Chapter Text
“We’ll be touching down in five minutes.”
K’Surda’s stomach flutters at the announcement. She takes a deep breath, trying not to let her nerves get to her even as her leg starts bouncing. The shuttle shakes as it hits Tython’s atmosphere and she clutches her necklace. Maybe it wasn’t orthodox to keep it, she wasn’t supposed to maintain any ties to her family as a Jedi, but it helped her remember where she came from and calm down. If she can survive growing up in the harsh desert canyons of Tatooine, she can survive anything.
She wonders what she’ll be doing on Tython, what kind of people she’ll meet, what her master will be like, if she’ll meet the Grand Master herself. That thought only makes K’Surda’s nerves worse but its excitement more than anything. The idea of meeting such a legendary figure makes her practically giddy. All these amazing, courageous people and she was finally going to join them in making the galaxy a better place.
K’Surda clenches her hand on the necklace. Even if she can’t go home, if she has to let her family go, it’s worth it if it means she can help people. The Order helped her after all. It’s only fair.
The pilot speaks again. “We’re coming up on the temple grounds now. Good luck, Padawan.”
An involuntary grin overtakes her face. The shuttle lands gently and K’Surda stands, letting go of the necklace. The ramp opens onto a circular landing pad, and the sound of crashing waterfalls spills in. She breathes slowly for a moment, holds her head high, shoulders back, and strides into the bright sunlight of Tython.
Into her new life.
K’Surda didn’t expect to prove herself quite so soon, but she leapt into action regardless, cutting a path into the Gnarls. The Flesh Raiders are imposing and brutish, but they bleed, and her training sabres stand up to the challenge of properly armed opponents.
It’s her first time killing a sentient. Hunting is one thing, its own complex tangle of emotions the first time you kill a living creature for food and leather, but feeling the life go out of another thinking being nearly gets her killed in turn. She wasn’t prepared for the sensation of it, the visual, or the sound. But others need her, Padawans who can’t defend themselves, so she steels herself and presses onward, learns in a trial by fire to tune out the death if she wants to do her duty.
For as many aggressors as she cuts down, there always seem to be more, and she does what she can to get the less combat-ready Padawans out of harm’s way. Some are easier to convince, sitting in a cage surrounded by violent captors knocked the fight out of them, others are stubborn and she has to talk them around to getting out of danger instead of pursuing revenge.
It’s only when she’s soaked with sweat and spotted with Flesh Raider blood that Master Relnex finally points her to the source of the problem, and she charges headlong into a cavern on the far side of the Gnarls.
She expects to find more Flesh Raiders, and she does, but what she doesn’t expect to find is another Jedi. A troubled Jedi—a dark Jedi—and she finds him tormenting another helpless Padawan, a young Bith.
He talks of cleansing, purifying, but the blood and terror in the training grounds is enough to make her cut him off before he can finish justify it. The flash of a lightsaber isn’t enough to break her focus, and she strikes him and his guards down in a matter of moments, breathing hard.
The fact he was a Jedi hits her like a drunk Gamorrean, and she stares at his body and the blood pooling under his head. She barely even notices the Bith, or the arriving Jedi Master until he touches her shoulder and she jumps.
He introduces himself as Orgus Din and praises her for handling the situation on her own despite her lack of a lightsaber. It’s a salve on the shock of it all. Many Padawans have their lives because of her, so perhaps the weight of killing isn’t so terrible to bear.
“Taking a life affects the living Force and the one who does the killing.”
Satele Shan’s words rattle around her head as she lays awake, staring at the ceiling and surrounded by sleeping Padawans. She knows it won’t be the last time she remembers those words and she holds her necklace tight.
“K’Surda, are you still awake?” The Bith Padawan from earlier, Unaw, whispers from the bunk beside her.
“Yeah,” she murmurs without looking.
He shifts to the edge of his bed, sitting up. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Are you?”
“I think so. I didn’t expect the day to be so frightening.”
Neither did she, K’Surda expected her first day to be a lot of introductions and orientation. She certainly got that, but everything else was hard to parse once the adrenaline wore off.
He speaks again, asking, “is it true Master Orgus took you under his wing?”
She nods, “we’re heading out at dawn to see what we can do about the Flesh Raiders. I don’t know what to expect, but we’ll do our best.”
Unaw settles back down, pulling the sheets around his small body. “If anyone can solve it, it’ll be you and Master Orgus. You were braver than any of us.”
She looks at him, brows drawn together. “Hey, there’s bravery in surviving.”
He isn’t looking at her now, his big, dark eyes lidded and downcast. “That’s kind of you to say, but I have a long way to go.”
“And you’ll get there.”
“You think so?”
