Atris

I had followed the wandering child of my group from a distance. I had never told her; told them, that I could do so.

I saw her in anger in a circle of battle facing a Mandalorian warrior in that horrible mockery they called training. I felt the sting of an electrical charge, and suddenly she was no more.

I recognized it. After all I had felt it in Marai, known that I could call her from it. Her thoughts were a red rage of fury and death. I felt a man die, and still it was unsatisfied. Then I saw her. She stood there, facing me as the Goddess would wish us clothed. Yet she was hesitant. "Do not make me do this." She said.

This was my chance. She was an abomination, and I directed that fury at her.

Yet I failed. It was like fighting an ocean wave. She was there, but every blow struck water, and flowed into nothingness. Then there was blackness.

She came back to consciousness, and she was resigned. She had used the last tier in that fight, and both she and Marai had known it. The tier of superiority and submission. The winner was master in every way.

I had not worried up until then. Nothing the girl had said was something Marai would not have discovered by mere ratiocination.

But then she had spoken, forsworn herself, and done it with a cheap ploy. Her father had asked the opposite to her as a child and that outweighed her oaths to me!

"Betrayer!" I screamed.

One of the Handmaidens came running. "Mistress-"

She had betrayed us! You sister, the faithless strumpet has betrayed us, betrayed me!"

I stood towering in my rage. "Once she was sister of your flesh, but no more! Forsworn I name her!"

"Mistress-"

"I thought when I sent her that she merely traveled with the Outcast one from pity, but that was a lie on her part! She seeks the powers that a Jedi would possess, and in so doing she condemns herself, and perhaps us!"

The woman was hesitant. Her oaths demanded her acceptance, but this was a sister of flesh. "Mistress, perhaps you are mistaken. Our family does not take oaths lightly-"

"Is that so." I spoke with an angry hiss. "As important an oath as a life bond to your mother? As important as your oath to me? Will you deny that oath whelp?"

"No my mistress. You are the last of the Jedi, and it is your will that will see them ascendant again." The words were a mantra, a litany to keep an angry goddess at bay. "But how has she fallen?"

"It is the corruption of the Exile permeating her being. She will try to teach the faithless one, but as she is flawed, so shall the faithless one be flawed. Gather your sisters. Prepare to depart. We will wait until it is needful, but we will be ready to move in a moment."

Marai

There is the custom among both the Mando'a and the Echani of waiting with the fallen. You know the dead no longer care. They have joined with the Force, gone on to their reward what have you. But to you, the one left behind; this is the friend you knew and loved that now lay upon a battlefield so frightfully alone.

For your own sake, for the memory of them, you stayed, keeping the predators and scavengers from them through the night. My own memory flew to a battle. Zagosta: People who do not go to war picture the troops as soulless automatons marching into battle. The media helps this by portraying battles as sweeps of color racing across a map like bloody slashes, not as the series of inchworm like movements of real armies trying to move, keep themselves supplied, and fight at the same time.

When there is a pause in the fighting, the pundits worry of failure, that the army isn't good enough, and will be destroyed merely because they do not charge on. We had stopped advancing into the mountains, more because we were tired than anything else. We had half of the valley, and the Mando'a that had been defending still held the other half of the long flat swale. Someone fired, and I moved along the lines to find out why. A heavy blaster rifleman was firing at a figure, and I slapped the weapon up.

"Sir, it's a fracking Mandalorian!" He screamed at me.

"Do they shoot our stretcher bearers or medics?" I hissed at him angrily.

"Of course not." He was offended.

"The Mandalorians believe that a friend should sit with the fallen if it is possible. You are trying to murder someone who mourns his loss." I flipped on my com link. "Max 2nd Marine units. Do not, I repeat, do not fire on any Mandalorian who does not cross the dead line. If you do, you answer to me."

The next day we returned to our bloody work of killing. But that night, the enemy knew someone on our side understood.

