Preparation and questions

Hand Maiden

I found her in the room she had been given. Her face was intent as she checked each weapon with the eye of a professional. The ritual brand was in her hand as she gently rubbed oil into the blades.

Her movements were smooth but her emotions were not. While her hands did the necessary cleaning, her mind was a roil of pain. Somehow I realized why. She had given this up so long ago, put aside weapons and fighting and tried to get on with her life. Yet it had been thrust back upon her like an old addiction. She hadn't wanted to do something like this ever again. But here she was preparing for yet another war.

"Is there something I can help you with?" She asked without looking up.

"Atris said that you betrayed the Jedi by going to war when it had been forbidden to you. That you turned against your masters, their teachings, and eventually against yourselves."

"If only it were that simple." She replied softly. Her hands moved, and the blaster pistol was suddenly in pieces on the bed. She examined them one by one before reassembling it. "I went to war because people were suffering and dying. I felt then that if I stood aside, I would be as guilty of those deaths as those that inflicted it. If I could have found a way to end it without a fight, I for one would have done so. It would have made it easier to sleep at night."

"That is not all she says. She says that you know nothing of loyalty except to your animal instincts, and she told us that is what caused you to fall to the dark side."

"I have never walked the dark path. Then or now." Her answer was as soft as before. But I could detect sadness there.

"Atris said that you fell to the dark side when you gave into your lust for blood during the Mandalorian Wars. Once you had tasted of it, you could never get your fill." I had just called her a liar, but even that did not seem to bother her.

"Yet I spent the last ten years wandering. Working as a bodyguard, as a security officer. With all the wars there are in the galaxy on any given day, that is poor fare. It also doesn't explain how I walked away from the wars before the Mandalorian war was even over."

"She says that when Revan returned as the dark lord you had fallen so far that you could no longer feel the Force."

She looked at me. Her eyes held pain, but they were calm. "I did not march with Revan, or march to fight her in that new war out of my own choice. I had been sent home to heal, and the Jedi Council healed me by stripping away all that I had been able to do. They would not have wanted me, and I would not go back to war on the word of any one person again."

"So you say it was a matter of choice. That if you had still been considered a Jedi, you would have fought against your friends?"

"My duty as a Jedi would have demanded it."

"Then why have you not told Atris of this? Perhaps she would listen to your own expressed feelings."

"Do you have one of the others that you feel is a special friend? Someone that you would trust with your life and secrets?"

"I have no secrets from my sisters."

"Think of when you were young. Was there one you missed terribly because they were your best friend in the world?"

"That was so long ago, but I think I understand what you speak of."

"I thought Atris was such a friend. When I went to war, part of me was glad she did not. I could not have borne her death as so many others died. It would have shattered my heart.

"Yet when I returned home, it was that friend that stood before the Council and demanded that I surrender everything I had become as a Jedi to salve her own conscience. If the one I considered my best friend in the world would do this then, what makes you think ten years has made her see my side of it now?" She holstered the blaster, and slid on her weapons belt, tying off the holster and sheath of the ritual brand. "Is that all she has to say about me?"

"I believe that is the extent of her expressed feelings about you. They vary some, but they all build upon the same foundation." My head cocked. "Why are you suddenly amused?"

"The Echani view. Gods, it had been years since I have heard it said in just that manner."

"But nothing I have experienced in my life proves the teachings of my home world are wrong. Many you meet seem to be unable to feel what their own heart or mind says. The words will not come, and they cannot force themselves to try."

"Then what does that say about her heart?" She folded then sheathed the blade. Now she turned her full attention on me.

"Without having seen you in battle together, I cannot say."

"I know. 'Battle is the purest expression of heart and mind reduced to the flow of movement'." She quoted. "But I will not fight her. If I win she will use it to prove that I have fallen. If I lose she will do the same. There are battles that cannot be won, so they need not be fought."

"Then her expressed feeling must stand."

"As you will. Now, may I ask a question?" I nodded. "Why is it that of all her handmaidens, you are the only one with your own face?"

"I honor the face of my mother. It is not something we talk about much."

"I am sorry."

"Whatever for? You were merely remarking on a visual representation as would anyone that noticed an anomaly. That is wise in most cases.

"May I ask you a question in return?"

"Go ahead."

"What does the Force feel like?"

She looked at me for a long moment. "It is hard to explain."

Please. If you can put it into words, I wish to know." I cursed the pleading note in my own voice.

She smiled gently. "There is a way I described it before you were born. I will not tell you of that one, but I want you to picture this. Think of hearing a heartbeat as close as your mother's heart when you were in her womb. But it is the heartbeat of everything that lives, the planets they live upon, the stars that warm them and the pause in the beat is the deathly cold of interstellar space.

