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You have done many things in the name of routing the Sith. Never have you questioned the rightness of your actions. You dared not do that, for reasons you did not realize at the time, but now one word screams in your mind whenever you question it: ‘guilt.’ You have left dead Jedi (or pretender-Jedi; sometimes it is not so clear to you which) in your wake, dead worlds in your wake, but all for the ultimate good of the Republic. With the Sith and those corrupt pretender-Jedi gone, you would have had the chance to build a new Jedi Order, stronger and purer than the debauched, sluggish beast that had gone before it. There would be no dark place for weakness or the corruption of the Dark Side to flourish in your new Jedi Order; you would not have borne it.
Everything you have done has been for the future. If ever you had allowed yourself to be bogged down by the past, you wouldn’t have been able to carry on. And to that end, you have trained your servants to be deaf to the Force, filled your storerooms with old relics, and you sit upon your ivory throne on a dead world, in a dark audience chamber packed with glowing red holocrons that fill your head with their whispers.
You could never doubt yourself.
You had to be sure.
But now has come the day when all your certainty has turned to ash in your hands, as you must have known it would. The old woman the Exile travels with, she opened your eyes, opened your mind, made you hear the Force as you have not done in years. The screams of Katarr echo in your mind as surely as the screams of Malachor V must echo in the mind of the Exile. The Force ripples around you, but the voice with which it sings to you is not the soft, peaceful one you first heard as a child in the Temple—it is rough, discordant, roaring like a river cutting a path where it will, with no regard for what it destroys on the way.
You know now: you have not been a guiding light to the future, but queen of a dead world, surrounding yourself with relics of a bygone era while you exterminated the present, and made ever more remote the chance of there being any future at all for the Jedi. The future frightens you, as it always has, so you turned away from it without even realizing. You turned to the past. It has always been preferable to you, the past. The past is pure in a way that the present and the future can never be, for it is immutable—it will never change.
Perhaps you could still have built your new Order, free of all impurities, but you see now that it is beyond you to teach anyone. You would raise up a generation of Jedi incapable of passing on your teachings, for their preoccupation would be with the past, not the future. A pure Jedi Order is a dream that has drifted into the past. All your dreams must become features of the past in time, lest they be corrupted, but the present and the future has become dominated by fear of the death of the Force itself. If everything dies, every last living thing dies, if the reality of Malachor V becomes the reality of all the cosmos, all dreams must become a thing of the past.
In the Exile, you have found hope. You did not think she would ever bring hope to you again; surely someone so steeped in the Dark Side could have brought nothing but despair. She has gone to confront the old woman—Kreia, she called her—and, if at all possible, stop the destruction that is to come.
Unlooked for, you have seen a glimpse of she whom you loved in the pale shadow that is the Exile. If anyone could avert disaster when you yourself have proved inadequate to do so, it is her. But your hope has gone away from you, and it is a feeble thing, fading fast. The Exile goes now to Malachor V. You know well what awaits her there; you, the historian, who has gathered everything of the Jedi and the Sith to you, and cherished it more than you did the living around you, more than even the Force. The past, present and future all merge there, the focal point of calamity, the wound in the Force whose echoes grow louder by the day.
She was lost there, once. Surviving, and turning away from destruction, she was still lost. Her heart lingers there still. Now, she speeds towards the awaited moment, and you fear… More than anything, you fear she will be lost again. Those who have been corrupted once are more vulnerable to corruption again, and the temptation of knowledge corrupts easily. You should know.
Days pass, and weeks. The Force still is present, still swirling around you like a maelstrom that will not let you rest, any more than the red-flickering holocrons will. The Force still lives, the galaxy still breathes, but this cannot rouse you from despair. All it may mean is that the Exile has vanquished the beast, only to become far worse of one in the process. It may be that the throne of Malachor V has simply changed hands.
“She has abandoned you.”
“We have seen it.”
“You, deserter and betrayer, have been abandoned and betrayed in return. It is our way.”
“You are alone. You know this. You always have.”
“You must kill her.”
“Only you can stop what will come from the Unknown Regions. There is no one strong enough to resist its corruption, but you.”
But you have already been corrupted, have you not? You saw yourself reflected in the eyes of the Exile, a sad, bitter creature who clings to the past at the expense of the future, willing to let all the future burn if it threatened your vision. You did not see a Jedi. You did not even see Atris. Perhaps the reflection was warped by the shadows that hold fast to the Exile still, but you suspect the reflection would have been no kinder even if the mirror was clear.
You sit and wait, while your holocrons feed you visions of a future that is to be yours—alone against a threat worse than Revan at her mightiest. But you don’t want to fight alone anymore. It is not a weight you can bear any longer. Perhaps you will entomb yourself here instead, sitting on your ivory throne in the cool darkness, where no fresh grief can touch you. In time, the galaxy will forget, and so perhaps will you.
“Atris? Atris!”
You hear first the clacking of footfalls on polished stone. You pay it no heed; one of your handmaidens has brought you food, that is all. But the voice comes again, more insistent, “Atris, can you hear me?”
There is a hand on your shoulder, shaking you roughly, as though the owner thinks to rouse you from sleep. Then, through the roaring of the Force, you hear a familiar strain, a soft hum, and you sense a familiar light, and your eyes snap open, and there she is, standing before you, living still.
You rise to your feet, slowly, as though in a dream. Disbelief washes over you as you stare at her. Light floods in from the chamber’s open door, glowing around her like a corona. For a moment, your eyes deceive you and you see her as she was before she went to war, radiant and young, shining with a light that does not burn, but then, the past becomes present and she is wan and tired, but alive, nonetheless. “You… You’re here,” you murmur blankly, stretching out your hand to her shoulder, only to have it fall limp at your side.
She nods choppily. “Yes, Atris. Kr—“ She breaks off, swallowing thickly, her brown eyes momentarily overcome with some emotion you cannot name. “Kreia is gone. Malachor V is gone. It’s all gone.” Her voice rings hard with something that might have been relief, were it not so heavy.
“And you have returned here.” A single word hangs from your mouth, filling the spaces between the two of you, the question you are loath to ask, whose answer you long to hear more than anything. “Why?”
For a moment, she purses her mouth in a frown. Her brow furrows, and she could not look more different than she did before she went to war, so many years before. Then, she would never have paused over such a question. She shared her heart freely, back then. “You said you would go into exile,” she says cautiously. “But if you feel you must do that, you don’t have to do it alone. I’m going into Wild Space again, Atris.” Her face contorts before she goes on, “Forces have been set into motion. There’s someone I need to look for, and I need help to find them.” Her voice softens slightly. “And I didn’t want to leave you alone. Will you come with me?”
‘I am going to give you the second chance you never gave me.’ The words hang between you and her, unspoken but still there, an old wound that has yet to close. You are not sure whether they come from the Exile’s mind or from yours. But for a moment, you allow it not to matter at all.
Slowly, mutely, you nod. She strides purposefully away, no shadow anymore, but white light, the candle reignited—no pretension of former glory, but there is some light there, glowing dimly. At last you can find a path towards the future. Slowly, perhaps uncertainly, but without looking back, you follow the Ex—Kalani Nuna, she who was once the Exile, out into the light of the future.