Epilogue: Where the Sun sails and the Moon walks
As the initial shock for the disappearance of Ahsoka and Kanan's injury waned, Ezra and Jaral immediately accompanied the Jedi to the infirmary of the base. Mira was extremely relieved to see her kids and gave them both a quick hug before taking a look at Kanan.
The doctor ran various examinations, but the verdict was grim: the only way Kanan could reacquire his sight was through a transplant of corneas, but that would require instruments and a valid donor, neither of which was available at the base and, in any case, they lacked a specialist that could actually make the surgery.
The news was devastating for everyone, but mostly for Hera and Ezra. The boy felt responsible because he trusted Maul, thus giving him the chance to attack Kanan. It was in fact a stroke of luck that Kanan wasn't dead, considering that Maul attacked by surprise.
Ezra went back to the Ghost, but didn't head to his and Sabine's cabin. No, he wasn't worthy of being with her, not after his carelessness had just caused Kanan to be mutilated.
He sat in the couch of the common room and leaned his arms against the dejarik table, which he used to hold his head as his thoughts spiraled down into the abyss of self-loathing.
"Ezra." the unmistakable voice of Sabine whispered from the door of the room.
The girl was peeking in, unsure as if to step in.
"Hey." he barely mumbled.
Sabine cautiously walked to the table and slipped in the seat next to him. She knew that words were useless, so she wrapped an arm around his shoulders and leaned her head on his right.
"Please, don't." Ezra said with a lump.
"Don't what?" Sabine asked surprised.
"Don't try to comfort me. I screwed up everything. I have no right to get attention."
"Ezra…" Sabine said with a sad voice, but Ezra snapped.
"No! I'm just an arrogant, stupid, incompetent fool! Because of me, Kanan was wounded and Ahsoka...Ahsoka…" he couldn't finish the sentence. He honestly wanted to cry again, but he felt like he had already dropped every tear he had on the Phantom. So he simply hid his face in his palms.
Instead, it was Sabine who shed a tear as she almost slammed Ezra into a tight hug, desperately holding onto him. Wishing that she could absorb his pain and share the burden with him.
"Please…" he begged, his sense of guilt telling him harshly that he didn't deserve her affection. "leave me alone."
"Never." she said resolutely. "You've always been there for me when I needed help. So I'm going to be here for you."
She made sure to bring Ezra's head onto her chest and hug him with all the affection and the desire to help him anyway she could.
The boy just didn't have the strength, nor the actual will, to chase her away. His idea of not deserving affection evaporated as the girl he loved kept him with such devotion and kissed him through his buzz cut, despite she herself feeling terrible for what just happened.
Ezra caved in and let himself fall on Sabine's shoulder, trying to find any ounce of comfort that may distract him from the pain and remorse gnawing at his heart.
"Tell me what happened." Sabine tried to ask.
Ezra exhaled. "I...there's no need…"
"Ezra, please..." she replied immediately. "Don't shut me off. Let me be here for you."
The boy took a few deeper breaths and finally started to reacquire a bit of lucidity. After sitting backup, though still holding to Sabine's warm embrace, he started to talk. He gave a small recap of when they arrived, how they met the first Inquisitor…
"And then I made the mistake." Ezra said snarling. "I should've never trusted Maul!"
Sabine's eyes widened at the name. "Hold up! Maul? Red Zabrak with weird black tattoos?!" she asked.
Ezra was taken aback. "H-how do you know him?" he asked loudly.
Sabine sighed. "Every Mandalorian knows the story. In the last months of the Clone Wars, Maul took possession of the Darksaber and caused a civil war on Mandalore. My mother fought against him and she was there when he was finally captured and delivered to the Jedi."
"What's the Darksaber?"
"A lightsaber, actually. It belonged to the only Mandalorian Jedi ever existed, over a thousand years ago. It's a powerful symbol of leadership for my people."
"I see." Ezra said. He could tell that his mind had finally started to set the pain apart, to let it burn into a remote corner of his psyche, and now he was feeling a little bit more normal.
"Anyway, what happened?" Sabine asked.