The Mandalorians understood. A quiet recruit brought me a blanket, and I sat with my friend through the night.

As the sun rose, Bao-Dur came up, handing me a cup of tea.

"The ship called. Your new friend is awake, and wishes to speak with you."

"Tell them we will be there as soon as we can." I brushed the sleeping face still looking up from my lap. "I have things I must attend to."

About an hour later, I felt the Handmaiden's mind stir. I felt a rush of the Force as her warrior mind instinctively searched her surroundings. Only when she was sure that it was safe did her eyes open.

"Master-"

"No. I am no master. I am still Marai, your sister of battle." I brushed her hair from her eyes. "I must go to the ship. You will stay here until I return."

"What have I done to offend you?" She asked bereft.

"Nothing my sweet. But you must learn to focus the new skills you will gain. If you cannot meditate, practice, work out. If the company does not offend you, practice with the Mando'a. But unless they cheat, do not kill any more of them.

"But I must interrogate the woman, and I would feel better if you were here safe."

"Safe? Why must I be safe?"

"The most dangerous time for those who use the Force is when they are new to it. She would be a destabilizing influence on you." I leaned forward, hugging her. "I do this to protect my sister from a battle she is not ready yet to fight."

She nodded.

We dressed, and I went to find Bao-Dur. He had been working on the telemetry computer, and he grunted with satisfaction when the system purred into life.

"I'll be with you in a moment, General."

"Bao-Dur, that was a long time ago. My titles are no more."

"I know that, General. But there are times when it's hard to get my head out of the past." He slid the panel back on, standing.

"Can't you concentrate on what has happened since?"

"If I had a home and a place to call my own, I think I might do that. But what can I say about the last ten odd years? I bummed around as a starship mechanic until I started feeling uncomfortable again. Then I'd move on to somewhere new. I couldn't seem to find anywhere I felt comfortable."

"I know the feeling. When I left the order I felt comfortable no where."

"You would. It was just that the one thing I fought the war for was something I didn't get out of it. Peace. I figured as long as I kept moving I wouldn't have to think about it."

"I know the feeling well."

"After about a year, I suddenly wanted to do something constructive. I became interested in helping people not have to fight. I studied shield technology, and planetary defense shields. The ones they had during the war waste too much energy and bleed off too easily. But the credits were always tight after the war. Why spend money building a newer more efficient system when the system put in by your great grandfather still works? There was more money in rebuilding than anyone is ever willing to spend on making sure it can't happen again.

"I talked with the Ithorians, and they asked me to design the system they're using on Telos. Not just the standard nothing gets in or out shields of a ship, but something that was flexible, could go around corners, or cut across a hydroelectric dam from the flat side up the glacis without buckling. Shields they could move like furniture."

He looked out over the jungle. "Telos was beautiful, one of the most beautiful planets I had ever seen in those old holos. It deserved better than to be thrown away after the Sith smashed it flat." He went still.

"Then Czerka came. Oh they talked a good game. Good enough that they were able to hire me away from the Ithorians. But it was all a game to them. A slot machine where you pull the lever, and it's rigged to pay off when they wanted it to. Before Lorso came it wasn't too bad. Falt was a good guy, even if he had to do some things to pad the bottom line. But Lorso went hog wild.

"I was under contract; have you seen their contracts?" I shook my head. He chuckled. "Fifty pages of boilerplate that a lawyer would love to take to bed for late night reading. But you can say it all in three sentences. 'You agreed to do the job. We can decide to change that job whenever we damn well please but you still have to do it. If you don't like it, get a new life, because you've already given your old one to us'.

"They wanted me to start interfering with the force fields around other areas. The main continent is a hodgepodge of cleared section controlled by Czerka, others controlled by the Ithorians, and wasteland. But the Ithorians laid out the areas originally, and Czerka can't adjust them, at least not legally. But there was so much that Czerka wanted to get to that was just out of reach."

"Forty million tons of Redrocite near the south pole and all of those old military bases and cities to salvage." I remembered.

