down. He had spent hours walking through the halls of the meditation wing with Master Windu, listening to the full account, absorbing all the details and yet still unable to consider them real. At length he'd decided that he would have to talk to the one person whom it had hit hardest before any of it would feel like truth.

The door to Drin's room was shut and guarded by a softly blinking light. Anakin paused.

"Can I go in?" he asked a nearby healer.

She hesitated for a moment, calling something up on the screen that she was monitoring.

"Padawan Audris? Yes, he's receiving visitors, but he's heavily sedated for the pain. I'm not sure he'll recognize you." Anakin thanked her and went in anyway.

Drin was lying still on a high and sterile bed. It seemed to Anakin at first that his friend was asleep, but as he drew near he saw that Drin's eyes were open, and he was staring at the dark ceiling, where the sterilized light surrounding the bed and its monitors did not penetrate.

He closed the door. For a moment neither of them said anything. Anakin glanced toward the intravenous lines strung between the bed and the monitors, where one of them had been carefully disconnected. A sigh escaped his lips. Drin had stopped the sedatives and chosen the pain.

"I killed her," murmured Drin. "I killed Aviva."

Anakin sank into the nearby chair. "I know."

"It was her, all along…"

Anakin ran his gaze over the semi-transparent cast and brace that kept Drin's right leg uniformly straight. "Are you all right?" he asked. His next words he spoke aloud without meaning to: "You look different."

"It kind of hurts," said Drin thickly. Pain was lucid on his face. An old adage passed around the berths of senior Padawans said that pain kept one awake, cleared the mind, allowed one to think. Whether from lack of sedation or some other, deeper stripping away of something, the sullen mystery that had seemed to shroud Drin's presence in the past was gone. His eyes were bright; Anakin felt, as he watched his friend staring up at the dark ceiling, that Drin was somehow looking eye to eye with a reflection of himself.

"I wish you'd been there," Drin said after a pause.

Anakin took a breath. "I'm here now," he murmured. "I'm glad you're safe. You've been very brave, Drin. Every Jedi should be honoring you for what you've done."

"I know," replied Drin.

A few moments more passed into silence.

"Master Skywalker, I have the results of his scans. Would you like to see them?"

"Please."

Aviva Kenmur. She had been so kind, so sweet, so…so Jedi. Perhaps that was the reason no one had suspected—for no one, not a soul, had suspected. Even after she had changed, even after she began withdrawing from her closest friends, disappearing as a Knight from the Temple for long periods of time, no one had a thought of suspicions. They could not think of her as she was now. They could no more envision Aviva swathed in black and carrying a lightsaber that burned red light than they could a Gungan clown.

Anakin could imagine how it had happened. The Jedi could never have expected anything like this, and so they were hardly prepared. Dooku and Aviva had stepped into perfectly executed Sith battle stances and destroyed them. Weary from their long travel and unequipped to handle an attack from a Sith Lord, Drin and Ka'ela Brun would have fought back valiantly, until one of them was inevitably wounded, and then, all too swiftly, the second would stumble, leave an opening, and fail.

Except that Drin didn't. Master Windu and those of the Council who had been present had listened with increasing apprehension and awe as Ka'ela described having been forced apart from her apprentice by Dooku, leaving her to battle the aged Sith Lord on her own. While he was in the process of defeating her and holding her captive in the confines of her own ship, Drin was making his escape the only way he could: down the stone steps into whatever blackness they led to. Aviva, furious, had chased after him.

"Master Skywalker."

The healer was waiting insistently by his elbow. Anakin sighed and attempted to concentrate again. It was early in the morning; he had waited by Drin's bedside in silence for almost four hours, simply offering his presence for whatever it was worth. It was dark in that room. Dooku had bound Ka'ela Brun in a ship that was to be programmed straight into the nearest star. The same fate had been planned for Drin. The Council had found him at the end of that stairwell, despite the darkness they felt, a darkness that, Windu attested, had wrapped around their bones, unnatural and ancient. It led downwards, the earth closing above them, for at least half a mile until it opened into a wide, circular room. The ceiling was low and confining, and the darkness was present there as well, along with other, more important things, like Drin's lightsaber blade, still humming and rolled several feet from his hand. Drin was there too, passed out, his right leg twisted at a strange angle.

To catch her prey, Anakin knew, Aviva had used the Dark Side of the Force against his body as he ran, crushing the bone in his leg. Even crippled, Drin had still gotten as far as the lower room, where he had been forced to confront her in battle. Aviva was found dead by a lightsaber wound, her short apprenticeship to the Sith ended forever. The Force only knew how Drin had won that battle, fighting as he was the darkness that strengthened his opponent with every passing second.

"This part of the bone—you see, here, a few inches above the ankle—was crushed to dust." The healer pointed out some meaningless numbers, then showed him the much more relevant picture of the injured leg. "Some emergency surgeries were performed immediately after his return to the Temple. He will walk on it soon enough, but never without a severe limp."

Anakin swallowed hard as something small and heavy landed in the pit of his stomach. He returned the flimsies to her hand. "Thank you," he said too late, after she'd already left.

He came across Windu as the sun was rising, casting golden shadows through the crossyard in the center of the Temple's ground levels. The Jedi Master approached him solemnly and returned his greeting.

