VII –Hermitage in Company
By Chronic Guardian
Written for Twelve Shots of Summer: Eleventh Hour, Week 7: Last Legs and Final Solution
A/N: I am writing this fic on a whim. It is based in a show I have not seen, but in a universe I have long loved. The entire purpose is to muse on possible natures of a discipline, something sorely lacking in most modern writing. If this faction is actually satisfyingly explained within canon then 1) good, I'm glad the writers dug beneath the surface! I hope they did a good job and that you enjoyed it. 2) I am writing this for my own satisfaction and in that respect take full license to amend the rules as necessary. I am not claiming to be canon or to be better than the established canon. I am enjoying the act of world building. Now put down your pitchforks and let me try to make sense of this.
(§)
Grey skies cloaked the sun, and beneath sprawled the forests of Brendok. Only a few decades earlier, the world had been a barren desert baked by the harsh star of the system. Now, wrapped in its cumulus cocoon, the soil had grown fertile.
Sorla Dona, the youngest of the coven, frowned at the skies and leaned on her tilling hoe. She could feel something in it, a roiling power roving the space between the planet and space. On one side, life unlimited. On the other, an abyss.
Shaking her head, she began to turn soil again. They were going to die.
That much was not surprising. Everything in the universe that lived would someday die. That which grew would someday decay, that which fed would someday feed. All was bound by the Thread, the strands that connected life and death together. They had always renewed themselves in the past by drawing new sisters into the coven, outcasts and seekers who felt the Thread.
But there was no one else on Brendok.
Hitting a rock with her hoe, Dona grunted and drew the tool out of the ground. Another strike confirmed it was too big to dig out easily. Sighing to herself, she put aside the hoe and rolled up her sleeves.
She had undergone the rite of ascension just before they arrived at Brendok, the gateway to truly connecting with the Thread. She had sacrificed the self that resisted the many. So now, reaching out with her senses to the stone, she tried to grasp at the Thread that connected the two of them and bring the stone a little closer to the surface.
She thought of the stubborn, immovable parts of herself, and the stone seemed to wiggle. She thought of how the coven had developed in the remnants of the Sith Empire, how they had endured for generations. How they had passed down their teachings for generations—
Her grip on the rock slipped and she let out a frustrated breath. She wasn't a rock. She barely understood how to do the one thing she was supposed to be able to do as part of the sisterhood. Maybe it would have been better not to come with the coven to Brendok…
Picking up her hoe again, Dona began excavating the rock manually.
(§)
For much of recorded galactic history, the Sith had been simply any force users who weren't the Jedi. Never mind that the "Sith" were a species and that a sect of Dark Jedi had become Lords of the Sith, to the Republic at large and Jedi in particular, the outsiders had been Sith.
As the Sith Empire grew across star systems, they consumed the populations. The Dark Side of the Force thrived on dominance, on slavery. Any Force Sensitives they found were drafted into the warrior enclaves and either refined into the Sith armada or ground up as fuel for the process.
And in the shadow of this hunger, the Daughters of the Thread began their own tradition.
"I will not wait for power; I will become it," Dona chanted with the sisters of the coven. In the dark of clouded night, she forgot the world she saw and instead leaned on the world she felt. The movement of the wind and soil, the flow of the Thread moving through their sisterhood, the power that the Sith coveted and the Jedi sought to control.
"I will not stand alone; I will stand with my sisters." About two dozen heartbeats surrounded her. Each of them had made the same sacrifice of ascension. They were not the megalomanian Sith, they were not the repressed Jedi, they were seekers of the living Thread together. Sharers of grief and joy, students of the power within, explorers of possibilities.
Possibilities the Republic had outlawed.
"I will not submit to the ways of men; I will seek the Thread."
When the Jedi overcame the Sith, they did not discriminate between the Dark Lords and any others that did not share their own views on the Force. All that was not in their light was darkness, all that was not order was destruction. And so, when the people of the Republic turned against the Daughters for taking their women and welcoming their outcasts, the Jedi had only intervened to place sanctions.