"It is like an ocean current that flows with you, around you, and through you. It is the warmth of the sun upon your face, but the light is so soft that no one risks his eyes by gazing for hours into it. And best of all, it is the feeling of a pet that loves you merely because you exist, and will do anything for you. But at the same time, it is a master that will guide your actions from cradle to grave, and only the truly dark fight against it."

She looked away, then back. Unshed tears glistened in those eyes. "Now picture it all taken away. You cannot hear the flow of life anymore. Everything from the greatest star in the galaxy to the person you are holding is silent. The ocean is a flat surface without movement, without depth, without feeling of temperature. The sun is gone, and everything is black emptiness. The pet has been taken away, and you cannot have another, the guiding strength that told you go here and do this has left you." She wiped her eyes. But still there was no anger.

"This your Master helped others to do to me. If I were petty I would have railed at them and condemned them to my dying day. But they did what they felt was right, what needed to be done. What is my life and dreams to their wisdom? After doing that when I thought her my friend, what makes you think Atris will now embrace me as the sister I once was?"

I pictured her imagery. She had a way with words. If she had not been exiled, I could see her as a teacher surrounded by the fledgling Jedi, guiding their steps into maturity.

"Why did you not merely use the image you used so long before?"

"Because that one was a friend, a confidant. A woman I followed into hell, and where I fell to the side and was condemned, she fell in truth. Another Echani I knew very well."

"Revan"

"Yes." She picked up her bag, and left the room. "If you want to speak more, let me know. I will be traveling, but the hyper com works, I think."

Memories

Marai

I was eight. I had found that I had one skill unique among the Jedi, and I liked to show it off when I got the chance. I could make a ball of the Force. It had been what got me noticed in the first place. The ball was as solid as a rubber ball, and I could throw it across the room, bounce it off a wall, and when I was irritated with someone, even bounce it off their heads.

No one had ever been able to touch it though. Somebody would ask 'how do you do that?"

I would give them that smile every kid knows. The smarmy 'I can do it and you can't' of those so pleased with themselves. Then I would make a ball, and pass it to them. But if they touched it the ball vanished like a soap bubble.

I had done something wrong, what specifically I don't remember now. I had been disruptive in the comparative languages class, I think, and had been told to sit in the garden and meditate.

I was suddenly brought from my meditation by a gentle footstep. It was a little girl with bright auburn hair, and skin the color of milk. She was watching me, and had been creeping forward as if she could sneak up on me.

"Hello." I said. I tried to put the 'oh I am so calm' tone in my voice Master Verasa always used. But I knew I sounded peeved.

"You're a Jedi, aren't you." She said. There was wonder in her voice. For a moment I was tempted to look and see if there was a zoo sign saying JEDI: APPRENTICE: IMMATURE FEMALE: DO NOT FEED.

"Yes, I am an apprentice."

She looked as if she'd found the wonder of the day. "What's it like?"

"What is what like?"

"The Force. My father talks of it, but he says 'only those that can touch it can explain it'."

"Your father?"

"Oh!" She covered her face, a dainty pudgy hand covering her mouth. "I forgot to introduce myself." She snapped erect, then bowed, eyes on my face, hands tight to her side, bending only until her face was even with mine. "I am Revan Chandar Bai Echani. My father is Borashi Chandar Bai Echani, Prefect of Echana."

"Marai Devos." I returned her bow. "Orphan of Cornet."

"Why are you at this academy instead of on Corellia?" She asked.

"It is the rules. They will not send you to an Academy near where you had lived, on the chance that people you might have met would disturb the teachings."

"Ah." She nodded. "So if I became a Jedi they would not send me to the Academy on Echana."

"Correct."

"May I ask you a question?"

"Of course you may."

"What does it feel like? Touching the Force?"

I sighed. I made a ball, a green sphere the size of a wall ball. "Try for yourself."

She reached out, and with a delicate touch, picked it up. She stared at it in amazement; I stared at her. No one, not even a master had been able to pick it up before.

"Can we use it to play wall ball?" She asked.

I stood. "Let's find out."

Five minutes later, the Prefect of Echana and Master Verasa of the Council came out to berate their misguided children. They watched us playing, giggling and shrieking as we bounced an immaterial ball against the wall, disrupting yet another class.

She was to be given to the Jedi Academy the next year. Unfortunately we were already too friendly, so instead of coming to Coruscant as a number of Jedi trainees from Echana did, they sent her instead to Dantooine.