"Got it in one, General. The ore they want to get to lies fifteen kilometers from their base under a glacier fifty kilometers in length, but it's in an Ithorian controlled region. So they wanted me to create a corridor that would run that distance, linking them. Lorso had already put in orders for the mining machinery. That glacier would be melted away, and the ore ripped out before anyone was the wiser.

"But I refused. I got sent off to the camp where you met me, and one of the security guard planted Ryll spice in my gear. Got me arrested. But they forgot who I was."

He opened a panel on his arm, and I saw a glowing energy matrix. "You spend enough time working with shield technology, and you find cute little things that don't have a lot of utility unless you're a thief. This little gizmo reads the shield harmonic, and by adjusting it here, it neutralizes that frequency. The shield just goes away long enough for me to walk through it.

"So I sorta went back to war again. This time the enemy wore Czerka uniforms. I was sabotaging their equipment, but never their shields. The planet wasn't my enemy."

"You against the corporation." I murmured. "Pretty steep odds."

"Oh I didn't expect to win. Just slow them down a bit." He looked at me, then asked gently. "I hate talking about the war, but can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"Why did you go to war?"

I shrugged. "The Mando'a had to be stopped, and the Republic military didn't seem capable."

"From you lips to the Maker's ear. I was wondering what the Republic was doing as the Mandalorians gobbled up the rim. Were they so blind that they didn't care?"

"It was a selective blindness." I said. "Like Lorso and Czerka back on Telos. We are supposed to ignore what they do because it isn't our planet they are ruining or our money they are stealing. The senate was just that blind. The Mando'a weren't attacking us; they were attacking those people too stupid to join the Republic before. We were too big for them to digest, so we were safe."

"Yeah." He replied softly. Like Iridonia."

"Bao-Dur-"

"Oh I know that isn't what you thought. You're just repeating what they said. My people had colonies both inside and outside Republic space, and they were among the first to fall. But when it was my own home..."

"I know. I'd like to think most of the Jedi that went did so because they could not allow other people to be hurt if we could stop it."

"I didn't join to protect anyone. I did it out of hate and revenge. I wanted to kill every Mandalorian. I wanted to choke the life from them as they had to my home, and if I had to strangle the last child in his crib I would have done it. Before the Jedi came into the war there weren't a lot of victories, but every Mandalorian death was something to celebrate. You know what I mean."

"I do, but not from direct experience." I shook my head. "The Jedi are taught that if kill you must, do it cleanly. Don't glory in it, or cheer. Think of it as surgery where you must spill blood, but you are doing it with the intent to heal the person."

"I couldn't do that." He whispered. "I couldn't separate the hate from the deed. It was almost as if this... this thing within me came out of its cage, and nothing would satisfy it but blood.

"Then suddenly the war was over. Revan fought and killed Manda'lor face to face, and stripped them of their arms. But I found I couldn't just turn it off. I hated the Mandalorians.

"But I came to realize that it wasn't the Mandalorians I hated. It was myself. I see the callow young man I had been unwilling to swat an insect turned into a ravening monster that gloried in the kill. I hated the Mandalorians for what they had made me do. For letting the monster out of the box, and now I don't know how to put it back."

"That isn't how you are." He looked at me. "What do you think of Zuka?"

"Well he doesn't really have the training to be a tech. He's picked it up, and is getting good, but he still hesitates when he tries to fix things. Worries too much they'll take any fumbles out of his pay."

"And Kex?"

"He's no better or worse than any supply sergeant I have ever met. But he never passes out crap and calls it gold. If it doesn't work he works on it until it does. In fact they told me there's an old cache nearby with some construction and repair droids. If they could get it open, they would have this place up and running in no time."

"And what have you been doing?"

He looked at me strangely. "I've been helping out where I can. I'd go bug nuts sitting on my butt while work needs to be done."

"Now think of what you just said. Did the thought that these people were Mandalorian have anything to do with them?"