"Maul tricked me into activating the Sith temple, and then he blinded Kanan." he stated. Then he clenched his fists again. "How could I have let myself being tricked like a baby loth-cat…?"
"Maul is tricky. That's how he ruled my people for months. But don't let an error drag you down, Ezra. What's done is done...thinking about it indefinitely will only drive you mad...trust me on this."
Ezra immediately realized what she was talking about. He remembered that evening when she disclosed her past to him and Jaral, and how much it hurt her to even talk about it. He knew that, right now, few people could understand how he felt like Sabine could.
And thus, he understood that, right now, she was the only person he needed. He renewed the embrace between them, before they realized that night had fallen on the planet and it was pretty late.
Sabine raised from the couch and grabbed Ezra's hands in hers.
"Come on. You need to rest, now. Go in the cabin. I'll bring something to eat."
The boy managed to give an amused huff and kissed her on the forehead. "I don't know what I would do without you."
She gave him a soft smile in return, then she tapped his cheek and nodded her head, encouraging him to reach the cabin.
Ezra complied and went into the room, closing the door behind him. He sat on the bed's edge and only now he remembered that in his small bag he still had the Sith holocron.
He took it out. The device was glowing with its red mist inside the hard glass and it seemed like it was inviting him to open it.
The young Padawan tried to reach into the Force, as he did in the past with the Jedi holocron, but nothing happened.
He remembered what Ahsoka said, that a Jedi could never open it. Which meant he needed to call the pain and the anger that he had just set aside.
It might have been risky, and Kanan would most likely yell at him for doing that. But after all, that holocron was the only thing they gained from that blasted trip to Malachor. This had to be the reason why Master Yoda sent them there. If he wanted to stop the Sith once and for all, he needed to open that damn pyramid.
But now it wasn't the moment. He sensed Sabine coming back from the kitchen, so he put the holocron away. The holocron could wait after he had spent some time with the girl he loved.
Jaral was accompanied by Darvos back to their room at the base. It was a small space, but at least it was private.
"You want some time alone?" he asked gently.
The young woman shook her head and grabbed his hand, inviting him to sit beside her on the bed.
"Jari, what happened there?"
The girl took a deep breath and started narrating. She talked for around half-an-hour before Darvos stopped her.
"Wait, wait...you saved an Inquisitor?" he asked dumbfounded.
"Yes." she said dryly. "And I would do it again. If I fight without compassion, I will just become like the Imperials."
"Absolutely. I wasn't judging you. I was just surprised." Darvos replied, putting an arm around her back and reaching her hip on the opposite side. Jaral leaned against him with her head and torso.
"I know. I'm sorry if I sound harsh, but...it's tough." she sighed.
"I can only imagine. But still, you're here, you're safe and I can tell that you're already thinking about the future. All in all, it seems like you're coping greatly." the young man tried to sound encouraging.
"I have little choice." she added dispirited. "If I give up, dozens of people in this base will pay the consequences."
"There, see what I means? Just because you have no other choice, it doesn't change the fact that you're still holding it together. You may just go crazy from the pain but you don't. You are moving forward already. That's what makes you a great person, Jari. And that's probably the main reason why I love and admire you so much."
Jaral cautiously raised her head so she could look at the blonde man that was talking to her. He looked back with his emerald eyes. Jaral right now couldn't have felt a deeper love for the man that seemed to have always the right words to encourage her. Even in this moment, where she felt utterly useless (because in the end, she did very little to help on Malachor), Darvos was still able to improvise a speech and recite it beautifully, in a way that made her believe every single word.
The young woman stretched her neck and kissed her betrothed in the lips. A slow, deep kiss that helped her express her feelings for him, along with getting out part of the negative feelings that clouded her mind.
"Flatterer." she teased him after letting him breathe again.
"I'm trying." Darvos replied with a smirk.
Jaral suddenly stood up, gently escaping the embrace of the man beside her, and went to the small closet that they shared.
Inside of it was a very small safe-box. She tapped a code and it opened, revealing her green kyber crystal, the one she had been given in the Jedi Temple on Lothal. In the box there were also some small pieces that she intended to use to build the lightsaber.
"I can't postpone this anymore." she mumbled, clenching her fist around the small glowing crystal.
