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She had twisted in her memories for just a little over ten years. The teenager who performed demonstrations of lightsaber forms for the initiates and guest-taught lessons on the Force, who called upon the Living Force as easily as she breathed. The young woman who took mission after mission, bodyguarding or extracting kidnapping victims or liberating towns or whole planets from the yokes of petty tyrants. Oh, yes, Atris remembered. Memory was not kind enough to let her forget.
Once upon a time, the Exile had been no exile. She had been a Jedi, an apprentice on the cusp of knighthood. She shone in the Force like a beacon, the light that did not burn but instead lit up all it touched. What was she, if not a paragon, a shining example of what the Jedi should be? Oh, she was impetuous, yes, prone to rushing in in instances where caution would have served her far better. It was a common flaw of those who let their hearts rule them and not their heads, a common flaw of the young who thought themselves invincible. Atris had tried to teach her better, but she had always laughed off Atris’s lessons, never imagining a day when she would need to make use of them. Atris bitterly regretted never being able to make them sink in.
Atris recognized her before even turning round. Her Force signature was dear and unmistakable, and even those footfalls were distinctive to the ear.
“Another world has fallen to the Mandalorians.” There came the thrum of mingled frustration and pity, the impatience for action that had so long characterized her growing stronger by the day. That sense of justice, thwarted and gainsaid. “Ord Mantell this time.”
Atris gave her the same reply she always gave. “We cannot do anything about that yet.”
“So are we just going to let the Mandalorians butcher innocents out on the Rim?”
Impatience had turned to defiance, and Atris turned at last to face her.
It was late afternoon on Coruscant. Golden light shot through the gray clouds in rays that lit up certain patches of cityscape like so many spotlights. The light shone on the tall windows of the Archives like flame, suffusing everything it hit upon. She stood in the path of that light, turning her skin to gold, her long, dark hair to sheets of polished bronze, her eyes to burning coals. Atris stared appraisingly at her, trying to guess how much of her had turned to anger—her mind, usually so open, so unguarded gave away nothing today. “You have been following Revan’s exploits.” She’d not meant it as an accusation; truly, she hadn’t. But it still managed to come out that way.
This earned Atris a defensive look, before she nodded. “I have.”
“Don’t. The Council did not sanction her actions; you know as well as I that she and her followers have been cast out of the Order. The Council has not yet made a decision as to whether or not the Jedi should intervene in this war.”
She stalked away like a rock-lion pacing the confines of a zoo enclosure. Atris watched her go, and sighed heavily.
She had succumbed to the siren song of war, as had so many Jedi—too many, too many who proved themselves vulnerable to the teachings of the Sith. Through her actions, she had become the Exile, Jedi no longer. Oh, yes, a victorious Republic general, but no Jedi. The paragon was no paragon, tainted by the aggression and wanton bloodshed of the Dark Side. And slowly, by inches, became something else, something even more alarming.
Atris was not insensitive to the suffering of those hounded by the Mandalorians. No matter what the Exile thought of her—and it galled Atris, more than it should have, that she could think her so callous—she had never been indifferent to them. She read the reports, and her heart stung. She felt the tremors in the Force, which even then had felt like the tremors preceding an earthquake, and chafed at inaction just as the Exile had. But the Council said to wait. That was their decision, and it must have been the right one, it must have. If Atris disobeyed them, if she went against their will, that would make her no better than the worst of the fallen Jedi, who indulged every base desire that came to them, even (especially) to the harm of others.
Sometimes, she felt other tremors, not in the Force directly, but originating in one person, who tore the Force around her as it tore in her. Atris woke in the dead of night, bathed in cold sweat, and thought of her out there on some distant world, the Force tearing at every place she touched, made her sick, despite all the reasons she should no longer have cared at all.
Then, came Malachor V.
It was the beginning of everything, the middle of things, and the end of all. All roads led there, and all roads led from there. A cataclysm so great that it rent the Force to tattered shreds where it fell. All the cosmos held its breath in the moment before it was annihilated, and all the cosmos screamed in the moment afterwards. The destruction howled in Atris’s mind, echoed in her bones, and in that moment, she knew.
What have you done?
What have you done?
And through the Force, there came no answer, but still, Atris knew.