"No…" He looked out the door at the men out there. "All I thought was Zuka needs training, and Kex needs help."

So you are growing out of it." I clapped him on the shoulder. "You have a beast. But if it is not in the cage now, it is at least placid enough to let them survive with you there."

He sat there lost in thought. "Well I have work to do. Did you need something?"

"No, Bao-Dur. You stay here and help. I have to go to the ship. I will be back in a while."

"Bring me some tea while you're there. This Mandalorian stuff is like getting jump started with a defibrillator."

"Sure." I gave him a lazy grin. "Echani fire tea?"

"Maker no! I have to sleep sometime."

I made my way to the gate. The Mandalorian Guard captain grunted then called for a couple of recruits to guide me to the ship. More to make sure I didn't do anything stupid than anything else. While we waited, he cracked his knuckles.

"I don't like it." He said. I looked at him. After a moment, he saw my look and shrugged. "We had to pull in our patrols because of that stupid battle overhead. We couldn't take the chance with the Onderon military running by with full scanners, so we couldn't even have the satisfaction of cleaning out the larger predators. They'd detect weapons fire."

"But you should be able to move around now. The battle is over."

"Manda'lor's orders. We had three ships come down on our sensor grid before we went dark. But where they landed we don't know."

"Well there is mine, and the Duros. Any idea what the other one was?"

"It read as a freighter. But no transponder code." He shrugged again. "Until your friend showed up using the sensor grid usually meant using the mark one eyeball."

"So they could have landed a fleet and they wouldn't have been noticed."

"Yeah, but who? The Onderoni use this place for two things, a place to catch animals they sell, and a burial ground for their kings."

"They bury their kings here?"

"Considering a lot of them through their history, I'd want to bury them somewhere they can't get back from readily."

"You're almost speaking as if they'll rise from the dead."

If you study Onderoni history some of them just might." He looked around. "One thing we were able to pick up before the system went down was signals on the surface. Old equipment of ours and yours detecting sweeps by someone. But when we go looking, we don't find anything.

"But it doesn't repeat in any sector we can reach. It's like someone looking for a Search and Rescue beacon that transmits only intermittently."

"Where?"

"Before the system was fully up I'd have said everywhere on the bloody moon."

The guides arrived, and we set out.

Submission

Visas

I awoke in a compartment, on a medical bed. A person bustled around beyond a force field generator, and I turned my face toward him. It was the man I had struck down.

"I must speak to her." I said.

He turned, and I could feel the anger. "Why? So you can give her crap too?"

"No. I have questions that only she can answer. Please, send for her."

"What do you mean?"

I sighed. "She is approximately 10.3 kilometers to the northwest of us at this moment. She is sitting on the ground with the one she will train across her legs, both naked, beneath a blanket.

"She is asleep, but her mind listens for anything that might strike at her. She is at peace." I moved my head. "She will awaken in a moment. At that time, you must ask her to come to me."

He harrumphed, walking out. A moment later he came back. "Bao-Dur would not tell me what she was wearing, but he said he gave her the message, and there were things she had to do first."

"The fact that she has agreed is sufficient." I tried to stand, but there was a force field over my body. "May I go and meditate?" I asked.

He drew his sidearm. As pitiful as the weapon was, I did not gainsay it. He released the field, and escorted me to the starboard berthing area.

"I will have the door blocked with a force field. You can wait here and contemplate your navel to you're heart's content."

I went in, feeling the field snap on like an electrical discharge behind me. I knelt, and watched the one I had sought as she spoke to the girl, telling her to stay there. To the Zabrak Bao-Dur about war, to the Mandalorians about their situation.

When she set out on the path to me, I began to meditate in full.

She had done something after our battle. I had felt my master's rage, and he had struck at me. But somehow she had stopped him. She had left me alive, unwilling to kill me herself, yet unwilling to merely allow my master to do so.

I had surrendered myself to her, and I needed to know what type of master I had taken.