It's not like she was ignoring her newfound duties as a Jedi, but she was given the kyber only a week before, and that week had been rather intense. The time on Malachor, and before that the first contact with the extra-galactic civilization laying behind the wormhole…
The Imperial Federation. Jaral's thoughts now went to her father, who was still in the Milky Way, trying to gain what help he could from their leader. Her gaze wondered toward the distant stars for a few seconds.
'I wonder how Dad is doing.'
Seeing the Milky Way again had given Jordan a fair share of emotions. He learned that the wormhole for Andromeda could be found right outside the Viper Nebula, home to the Bahak system, known mainly because it was the first system in recorded galactic history to be wiped out by the destruction of a mass relay.
The relay had been rebuilt by the Reapers/Guardians, but the planets and the hundreds of thousands of batarian colonists that populated it when Commander Shepard was forced to destroy it, they would never come back.
Jordan was escorted back to Earth aboard the cruiser INS Mombasa. Somehow he felt like he had missed flying aboard a ship of the Imperial-Federal Navy. Or maybe he just missed flying on a big ship. The Mombasa was a simple first-line cruiser, but compared to Phoenix Fleet, which had only corvettes and a small carrier, there was way more space, plus gyms, training rings, and the mess hall was much better filled.
The Legionnaire found out that he also missed the food of the Milky Way. Sure, the food in Andromeda wasn't bad, and since every species there seemed capable of eating the same things, he found himself wondering if the food in the other galaxy might become a 'universal food' for the Milky Way, one that might allow species like Turian and Quarian to finally eat the same things as the other species.
Aboard the Mombasa there was also a small team of Legionnaires, as part of the standard composition of the Federation's crew for military ships. It was nice to see someone else with his same history and genes and spent most of the time aboard with them, being brought up to speed about the events of the last 20 years. He learned that the Federation was ever-more expanding its horizons and made contact with new species that just began space-faring. They weren't all peaceful, for example a particularly xenophobe species known as the 'Tambaran' immediately opened fire on the diplomatic vessels sent to make first contact, thus this species was now under embargo from the Federation.
The Terminus systems were still a lawless portion of galaxy, with very few planets with a stable government that had embassies on Earth.
The trip to Earth had lasted only a few hours. Jordan had forgot how easy it was to go from another side of the galaxy to another when you have the Mass Relays. Granted, there was a Relay for any star cluster, and it was a fast travel as long as you didn't have to reach other systems than the one with the Relay on it, because if that's what the case, then you'd have to rely on FTL travel, which takes hours depending how far you have to go and consumes fuel.
Luckily, Earth and its Sol System is one of those that has a Relay in it, so the voyage was quick.
When Jordan went to the observation deck and saw his homeworld, he couldn't help a bit of nostalgia from taking over his thoughts. But mostly he was impressed at how prosperous it looked.
The atmosphere was clean like it never was, and on the dark side there were sprawls of light indicating the major urban areas of the planet. There was a constant traffic of civilian ships of any kind, all traveling along determined routes vigilantly watched by the Navy.
Then the Nairobi passed in front of the renewed Citadel. The giant space station that was destroyed when the previous Emperor used the Crucible to subjugate the Reapers, but the big sentient ships had rebuilt it immediately, along with the devastated areas on Earth (specifically the isles of Britannia and Ireland) that the Reapers managed to occupy only for a couple of months and in the last hours of the war.
By the time the Reapers had repaired the network of Relays around the galaxy, Earth had already become the center of the galaxy, so it was decided that the Citadel would stay over the homeworld of mankind.
It still retained its five arms with many residential and commercial districts, all kept together by the ring-shaped structure known as the Presidium.
Patrolling the station was still the titanic dreadnought, the Sentinel. 16 km of triangularly-shaped length, an armor capable of taking fire from an entire fleet and thousands of weapons granting it the firepower that kept the Reapers out of the planet for months until the last battle, when the massive ship had joined the coalition's armada.
Growing up in a Legion's base on Continental Europe, Jordan and his comrades practically grew under the Sentinel, which had become the flagship of the Imperial-Federal Navy and the personal ship of the Empress, tasked with protecting her wherever she went.