Gathering Force

Marai

I found them stuck in force cages like animals or criminals. I understood why Atris had taken the precaution, but it didn't mean that I liked it.

Kreia merely stood from her meditation seat. "Did you find what you were looking for?"

"That depends. What do you think I was supposed to find?"

"There are echoes from your past here. Echoes that must be resolved before you go on, or they will resonate into your future. This woman who resides here... She meant a great deal to you once. She also dealt you the worst pain one can do to another."

"Her name is Atris. She was a member of the council that exiled me. I thought she was my best friend in the world. Perhaps I was wrong."

"A Jedi Master. Yet she has no students."

"What?"

"These women that surround her like planets about their sun. They are cut off from the Force. Taught to seal their minds like radioactive material inside a protective box. Trained to resist all tricks of the mind. This training blinds them to the Force. If they were sensitive to the Force at all, they would not know how to touch it now."

"How did you know that? Have you been trying to reach their minds as you do with me?"

She gave me a cold look. "Invade the mind of another? That is not something done carelessly, unless you do not care about the outcome. Even if there is something of great value to take from it."

"We should go and discuss this later."

"Very well."

Atton moaned, rolling over in his sleep.

"What happened to Atton? He looks like they knocked him out."

"Oh nothing of the kind. It seems he was tired from our journey and is catching up on his sleep."

I found the controls, and released them. Bao-Dur nodded to me like he'd just been waiting.

"How do you feel?" I asked him.

"I think next time Atton is flying, I will be buckled in. Does he actually land a ship rather than crash it?"

"Hey, I was being shot at! Both times!"

Bao-Dur gave him a look and I chuckled. "He does have his better days."

The Zabrak looked about. "It looks like the old pumping station. We hadn't reactivated it because the Ithorians needed weather resistant plants to be able to purify the water." He looked at me. "Bachani does well in temperate and tropical climates, but not so well in deserts or arctic conditions."

"We have things we must gather. Atton, you and Bao-Dur prep the ship. I want to find T3."

It didn't take long. We found the little droid attached to the mainframe. He had been wired in like a patient in an ICU unit.

"T3! What have they done to you?" He bleeped and burbled at me as I disconnected him. I waved my hand. "I know you couldn't have stopped them. I'm just glad you're all right."

He gave a long series of chirps, and I looked at him sharply. "She downloaded your entire memory core? Why?" His answer was long and convoluted. "All right, we'll see what she accessed when we're safe and in space. Can you get to the ship?"

He gave me a raspberry, then rolled away.

The ship looked good. I almost ran aboard to get back to that womb I had found. I settled into the rear quarters. I wanted so much to be alone with my thoughts. Ten years of pain had been rammed down my throat in the last few minutes, and I wanted to release some of it.

I felt the ship lift, felt it leave the atmosphere. I didn't care where we were going. There was a cough, and I opened my eyes. Atton stood at the door. "We need to know where to go, and T3 keeps blithering."

"Blithering is a description, not an actual noise." I sat up, sighing. "I will be there in a moment."

They were all standing in the mess hall when I arrived. T3 immediately began bleeping and clicking at me. I stopped dead at what he said. "You're joking! No one would have been that stupid!"

"What is he going on about?" Kreia demanded.

"Atris downloaded his memory core; all of it. But when they hooked him up, no one thought that he might do the same."

"What, he jacked their entire mainframe?" Atton asked. "There isn't room!"

"Not all of it, just things he thought I might be interested in." I sat down. Bao-Dur handed me a cup of tea, and I almost threw it away when I tasted it. Echani fire tea. One of my favorites. But that meant that it reminded me of Revan, of Atris, of the war, and for some reason, the Handmaiden. I stopped myself, and sipped it. "There is a recording of the council meeting when I was exiled." I looked at the droid. I wanted to tell him to delete the entire file, but some part of me wanted to relive it, wanted the pain over and done.

"Play it, T3."

The holovid lit the room as it came up. The council chamber looked as I

had remembered, but unbidden, I felt my own memories merging with it.

The day was icy. A cold front had rolled through the section of the city, and I had welcomed it. I was still wounded in spirit. Malachor V was almost two years in my past, but still I grieved.

It didn't help that I had just gotten a call from Revan earlier in the week. "We need you, Marai. Come to these coordinates." I recognized it as Melodoro, a small colony on the rim of what had once been the Mandalorian Occupation Zone.

"I can't." I looked away from the screen. That mask of hers brought back too many bad memories, and I wanted to curl up and die in my room.

"We can fix the problem." Revan told me gently. "We can save the Republic from those that are trying to destroy it from within."