She came up the ramp, and down the passageway. The force field died, and she stepped into the compartment. I turned, bowing to the deck. "My life for yours."

She came over, and knelt before me. "Are you all right?"

"I am able to serve. If we enter battle, my only wish is to fight and die at your side."

"That isn't what I meant. I asked are you healed?"

That threw me off. Never before had my master cared beyond the mere ability to move. If I could crawl into battle, he was satisfied. "I have not been asked that question in a long time. My flesh is healed, if that is what you wish to know."

"I am sorry that I hurt you."

"I know that. But I fear that others might see this as a weakness. They will see me healed, know that I have survived, and use it as a weapon against you. Perhaps using me or the others because if you put a blade to the throat of one, they have put it to yours."

"Threatening my friends will get them a swift death, whatever happens to my friends. Who sent you?"

"I am a scout and emissary for my master."

"Why did he send you?"

"Because he was aware of a disturbance in the Force, but unaware of its nature. I was sent because the ripples in the Force you caused did not feel like that given off by a living being. There is little my master does not know, and the fact that you had eluded his sight for so long disturbed him, though he would not tell me why."

"How did you find me?"

"I... felt you. It was like a sound on the very edge of hearing. Enough to disturb you, but not enough to clearly make out. But as I listened to that music, it suddenly reached across the space between us, and I was compelled to find you for my own reasons."

"What reasons were those?"

I bent back forward. "I was ordered to slay you, but as I approached, I knew that I could not. My master has always sent me on such missions, not caring if I lived or died as long as his will was done. I could not die by my own hand, or allow someone to kill me. You were the first in many years that had the chance, and I prayed that you would end my existence. Allow me to return to the bosom of the Force. To be with my family, my people forever again."

"But I refused."

"Yes. And as you have defeated me, I am yours to command. When my master struck out in his fury, you shielded me from that wrath." I knelt back up. "Why have you done this to me? You could not end my life at your hand, but allowing him to kill me was within your grasp. Yet you stopped him, had the male-"

"His name is Atton."

"-Had Atton minister to my wounds. Healed my body. You consider even now helping me learn, and this from someone I tried to murder. Why?"

"To the first question, I could not merely stand aside and let you die. As for the healing of your body, I would not leave you maimed any more than I would shatter a stained glass window out of pique." She leaned toward me, and a hand brushed my face. "As for training, I had considered it, but only because everything your master has taught you is anathema to me. I cannot merely bring you along when everything he has taught you is for the pain of not only yourself but of every living being you might encounter. I believe you can be redeemed and I will do this."

I reached up, pushing her hand aside gently. "You must not do this. I cannot allow you to weaken yourself in trying to heal my entire life."

"Helping another is not weakness. It is strengthening to those that receive, and those that give."

"That may be so, as you would see it. But to my knowledge it is not the way the common man sees it."

She was silent for a moment. "Will you answer some questions for me?"

"I cannot guarantee that my answers will make sense or be of any help, but I will try."

"Was you master the one that destroyed Peragus?"

"There are many factions within the Sith at present. My master leads but one, and his people did not cause the destruction you speak of."

"Factions?"

"When Revan shattered the Star Forge, when she slew Malak, there was no one to lead the Sith. Those in power fought among themselves, and still do. Where one moves, or plots, the others do not always know it. The only thing they all share is one abiding purpose. To assure that the Jedi do not rise again, to see that all of you are obliterated, expunged from existence.

"They believe you to be the last of their quarry and only that hatred binds them to that one purpose. All of those eyes are upon you, and the pursuit will be dark and terrible to imagine."

She considered. "I am told your race is blind. Yet you moved within this ship with ease, and fought well. How can you see without eyes?"

"My people had to learn to use the Force instead of the eyes we can no longer use. Some could see events elsewhere in the galaxy. One of my people could also affect those around them, give briefly the ability to see as they once did."

"You speak as if you have lost that ability."

"My sight was... damaged. Here, touch my hand."