And it was exactly on the Citadel, on one of the arms, that the Nairobi docked. Jordan, still in his Katarn armor, was escorted on the docks and met with a group of four men with the black armor of the Imperial Guard. At their head was a man with the officer's armor of the Guard and without the helmet. He must have been in his 60s.
"Lieutenant Jordan Bridger?" the man asked when Jordan stood in front of him with his own helmet under his left arm.
Jordan straightened up and instinctively made the military salute.
"Sir, yes sir."
The man made the salute on his part.
"Colonel James Vega, of the Imperial Guard."
Jordan was a bit surprised. He remembered that name: he was part of the crew of the INS Normandy, and served directly under Commander Shepard and the then-Princess Benedetta.
"It's an honor to meet you, sir." Jordan extended a hand, and James shook it cordially.
"Likewise, Lieutenant. You've become quite a celebrity on Earth in just a few hours."
Jordan made a lopsided grin. "Are you kidding?"
James chuckled. "Why so surprised? You went for 20 years into another galaxy and came back. Besides, the news arrived first into the Imperial Citadel, so of course we already knew."
Jordan shrugged. "It wasn't that bad. I even got a wife and kids."
"Oh really?" James sounded surprised. "Aliens?"
"Nope. Believe it or not, Humans are the most important race in that galaxy too."
Now the Colonel widened his eyes, but then relaxed and smiled. "Well, happy to hear you settled down quickly." then he indicated with his arm a military shuttle waiting on the next dock.
"Now, let's not make Her Majesty wait."
"I wouldn't dare." Jordan quipped.
The group boarded the shuttle, a UT-47A 'Kodiak'. Despite it being a model dating back to the Reaper War, it was still largely used, with only some small improvements to the overall stability and practicality.
"Ok, Cortez. We can go." James said to the pilot once they were all aboard in the cargo bay.
"Copy that, Colonel." Cortez said in a friendly tone, as if the two knew each other from a long time.
The lateral door closed and the shuttle took off toward the Presidium.
Jordan was staring out of the small window. Part of him still couldn't believe that he was there, right now. On the other side, he looked at how peaceful this part of the universe was, and his mind raced to his wife and kids, who were instead fighting a war.
The flight was only a few minutes long, and then the shuttle reached the docking space right outside the Tower of the Presidium. Jordan stared up at the summit, a bit nervous at the idea that he was about to met both the Empress and the Citadel's Council.
"You okay, Lieutenant?" James asked as they reached the door of the elevator.
"Yes, sir. Just a bit nervous." Jordan replied with discipline.
"I know all of this sounds overwhelming, but don't fret. Remember, before being the Empress, Benedetta was a soldier, and a fine one at that. I'm sure she will make her best to make you feel comfortable."
"I'll keep it in mind, Colonel, thank you."
They stepped into the elevator, which reached the top of the structure in around 50 seconds.
The summit of the tower wasn't so different from the rest of the station, to Jordan's surprise. Sure, there were many flowerbeds decorating and delimiting the walkways a person was supposed to take, and the architecture was definitely more artistic, but all-in-all, the materials used to build the structure were the same as everywhere else.
The only element that made Jordan understand that he was in front of the galaxy's political heart was the giant wall at the end of the corridor, which enclosed the conference room where the Empress and the Councilors representing every species of the Imperial Federation were waiting for him.
The tower was also patrolled by an entire squadron of the Imperial Guard. Jordan noticed that, while most of them where Humans, there were at least a dozen Turians, a couple Salarians and even a Krogan guarding the main door of the conference-room.
Said Krogan saluted James, who returned the gesture, and stepped aside.
"Ready to meet the big shots of this galaxy?" James quipped to the Lieutenant.
Jordan took a deep breath and remembered why he was here. He remembered what happened in the last few hours. The promise he made to his friends and allies to bring back some help. The promise he just made to his daughter as she looked at him with a half-broken heart, but still proud of what he was doing.
"Let's do this." he said looking straight ahead.
The colonel pushed the button of the holographic panel of the door, which hissed open and the two stepped in.