“This won’t keep you down. I believe in you.”
Unaw’s eyes squint happily in the darkness. “Thank you.”
A burning shame is all she can feel walking out of the Matriarch’s house. Shame and frustration, Jedi were meant to help people, but Kalikori village stood alone against the Flesh Raiders all because the Republic deemed them illegal. It mixes in her mind with the way the council talked about the Flesh Raiders, primitive natives, and it sits uneasily on her tongue. There were so many people who saw the less technologically-advanced as inherently inferior. She hoped she wouldn’t find that in the Jedi, and yet.
K’Surda huffs out a deep, irritated breath, trying to reign in her anger at the situation. The suffering was so unnecessary. The Jedi could have—no, should have—done something before it came to this. She wrings her hands and surveys the village, the tension in the air, and the tired, despondent faces of its defenders. Many bear scars yet to fade with time.
Whoever made that call in the Senate needed their heart checked, but it was the Jedi who stood and ignored pleas for help.
Enough was enough.
She tries to avoid fighting if she can, but she realises by sunset that she’s lost track of how many Flesh Raiders she’s had to cut down. She reassures herself that there are more important things to think about. It’s in service of protecting the innocents of Kalikori, and their pain was far greater than anything she had ever experienced.
K’Surda winces at the thought—there was a brief point in her life where all she knew was pain and terror. It was why the Jedi Order took her in when nightmares of Coruscant left her catatonic as a child, one of many early signs that she was strong in the Force.
She shakes the thought away. The nightmares were temporary, empathic ripples through the Force, just an echo of someone else’s very real and present trauma, magnified by the thousands killed when the Empire attacked.
No, she has never felt as the Kalikori do, not personally.
She hopes she never does, but Orgus’s remark about Jedi destroyed by passion lingers at the back of her mind. She makes a point of hiding her necklace.
Quite a few heads turn when she walks into the temple with a Flesh Raider infant in her arms, still happily gnawing on a grisly piece of guid meat.
“Master Quilb?” she says, interrupting a conversation between the Cathar and a human Padawan, but he is quick to understand her urgency when he sees what she’s carrying.
“A Flesh Raider baby,” he murmurs, intrigued and astonished, “I assume it’s caretakers are dead?” He holds his arms out, and she carefully hands the little one over. It wriggles when she lets go, twisting around to stare at her with a look of confusion, and stops gnawing on the morsel.
K’Surda rubs her arm. “Yes, I found him next to a dead adult. I thought we could return him, but I didn’t want to risk doing it alone.”
Master Quilb hums in agreement, eyeing the infant. “You did the right thing in bringing it to me. I will convene with the council so we may decide how to handle this.”
“He should be returned. We’re not his people.”
“That will be for the council to decide. You have done your part, Padawan, run along.”
The dismissal makes her uneasy, but she doesn’t have the time to stand and argue. Orgus needs her back at Kalikori, so she lets it go.
She hopes she hasn’t made a mistake.
The toxins burn her throat and make her eyes pour. In her rush to save the Pilgrim’s food source, she forgot her lessons on breath control. Jedi fortitude sees her through all the same. Her pain is nothing if Kalikori starves.
She fends off the last of the Flesh Raider saboteurs and stumbles back, catching her breath. The devices are in pieces, and most of the crops look fine, too briefly exposed to do lasting damage.
Reporting back to Ranna, she projects confidence and reassurance, hiding the chills pooling in her stomach. It would pass.
“Since you came here, all you’ve done is risk your life over and over for people you don’t know,” Ranna says, smiling sadly, “you remind me of her, you know, she was strong and selfless too. I don’t know if I have that strength.”
“I believe in you, Ranna, you’re strong, capable, and a good person.” The response is natural; empathy outpacing her thoughts. “And I won’t let you down. I promise I’ll see this through.”
Ranna’s smile grows fonder. “I appreciate that. It’s just hard to be alone with all this, and I feel better knowing you’re here.”
There’s something about the way Ranna looks at her that makes a blush creep up her neck and K’Surda feels her throat close uselessly. Ranna continues, looking away. “That’s strange, isn’t it? I’ve only known you a little while, but you’re brave, honest, and you put others before yourself. I wish I could’ve met you sooner.”
Heat flushes her face. “That’s… very kind of you,” she sputters.
Ranna’s smile widens briefly with amusement, and she meets K’Surda’s gaze again. “Will you stay with me a while,” she asks, sobering, “at least until your master returns?” There’s an invitation to Ranna’s voice that makes her heart pull in two directions at once. Her ears burn.
K’Surda clears her throat, stumbling over her words and her feet as she backs away to the door. “I would, I-I’m sorry, I just—there’s things I still need to do around the village. You understand.”