She reached out, and I allowed her touch. Then I showed her what I saw, the swirling essences of the Force within her and around her. The glows of her companions, the animals that wandered between the Mandalorian encampment and where we were, then the encampment itself. There, like an arc light among the candles, were two forms.

"Who are they?"

"Can you not see them for who they are?" I indicated the brighter of the two. "She is the one you call Handmaiden. This one is Bao-Dur." I pulled my hand free.

She shook her head. "That was... interesting."

"Yet it is merely a tithe of what one of our elders could have done."

"How did you lose your sight?"

"When my master dragged me from the ashes of my home world, he showed me my world as it was when he had finished. It hurt me deep inside. Since then it was if part of the Force had been taken from me, and I do not see as I once did. I made myself blind so I could not be forced to look again. But being with you, I sense that there was a gift beneath that pain."

"When one endures pain it gives hope to others."

"Yet only by suffering and enduring can certain truths become evident. I feel you are an example of this. That you see truths of the galaxy, your companions, and yourself that no other can see yet."

"Your home world-"

"Katarr. It is not a subject that I have considered much since it is no more."

"Why did your master strike at them? All I have heard about your people was of their peaceful nature."

"The last full council of the Jedi met there in secret. They hoped that our elders could aid them to see what was striking at them from the shadows. Many had already fallen, but it was as if they had merely died for no reason.

"They succeeded in a fashion. Their presence was a scent of blood in the water my master could not ignore. My people were incidental to that hunger, but it was a rich meal for one such as him.

"The Jedi died, my people died, that which lives on our planet died. Only I still live."

"He came to your world just because the Jedi were there?"

"He cannot deny his hunger for long. The Jedi Council was a rich meal as I said, and he had to feast. Any gathering of the Jedi is something he will not resist for long.

"But now the Jedi are vanishing. Soon they will be no more, and I fear what he might do then. Perhaps by then he will be able to eradicate even life that cannot feel the Force with his presence."

"How could he destroy an entire world! You would need a fleet of ships!"

"Oh the world itself is still there. But it circles a star, empty of all life except for that last scream of pain and fear. Nothing lives upon its surface. All that remains are the echoes of those that once were, but no one lives to hear them."

"But it is beyond the capability of mankind to destroy on such a scale!"

"It was not a matter of weapons and ships. He used the Force, and the Force reaches where no weapon can. To the depths of the earth and seas, it reaches, and he drained it all."

"I have seen destruction. I saw Malachor V after the battle."

"It is said that people across the galaxy felt the destruction of that world. But the forces there shattered the world and it is no more. My world is still there. Just empty."

"How did you survive?"

"I am not certain that I did. I was there when it struck. To see everything you know, loved, and imagined extinguished like a candle flame. It was as if my sight was snatched away even as I felt the Force drained away from my world to leave nothing behind.

"I am sure there are worse pain, and worse deaths. But I have yet to find one that matched it. When I awoke from that pain I could feel that only I remained. My life, my agony of mind and body was a flicker of a candle in the immensity of space. All that I had ever been connected to was gone as if it had never been."

"But you survived."

"If being a child on a dead world with the bodies of all you knew and loved scattered about can be called living. I wonder at times what would have happened if I had died there. Been with my family, my friends, my people when they went into the ending dark together rather than being left behind alone. If perhaps there had been a way to hide myself from the eyes of the galaxy. Not endured all of the pain and death.

"Yet it was not to be. When my master looked upon the planet, he found me. He came for me and among the bodies of all those dead, took me as a woman, then took me as his own."

For some reason that infuriated her. "How old were you?"

"I was twelve standard years old. I am now seventeen."

She made a strangled sound, and I could picture her thoughts, of my master laying dead, the manhood he had besmirched removed not with a lightsaber or blade, but with her own hands. Then it faded. "Go on."

"As I stood there, bleeding from his actions, he reached into my mind and forced me to see. To see what he had done not only to my world, but to others before it."