"And who will fix me afterward?" I asked her. "I have given too much of my soul to the Republic, to the Mandalorian wars. When we reached Malachor V you know what happened. I can't do it again. If I do, I won't be coming back, dead or alive."

She looked at me. "Then our paths divide here."

"Sobeit."

She screened off.

Three days later I was called before the Council. Only five members sat there. Atris, Kavar and Vash I knew. Zez-Kai Ell and Vrook I had met in passing. I knew immediately that something was wrong.

The voices brought me back, but still I was in that memory fugue.

"Do you know why you have been called before the council?" Zez-Kai Ell asked.

I looked like death warmed over. I hadn't gotten a decent night's sleep since my return, but I straightened. This was not a discussion or another debriefing.

"I expect the Council will tell me. Unless it is another debriefing about Malachor V."

Kavar looked at me. He had been one of the leaders when we went. It was his hands that had helped mold the ground forces with mine. Yet he was not looking at me like an old comrade. He was looking at something he had hoped never to see.

"As Revan summoned you, so you are now summoned by this Council. You have come full circle from the day you left. Now Revan calls you again."

"I was asked to join her. But I refused."

"So instead you sit here as she forces Melodoro to surrender. As Malak and Saul Karath lay waste to Telos even as we speak."

"What?"

I had looked at them as if suddenly they all spoke Twi-leki or Hutt. What do they mean Revan is attacking our own worlds? And Telos! After all we had done to smash the Mandalorians there, she starts the slaughter at the site of her most famous victory?

"What would you have me do?" I did not feel healed, but I knew that if we now faced our own kind, we would have to send every Jedi into battle. Even a half dead reject such as myself.

"You can begin by telling us what her battle plan is."

I looked at Atris. I had heard that demanding tone before, but never had it directed at me.

"I know of no such plan."

"You are called one of her riders, are you not?"

I wanted to tell them, wanted them to understand. I was a last wounded of the war that had just ended, not an author of a new one.

"I was told no plans. As I told her if war there is, she can go alone. I will have no part of it."

They should feel I spoke the truth not only in my knowledge, but my own spirit as well. Yet I could feel that they didn't believe, or perhaps merely didn't want to believe.

"Why did you and the others defy us? The Jedi have been Guardians of the peace since the founding of the Republic. The first call to war undermined everything we wished to do, and this new one is an abomination!" Zez-Kai Ell said.

"Is Revan your master now?" Atris snarled. "Or is it the horror that you wrought at Malachor V that guides your steps now?"

That hurt the worst. If Vrook or Zez-Kai Ell had said it, even if Kavar whom I also considered friend had said it, I would not have been cut as deep.

"None of you were at Malachor V." I said levelly through the tide of fury that I had felt. "Kavar fought for a time at Dxun, but even he does not understand." I looked at those faces.

"When the Jedi fought Exar Kun only three of you were alive. But you, Zez-Kai Ell taught the children of the Chandar Monastery on Echana. You, Vash were a spokesman for the Council on Boradis. You, Vrook were teaching meditation on Dantooine. Except for Kavar none of you know what we faced when we went. If we had known perhaps we would have run screaming from it as well. But you taught us to defend the Republic. You taught us that our lives mean nothing if we preserve the people we protect.

"By all the Gods and the Force itself, you look at what war had wrought, what warriors are supposed to do and are even more appalled that I, who went through the hell in person! We fought because we thought it was right. There was little of defiance in that when we had millennia of examples to follow. Examples you ignored."

I had been furious, but my tone had never risen above a level tone even as I heaped that abuse on their heads. The mind healers could not help me, because none of them would have been able to bear the agonies that were an every day occurrence in the field. The Council wanted a scapegoat, and I was obviously it.

Zez-Kai Ell looked at me sadly. He didn't understand, and until he did I would be something to be pitied, but not listened to.

"You will not listen. You refuse to hear this Council. With your own words and deed you have shut us out, and done the same for the very Galaxy and Republic you seemed to cherish before."

They looked at each other. Then Vash looked at me. Another one with pity in her eyes. I was sick unto death of pity.

"The Council decrees that you are to be exiled. There was dissent, for we could have ordered that you be imprisoned or executed as well." Her eyes strayed to Atris. You, my friend, wanted me in a force cage? Or dead?

"The Council will take your lightsaber now. Give it to us." Vrook ordered.

They had demanded my lightsaber and in the one last bit of resistance I felt I plunged it into the stone, dividing the word justice into the words Truth and Seek. In the old Coruscanti language it is said 'unless you are willing to see the truth, seeking it does not matter.

"When you have healed the stone, and healed your hearts, then I will speak." I rasped out,

Then I stood there as they reached in and removed all of my connections to the Force as if it were a garden in need of weeding.