The Republic lauded Revan for her victory over the Mandalorians, and paid no mind to the cost in lives, nor to the gaping wound in the Force. The backs of the Mandalorians had been irrevocably broken at Malachor V, and the Republic cared for nothing now but celebrating their victory, and licking their wounds. The Council sent a summons to all the former Jedi who had followed Revan on her ‘crusade,’ recalling them to Coruscant to face judgment.
Only one answered.
When all was right, the Force permeated all living things. Even if one could not hear it, it was there, tying all that lived together. Before the war, she who was to become the Exile was like a beacon of light within the Force. She formed bonds so easily; it was second nature to her. Now, however…
Now, the Force touched her not at all. She was a dead spot in the Force, a wound that walked. If you stretched your mind out to hers, you would feel nothing. No, worse than nothing—a void, a vacuum, not just a place where the Force could not go, but a place where it could not live. The Exile was not Jedi. She was not Dark Jedi. She was not even Sith. She was an abomination.
And neither had she returned to face judgment out of any sense of contrition. There was nothing but defiance in the Exile now, defiance and pride, as she still claimed, even in the face of the atrocity she had committed, that she had been right to defy the Council and go to war. Even in the face of horrors, she had learned nothing. She was dead to reason as well as the Force, and thought herself righteous.
But she spoke with such conviction, her eyes blazing with certainty. She stood there, she spoke, she thrust her lightsaber into the center stone and strode out of the Council chambers without another word, without so much as a backwards glance, her head held high. In that moment, she was so… right, that Atris doubted herself.
In that moment, she had never hated anyone more.
“She should have died, and Malachor V should have been her grave!”
But that had been many years ago. The Exile had vanished out of known space, and the Sith, united under Revan’s banner, decimated the Jedi and all-but-destroyed the Republic. Of the Jedi, Atris was the last—the last true Jedi, anyways. There were others who might have called themselves Jedi, but they put no mind to preserving the Jedi’s history, and they did not adhere to the old ways as she did, and thus, they could not be Jedi. They had fallen, even if they did not realize it. The galaxy was better off without ones such as them.
Atris had years to collect the fragments of a ruined history. She’d had years to formulate plans and enact them. She’d had years to remember.
You were the best of us, and look at how far you’ve fallen. Her relics were a lightsaber with a scarred hilt and a yellow blade, and a grainy holovid of the Exile’s trial. That’s it, and in the absence of the woman, Atris could hardly reconcile the paragon with the abomination she had become. It was as though they were two different people, and the one Atris had loved had been devoured long ago. So many other Jedi had fallen straight into the maw of the Dark Side. If the method had been different, the Exile had still been devoured.
But then, she came again.
She was older now, as they all were. She did not show it with graying hair or wrinkles, but in the tiredness that crept in at her eyes and mouth. She who once was lively and impulsive was now grown sad and, if not wise, somewhat more insightful than the Exile of ten years ago. In the pale light of Atris’s reception chamber, she gleamed not golden, but pale white, like the ghost of a candle flame that had burned out long ago. She was still wrong-headed, though, still persisting in the belief that she had been right to go to war. Still speaking with such conviction, her brown eyes blazing with certainty. Still with her head held high, her back unbowed.
How many trackless days and nights had Atris contended with her own loneliness? Her handmaidens were servants, not friends. She was alone here. She had consoled herself with the certainty that she was right, that the Exile had become something worse than even the Sith, that she could not be saved and that Atris should not expend any effort trying.
And here she was, come again into Atris’s sight, and just as with the last time, she was just so right.
Then what have I—
No. She will never make me doubt myself again.
“The female is someone from your past,” came the familiar rasping, hissing voice. Soon after came a chorus, as the room was flooded with red light.
“Yes,” Atris murmured. The lights flickered, leaving her as they ever had, dreamy, vague, receptive to any idea they put to her.
“A friend?”
“…No… not anymore. Once…”
“She has betrayed you.” The whisper grew more guttural the louder it became. “She is your enemy. Do not trust her.” The other voices rose to a clamor, deafening Atris to anything else that might have gotten through.
“Yes… she is my enemy. And I have not given myself over to trust in a long time.”
Atris was the last of the Jedi. The whole galaxy was her enemy. She could not bring herself to trust anyone. Not even (especially not) old heroes.