Ranna nods, tries not to look disappointed, and K’Surda turns, quickly leaving before her face can melt away.
She cuts down the lightsaber-stealing Flesh Raider with a hard weight in her chest.
Another dead Jedi, another death that could have been avoided had the Order acted sooner and helped the Pilgrims. She picks up the fallen lightsaber and turns it over in her hands, staring at the Flesh Raider who wielded it. Her thoughts drift to the talkative Raider she helped enter the temple.
Another mistake she hopes she hasn’t made.
Moorint falls dead with his cohorts, and K’Surda can’t breathe. Her mind races with possibilities, her heart is heavy, and her hands shake on the grip on her blades. She doesn’t hear Ranna at first, staring at the innocent blood on the floor, frantically searching all her training for something she could’ve done differently to avoid it. She tried to talk them down and they didn't listen.
She could have forced it, compelled them to listen, persuade them that this course of action was suicide.
Her stomach curdles at the idea now as it did the first time she learned about that power. She could never wrap her head around how comfortable most Jedi seemed with using it, no matter how benign its usage. The notion of dominating someone’s free will, messing with their thoughts, forcing them to do things they didn’t want to—her stomach lurches.
She could have saved them from themselves.
“I’m sorry, my friend, I thought I could save my people. I wouldn’t have let anything happen to you.”
She slowly relaxes her grip on her weapons and mutters a platitude, a flat-toned acceptance of Ranna’s actions. Ranna begins to ask what she can do to make this right, and K’Surda turns on her with a speed that makes her flinch. “Where is my master?”
Ranna holds up her hands in a placating gesture that makes K’Surda flinch it turn, afraid she’s intimidating the smaller woman. “Bengel took him to a place called the Forge. I don’t know it, perhaps your droid does?”
K’Surda makes short work of reactivating T7. She desperately wants to be anywhere but Kalikori village.
It should feel triumphant to finally put an end to the threat but K’Surda only feels pity and sadness as Bengel tries to sway her to his broken way of seeing things. She doesn’t want power, so his words fall flat, but no one else is going to die today, certainly not by her hand.
His nose crunches under her knuckles. A follow-up blow to the temple lays him out cold. She takes her belt and secures his wrists behind his back, then takes his lightsaber away from him before checking on her master.
Orgus, thankfully, is fine. He grimaces and grumbles, but he brushes her off for fussing once he’s upright.
“You faced a challenge beyond any trial I could assign. There’s nothing more I can teach you.”
She’s dumbstruck when he gives her the parts to make her own lightsaber. It feels like she’s only been on Tython a week at most and part of her is unsure, but she takes the pieces from him and finds herself smiling with pride and excitement.
“Will he okay?” she asks, motioning to Bengel.
Orgus nods. “I’ll carry him back to the Jedi Temple and get him help. The horrors he witnessed on Coruscant broke him—destroyed the gentle Padawan I trained. But thanks to you he can recover, he deserves a second chance.”
Memories that aren’t hers rise to the surface, and she shakes them away. She can imagine all too well what Bengel saw and how much more horrifying it must have been in person. “I hope so,” she says, clutching the lightsaber components tight. “I won’t be long, stay safe on the way back.”
Orgus smiles drily and turns away, leaving her to the Forge.
“K’Surda! Is it true?”
Unaw’s voice snaps her out of her reverie. She turns away from the setting sun, framing Kalikori Village up on the ridge above the temple grounds.
“Is what true?” she asks, leaning against the balcony railing.
Unaw practically jumps on the spot, gesturing excitedly. “Your Knighthood! I heard from the other Padawans, your victory at the Forge, saving the Order, its all they can talk about!”
She blushes despite herself and rubs her neck. “Yeah. It’s true, and I was just as surprised.”
“How?! You acted like a Knight the moment you arrived!”
“I’m not sure about that. I just did what I thought was right, Unaw. I don’t think it’s anything more than that.”
He shakes his head as if exasperated by her answer and joins her at the balcony’s edge. “Well, I just wanted to wish you luck. You’re leaving soon, aren’t you?”
“You hear that from the Padawans too?”
“I overheard a couple of Masters talking about it.”
The temple practically buzzing with news of her exploits was why she was standing on the balcony in the first place. Fewer people would notice her, and she would have a moment to think. But she refuses to let any irritation show and smiles at Unaw. “You seem to be in better spirits.”
He nods, squinting happily. “I have you to thank. I know you’ll probably be fine, but be careful on Coruscant. I’d hate to hear of anything happening to you.”
She holds out her hand, and he grasps it tightly. “So long as you promise to pass your trials too, the galaxy needs more Jedi.”
“I promise!”