But then it suddenly changed for me. As I walked from the chamber, the Masters seemed lost in thought.

"Much defiance in her." Kavar broke that silence.

"You were correct, Kavar. When she was here, I felt it. It was as if we judged an echo or a shadow, even though she stood there before us." Zez-Kai Ell mused.

"But what of the others? The ones that still serve Revan?" Vash asked. "Not even the Great Sith war harrowed our ranks as thoroughly as this conflict! The Jedi may be destroyed by Revan. The Mandalorian bent, shaped and destroyed a generation of our Guardians. Now we have reports that most that have gone to join Revan this time are not only Sentinels, but Consulars, even masters! If we do not discover why, the Jedi will vanish into the mist of history."

"That does not matter to her." Atris pointed accusingly at the closed door. "We did not lose a Jedi this day. You all felt it. She was lost to herself long before this Council met. The only thing that has kept her from taking Revan's traitorous path is her own weakness."

Zez-Kai Ell shook his head. "She was right it that some of our teachings guided them to this path."

"Of us all only Kavar and Vrook knew Revan. None of us were her teacher!"

"We are here to take responsibility, Atris." Vash said. "Not to assign blame."

Before Atris could speak Kavar said, "The choice of one is the choice of us all, Atris. Those that taught Revan and Marai intended no harm. And those who now war on us or lay banished had other teachers after us."

"Yet they all stem from the same seed. It was she that taught them all!" She looked at them. Still, even after being admonished, she was trying to assign blame. "Her teachings violated the Jedi Code and everyone who was her student had fallen to the dark side. Just as she did." Again she pointed at the door.

Vash looked at her questioning. "It was not the Dark side I felt when she stood here. You others felt it as did I, and only you scream of the Dark side, Atris. I felt emptiness, as if there were nothing beneath her skin. She is not the woman I met those years ago."

"I disagree." Atris bit out. "Whatever that wound is, it was dealt by the dark side and devoured everything good and true within her. We should not let her depart. She will join Revan soon enough. Or become worse." She stared at the door, and for a moment I could see the pain in her eyes. "I would move again that we imprison her. Or..."

Or what?" Zez-Kai Ell stood. "Be mindful of your feelings, Atris. This is not Revan or Malak who stood before us today. To suggest not only imprisonment but even worse yet again is not what she deserves." He looked at them all. "Killing her would not be justice, it would be vengeance."

"Yet." Kavar sighed. He seemed the most distressed by the discussion. "That may be forced upon us in time. No, we let her go, Atris, because under our own code, she had done nothing to deserve worse. But if you think she is now plotting because we could not imprison her, think again. She is inside a prison she has made herself. Forged during the Mandalorian Wars, freely entered, and locked from within after Malachor V. We must first remove her from that cage she has built so well before we can understand what else needs to be done."

"If there were any justice in circumstance, Malachor V would have been her grave." Atris snarled back. "You saw it in her stance, in her walk. She is already dead and hasn't the decency to lay down and be buried."

"It is not death." Zez-Kai Ell returned to his seat, crumpling back. "Many battles remain for her if what we have all seen is true. To us the future is a shifting sand bar of possibilities, but she seems to cut toward it like a blade."

"We should have told her." Vash almost whispered. "A Jedi needs and deserves to know."

"No good would have come of it, even if you are correct." Vrook demurred. "We must deal first with Revan. Better not to fight on two fronts if we do not have to."

"Perhaps in some years we can find her and call her to this Council again." Kavar said in a pleading tone. "We can explain to her what has happened, and if it is possible, find a way to heal her." He looked from face to face, but there was no give in them from the slightly worried look of Zez-Kai Ell to the adamant piety of Atris. "Even then, we must let her go where her path takes her."

"But she may never learn the truth without our telling her." Vash also looked from face to face. "She may never learn the truth of why we cast her out."

"Then that is the future she and we must accept." Vrook snarled. "Now-"

The holovid cleared. Then suddenly it flashed back. The Council room sat silent. Atris entered, going to the pillar. Her hand touched the stone of it, and I could see tears in her eyes. She lifted the lightsaber I had left, holding it as if it were a child. Then she left the room.

"Those Jedi surely do love their secrets." Atton commented.

I stared at empty space. I felt emptiness, as if there were nothing beneath her skin. Vash had said. Devoured everything good and true within her. Atris had said.

"They knew." I whispered. "They knew what Chodo spoke of, they knew what had happened, and they did nothing!" I flung the cup across the room to shatter. I stormed out of the compartment keying my hatch to refuse any access.