"He made you see what he had done?"

"To my eyes, to the galaxy, my world was absent the currents of the Force. Swept clean, leaving only stone, metal and the flesh of those that had once lived there, preserved from corruption by the death even of the minutest life forms. There was nothing but emptiness.

"Then he showed me other worlds, bastions still of life scurrying across the surface of their worlds like a bacteria infecting the blessed emptiness of space. Disconnected from themselves, their worlds, and their place in the order of things. Unable to see the currents of what must be and their effects upon it."

"Why did he show you these things?"

"He told me that life was a disease. That the only way to return the galaxy to purity was to remove that infection. He would find that ugliness, that white noise, and in his wake was blessed silence. Where there had been chaos, now there was order.

"But I have discovered that for every being that feels the Force, there is a different path. Different strengths, different weaknesses. You have your own strengths, as does my master. But his comes with a terrible hunger. He is a wound, a black hole of the Force sucking all life into his heart, and it never escapes. In his wake all life has surrendered it's energies to him.

"And those like you who feel the Force strongly are beacons in the night sky, and his eyes are drawn to them, and soon he will go to them if only to put out that blessed light. The only difference for my world was the timing. When he had devoured all of you, we would have been another meal to partake of."

"Tell me where he is." I could feel her will encompassing this. She would hunt him down; try to kill him.

"You cannot find him by yourself. He is always aboard his ship, which lurks in the depths of uncharted space. Not even I know where he is unless he calls to me. But even if I could give this information to you, I would not. You are not yet ready to face him."

"Ready?"

"You are not the equal of Jedi masters that have already faced him and died. If you face him without your full potential realized, you will fail, and none that he has so devoured went on to the Force. You would be lost to me forever, and I...I cannot bear the thought that it would be so. It would be as if I lit a brushfire to burn away a pristine valley never touched by man, shattered a cave's worth of precious crystals. As if I had smashed the hands of a sculptor, or blinded an artist so he could create no more."

"My life is incidental to this. Your master threatens more than me and mine."

"I cannot, and I will not." I dropped forward, head touching the deck plates. "I would die by my own hand rather than harm you. To preserve you untouched and safe my life is there now only to protect you. I have found peace in my life for the first time since I awoke on a dead planet and I cannot sacrifice that peace no matter how you ask."

"If he is behind what has happened, the hundred or thousands of the Jedi that are no more, your entire race removed as if they were merely a stain! I will face him."

"You will, I have foreseen it. But to go now will not avenge the dead. When you stand before him, realize what you face, you must be prepared for he will not give you a chance to run away and return. Confronting him directly will focus his attentions on you and he will move every heaven, every world, and every hell to assure that you do not face him a second time.

"Until then I must protect you. Stand by your side and aid you in every other way until you are ready."

"Why? What is so important about me?"

"There is... a greatness in you. It does not stem from the Force. It is the woman than kneels before me. Her body mind and soul forged by adversity until she is the ancient metal blade of the Jedi that cut anything. Even without the Force you would be a force to be reckoned with.

"But the making of such as you is something my Master cannot understand, and would not accept. Because of this you are not even an echo in the Force. I found you not by your own actions, but as if you were a planet at the edge of a system, measured only by the affect you have on the bodies around you. That blindness gives me hope for all life. But if you are to survive, you must seek to understand your own nature."

"How is it that you could see me and find me, but he cannot?"

"There is much in the galaxy that I can see and he cannot. I fear it is because of the nature of my race. Of myself.

"My people spent their entire existence seeing the galaxy by the swirls of energy in it. By the strength of the Force within life no matter how small where ever it may be. We understand his blindness better than the sighted would because it is fueled by denial."

She stood. "I have much to think upon. Stay here, rest until I return."

"As you bid, my master."

"And one more thing. I am no master. I may lead, but I lead friends, not servants and never slaves. If you would call me anything, call me Marai."

"As you wish ma- Marai."