"Any news on the Count's whereabouts since the attack?" He knew it was a hopeless question, but enough missions in the past had taught him to ask ahead anyway.

Windu shook his head. "Master Brun and Drin were both fortunate that the Council members arrived when we did. Dooku knew he wasn't prepared to defend himself against all three of us. He left his apprentice and ran."

Anakin grimaced. "True Sith loyalty."

When Anakin had killed Palpatine, the archaic rule of a Padawan's rite of passage had been called back into play. None of the Council had expected that, and none of them had thought that it would ever be used again afterwards. On both counts, however, they were wrong. Not two weeks after Drin had begun to walk again did the Council summon him to the Testing Center. They had meant to wait, Windu explained, until Stass Allie had returned from her mission to Cerea, but she was delayed, so it was only eleven Masters that met Drin there.

When Anakin had killed Palpatine, he was accepted automatically as a Knight. With Drin, the Council could not be so lenient. The Testing Center was where Padawans were tested to their physical and mental limits when it came time for them to take the Trials.

It was an enormous section of the Temple, consisting of two main parts. Eighty percent of the Center was the physical section, and this contained a large obstacle course, complete with holographic surroundings and enemies, stretching so far that it was impossible to see the entire section from end to end while on a level plane with it. For this reason, there was a wide glass window that opened high above the trainees' heads.

The other part of the Testing Center was much smaller, and separated from the other. This, too, used holographics to test the Padawans, but it required no physical exertion save that of speech. The apprentice in question stood in the center of the room, and holograms appeared around him, testing not his knowledge but his instincts. Anakin had heard that the holograms often appeared in the form of birth parents, or beloved friends. Practice and discipline was all it took to pass the other two tests, but this section made it obvious how deeply the Jedi philosophy was embedded in the Padawan's soul, and no amount of practice could change that. Anakin was always secretly glad that he had been allowed to skip the Trials; if his mother or Obi-Wan had appeared before him, the Force only knew how he might have reacted.

When the holograms had disappeared, the Padawan stood where he was and the twelve Council members entered the room with him. Without mercy they fired off questions about history, philosophy, the Code, life and death, the Force, anything they chose. This third test, though possibly the easiest of the triad, was by far the most intimidating.

Due to Drin's unusual circumstances as well as his injury, he was not required to undergo the physical part of the Trials. Given his history, however, the Council could not afford to trust him blindly; he was ushered into the Center as Anakin watched from above. Ferus joined him wordlessly, and together they stood as Drin went forward into the circular room and the first hologram appeared, its mouth moving but no words audible from their vantage point. Anakin grimaced at the sight of Drin's pained movement, each step of his right leg stilted and short.

"It isn't fair," he muttered. Ferus glanced at him.

"I would have thought you'd be pleased by this," he said. Anakin looked helplessly at the ceiling, shaking his head.

"Not the Knighting. I'm proud of him. But it isn't fair. The Force cheated him."

Ferus understood. "You mean his leg?" Anakin nodded; his jaw was clenched tightly.

"He's hardly nineteen and he's got the limp of an old warrior. You know as well as I do that he'll never do any of the things he loves again. He can't fight, not really. He can't run obstacle courses or sims. He'll be in pain for the rest of his life. It's not right."

Ferus tried to help. "Anakin, you were gone a long time," he said. "I've seen Drin around the Temple. He's different now. He's not so…physically-minded as he once was. He's learned to appreciate more than just running and fighting. That year changed him, not dramatically, but for the better. Maybe—" Ferus's shoulders rose and fell. "Maybe it's not so horrible for him."

For a moment, Anakin was quiet. Below them, another hologram rose out of the smoky surroundings, materializing from nowhere—a dark-haired mother, carrying an infant in her arms. Distantly Anakin wondered if Drin knew her.

"It's not so much that," he murmured faintly. "When I look at him now, I can—I can see what he should be—" Anakin found himself grasping for the right words. "There's something inside of him, Drin as he should be, strong and whole; and that's right. But I can see what he is—what he was meant to be, but changed, like the Force warped what was right. And it isn't fair. It couldn't be."

Ferus was looking at him with a very strange expression on his face. "You know, Anakin," he said, "sometimes I worry about you."

"What?" His words hadn't sounded condescending, as that expression was usually used. "Why?"

"You see life so differently than the rest of the Jedi, even than the Masters," Ferus explained. "You—never mind."

"No, tell me," Anakin insisted, momentarily distracted from the sight below. His curiosity had been piqued. Ferus shrugged. He spoke reluctantly.

"I sometimes think you've been somewhere, to the other side of the Force, maybe," he said, "and seen life as it was truly meant to be: not just without sins and faults, but deep in the other extreme, pure and precious. The Masters, the Jedi, we all see life as something to be saved and salvaged; but you see what could be, and what should be. Not that you're blind to the wrongs around you—" Ferus was struggling now "—they…hurt more for you. The rest of us can only see to the middle of the spectrum, but you see beyond that, to something better. And that's why it hurts you so badly. So yes, sometimes I worry about you." There was a pause. "And, maybe sometimes, I envy you for it."

Anakin was not sure what to say to that. He didn't know how to explain to his friend that it did not seem like a trait worth envying, for all the pain it caused. So they watched in silence, until one of the Masters nodded, and the questions stopped. Drin had passed.