Jordan found himself into a rectangular room, with a large, half-moon table at the center of it. The open side of the table was aimed at the door he just used to step into, and while he immediately took notice of all the various alien politicians sat around him, his gaze quickly fell on the seat right in front of the door, sitting at the exact mid-point of the shape and with a large glass wall behind it.
There sat a woman, 65 years-old. Her skin was olive, clearly Mediterranean, though her eyes were slightly almond-shaped, and despite her age she only had a couple of wrinkles, due to the slowed aging. Her lips had a black lipstick on it while her hair were a fascinating silver and formed a braid leaning on her right shoulder.
He could only see her upper body, which was slender and athletic despite her duties giving her little time to engage in physical exercises.
What hit the Lieutenant the most, however, was her aura. Her expression, her posture, everything about her indicated that she was a ruler, yet not a tyrannical one. She seemed at the same time strong yet humble, pragmatic yet empathetic.
In short, she was the embodiment of a true leader.
There stood the most powerful person of the Milky Way. Empress Benedetta IV dei Vignoli, Ruler of the Imperial Federation, Pontifex Maxima and 47th Head of the Vignoli Dynasty.
The woman gave a gentle smile both at him and James, who made a small bow with his upper body.
"My Lady. Allow me to introduce Lieutenant Jordan Bridger. Here as you requested." his tone was formal, though Jordan caught a hint of lightheartedness, as if the two knew each other well..
"Thank you, James." The Empress replied with a quick bow of her head in a tone that did show how much respect she had for the Colonel. "You may go before things get boring for you." she added with a quip, surprising Jordan.
James chuckled. "Too kind, as always." then he made a couple of steps backwards before turning completely and leaving the room.
"Lieutenant Bridger. It's an honor to meet you." Benedetta said with a polite tone and a cordial expression.
Jordan stiffened for a second. He had always imagined the Empress as one of the high-ranking politicians he had met in the past, someone who thinks they own the universe (which was kinda true in her case) and deal with everybody through arrogance. But the woman was talking to him like he was a welcomed guest in her home, not a man in front of his Head of State.
He cleared his throat and made a polite bow. "The honor is mine, Your Majesty."
Benedetta chuckled lightly. "No need to do that, Lieutenant." she said, referring to the bow, which made Jordan more confused.
Then Benedetta continued.
"Meet my third children and current heir to the throne, Crown Prince Francesco." she said with her right harm bent to indicate a young man that was standing on her side with his arms behind his back.
Jordan realized just now that he was there. The man was clearly a male, younger version of his mother and wore a military uniform. Jordan noticed that he had the rank of Captain, meaning that he was probably a career officer.
Technically, Jordan had already been told that, since he was simply 'Missing in Action', he was still part of the Legion, thus an officer of the Imperial-Federal Armed Forces.
Seeing that he didn't need to bow, Jordan simply made a military salute.
"Your Highness."
The boy returned the salute. "Lieutenant."
"Very well." Benedetta declared before turning to a servant on her left. "Bring Lieutenant Bridger a chair, please." the servant bowed and immediately moved to obey.
"I feel like we have a lot to discuss." she added, turning again toward Jordan.
The Legionnaire's face hardened resolutely.
"Yes, Your Majesty. We do."
Hello there,
So here we are, at the end of this book.
I honestly don't know how many of you already know Mass Effect, so I hope the last part wasn't too confusing.
As I stated in a previous chapter, this is a different Mass Effect timeline, where the Geo-politics of the Milky Way are way different and we're almost 40 years after the events of Mass Effect 3. I mentioned two canonical characters of Mass Effect 3, so that it gives to anyone of you who is a fan of the franchise a sense of continuity.
At this point I guess you understand that the next books of this 'Saga' will be a crossover between Rebels and Mass Effect, but honestly I won't put any of the famous characters of the latter brand into the Galaxy Far Far Away (or Andromeda, here), since that will give me much more freedom for writing.
Still, I thank everyone who has followed the story so far. I hope you had fun with this stuff and I hope to see you again when Year 3 comes out, which will probably be in a week or even less, depending on how I'll be able to manage my studies.
Have a fun July and May the Force be with You.