The Seeker's Journal:

I bow to the twin lotus feet of my Master, who is a chalice filled with the Jedi-wisdom and who is my mother, father and teacher. He cut asunder my bonds of attachment and bore me across the ocean of suffering.

I bow to the Diamond-Hearted Being who has realised the true Jedi-nature. He holds in his left hand the adamant crystal which spits lightning in the form of a sabre. His light-blade cuts through all delusions with the velocity of a thunderbolt. His right hand is raised in the sign of blessing towards all beings, and the brightness of his person outshines the supernova. May he illuminate my path.

I have come to the desert planet, Tatooine, like so many before me. I come in search of answers.

Acceptance is the hardest skill to cultivate. The first Jedi said that all events must be accepted without judgement. If a thing comes to pass in our universe, there could have been no other outcome. All phenomena arise from the chain of dependent causation.

Do we grieve when a planet exerts a pull on a smaller object? We have all done the exercise in school: calculate the force acting on a body of known mass in a known field. Yet if that smaller object is the broken corpse of our Master, falling from a great height, or a lightsaber slipping from a dead Padawan's hand to the blood-slicked floor, the mind refuses to accept this as a simple and necessary outcome of the universe's laws.

The heart rebels. It rages. I understand the mechanics: all things proceed from initial conditions. The dead Master, the butchered younglings: like debris in an asteroid field, these things could be no other way. They are by-products of the galaxy's formation. It is merely our mental narratives that assign emotional resonance to this chain of causation.

I was asked to love and honour my Master without attachment. To protect the Galaxy without attachment. To serve the Light without grasping it, to fight the Darkness without resisting it. Paradoxes were our daily bread; like the hard floors and martial arts which conditioned our bodies, we used riddles and philosophy to condition our minds until they were unbreakable. Our souls became hard, even unfeeling, like our unnaturally strengthened limbs.

I could not love my Master as the Jedi love: without attachment. One of our teachers said she never grieved the loss of her comrades in the Clone Wars.

"All things are impermanent," she said. "I value my brother and sister Jedi, and my friends. But each day in my meditations, I visualise each one already dead. Thus I condition my mind to prepare for their loss. It is this non-attachment to life that makes Jedi lovers of peace, but formidable in war."

Equanimity is what the Jedi call it. Sameness of mind towards all external conditions, all objects and persons.

To love and honour my Master without rejoicing in his life, nor sorrowing at his death. To serve him while believing him already dead. This I could never cultivate, despite my best efforts.

Of my many, many failures to live up to the Jedi Code, this is the one I regret the least.


As he stepped into the bar, the coolness struck him like blowback from an engine. He blinked, feigning sun-blindness while he discreetly scanned the room. Old habits died hard. All art lies in concealing artfulness.

The crowd was what he'd come to expect in his two days on Tatooine. A ragtag assortment of workers, scavvers and drifters. Their clothes were drab and practical, their faces rough and predatory. They huddled like animals, the smell of many species' sweat clouding the air. This was a planet that burned away all pretension, stripping any sapient race to its most primitive survival instincts.

His Tusken informant had told him: We only cover our faces. You outworlders hide your souls behind your fine Republican manners. On the day when al-Shams sends down his fire from the skies, your ways will be burnt to ashes. What will cover your sins then?

He hadn't know how to reply to that. There were so many sins to cover.

He'd said to the Tusken, "You're a Republican too. The New Republic claims jurisdiction over the Outer Rim."

Angry, the Tusken had made a sign with his hand to ward off the Evil Eye. "We serve no Emperor nor Council. We are of the 'ummah. We submit to the authority of the Most High, not your corrupt Senators."

The human bartender squinted at him, noting the water-plump flesh, the skin unravaged by sand and heat.

"Fresh off the docks, eh? Don't tell me, you're here to see the Chosen One."

"I am. Everyone says this is his birth planet."

"And they say aright! He was a farm boy here on Tatooine!" The bartender stuck his chest out. "Yep, the great Jedi Knight trained under Ben Kenobi, who lived here for years. This planet breeds men like nowhere else in the Galaxy. And Luke did what all the Resistance couldn't, and put down the Emperor like a feral bantha."

This planet breeds men like nowhere else…

He was aware of a gravity behind the bartender's words. Perhaps it was the faintest stirring, the slightest ripple in the Force. Then again, it could be a false positive. But wasn't that what had called him here? The Jedi called Luke… and the other one. The father.

I must understand what caused the fall of one, and the rise of the other. The Fate of the Order is bound up in these two souls.

All Padawans are trained in causal analysis. To understand why a phenomenon arises, you must trace the chain of causality.

This planet made them what they are. I must seek the variables.


Excerpt from Imperial Education Materials: Testimony of a Jedi Defector

My interest in Tatooine began when I was a small boy. My father had been reassigned to the planet in a minor diplomatic capacity. He regarded our move to the Outer Rim as banishment, a punishment for angering the wrong politician. Such corruption was rampant in the old Republic.

Our arrival on the planet shocked me. As part of my education, my mother insisted I study the local culture. The more I learnt, the more appalled I grew. I asked my father why the Republic allowed slavery and savagery to persist on Tatooine (slavery had been outlawed under Republic rule).

My father sighed deeply. "The Republic will not abolish slavery on Tatooine until it has an economic incentive to do so. Half of our Senate is owned by corporate interests, the other half is held in the grip of increasingly polarised voting blocs. The Senate will not approve a war bill until enough of its stakeholders see an advantage in it. The best thing for the slaves of Tatooine would be if untapped spice fields were discovered here. The Senate, representing the people's will, would suddenly develop an interest in promoting democracy in this system."

My father had once been an honorable and principled man, but even he had been poisoned by the machinery of the Republic. So much so that I felt no regret denouncing him to the Empire to spare my sister from interrogation. Such moral decay as he embodied was pervasive. We lived in such evil times, we could not even see our hypocrisy. This was before the Emperor stopped our society's degeneration and restored the strength, virtue and unity of our great empire.

Glory to the Emperor! He restores the dignity and humanity of the people. Let us reject the moral decay presided over by the corrupt elites and vested interests of the Republic. Let us purge the rot, and return to the principles of our founders, which made this galaxy great.