They would be allowed to exist, but not to recruit or move freely through the galaxy. Their methods were deemed too similar to the Dark Side that had driven the Sith Lords. Dona felt a flash of indignant anger as she recalled the pronouncement. The Sith, who had enslaved and abused their ancestors, now being compared to her people. The Sith, whose hunger drove them to destroy. How could they be compared to such monsters?
Around her, she felt similar anger tingling through the thread. Another sister had not forgotten their disgrace…
(§)
When Dona returned to the gardens to again work on the stone, she stopped short. The fields, unsown, were sprouting. Kneeling down, she pulled on the leaves, already as big as her thumbnails.
"Muja fruit," she muttered to herself, straightening up. Not weeds. They'd brought a stock to plant with them to Brendok, but these weren't from their seeds.
More than returning life was stirring on the resurrected planet.
Was this the doing of the Daughters?
(§)
"The Thread is responding to us," Mother Aniseya, the leader of their coven, concluded after Dona had explained the situation. "What we need, it will provide."
"Did we not need protection from the Sith? Or the Jedi?" Dona pressed. "Why now? Why this? When our coven is on its last legs, exiled to die, suddenly the Thread decides to give us a familiar fruit?"
Mother Aniseya smiled and shrugged. "Our hearts called out for Muja. When we enacted the rites last night, I gathered our threads to pour into the planet. And see what we have made!"
"This came from us?" Dona looked away as she remembered her feelings during the rite.
"We were rejected by the natural world," Anisaya said. "Our coven is made from the lost, single threads woven to hold the strength of many. We who have fallen from the ways of nature are closest to the ways of miracles."
Dona shook her head. "If we can introduce an alien plant species with the Thread, what else can we do?"
"Not what we can do," Aniseya corrected lightly, "What the Thread can do. We move with it, we turn and tune to it, but our power is in the Thread as the Thread is in us. The more of us, the stronger our pull on the thread."
"Then we must pull for all we can while we yet live," Dona concluded, "create something to last beyond our doomed sisterhood."
"Who says we must be doomed?"
Dona put her palms face up and cajoled the air for an answer. "We cannot recruit, we cannot reproduce, we have been sent into exile. What solution is there for us beyond living out the last days of our order?"
"Nothing natural," Aniseya agreed, "but we left that world behind to join our sisters, did we not? We have left all to pursue the Thread, let us see if the Thread will turn more miracles for those that seek it."
Dona could only purse her lips. Aniseya was right: they had already forsaken all obvious options. It would take a fairytale come to life to save them now.
But to some of the galaxy, that was already what they were. If they were to be hermits, perhaps there was worse company than the forces of life that others refused to see.
If nothing else, it was the only solution left to try.
[End VII]
A/N: As stated above, I have not seen the Acolyte, but I have seen some of the discussions and clips surrounding it, and one of the big world building problems I have is that the coven of Brendok does not have a well defined take on the Force. Like… apparently joining forces with the power of many, but that doesn't strike me as unique (see Bariss Offee and Luminara Undali joining in meditation in the Tartokovsky Clone Wars). There needed to be some definition or history that drew this apart from the Jedi and Sith and, what would really be a bonus, something that explains why they are able to make Mae and Osha happen. Too often these days Star Wars just makes things happen, realizes its totally unbalanced to anything that's come before, and then just kind of shrugs and says "Balance of the Force? Or maybe unnatural Darkside..." like that explains how Palpatine somehow returned.
Well, I come from an era where Star Wars still had to at least try to explain itself. I don't have a problem with creators wanting to look beyond the Jedi and Sith, you just have to actually make your new factions meaningfully different.
All that to say, if the Thread is "not a power you wield," then it made sense to me to expand on it as more of a "power you are", that is more primal, instinctual, and tapped into by literally weighting the Force in a certain way by gathering similar threads of life and making them resonate.
I dunno, maybe I didn't make anything all that coherent, but it's still a one shot.
Cheers, let's see if we can end this summer.
-CG