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She barely felt anything.
Satine was startled. She had expected pain, the scorch, but when the blade slipped through her in a white flame, she felt nothing at all.
What she did feel— almost immediately—was Sundari’s air, metallic, rust-tinged, flooding her chest again. She breathed greedily, yet too shallow. Then there were Obi-Wan’s gloved hands gathering her up. A shiver ran through her shoulders, small, quick, but she could not tell whom it belonged to.
She looked into his eyes. She knew she had to say something, or she would never be given another chance.
But did I ever tell him? She wondered as she lifted a hand to his cheek. His eyes look like the sea back home. She had always liked him in white. It reminded her of Kalevala’s sea birds, circling the cliff all day; she remembered watching them through the windows of the old mansion, but now, armored in red, he reminded her only of Sundari, of Sundari in civil war.
Remember this,
The cliff rose before her eyes all of a sudden. As a child, when she had just learned to run, she used to sneak there alone. Her nursemaids would scramble after her on hands and knees, frantic, and she would laugh so hard she hiccuped. They always said that she had a wicked heart; then they would also say she was as pure as the white flowers that clung to the cliffside; then that she was stubborn as a Bantha (she did not yet know what a bantha was), or so soft, as cloud winding down the edge of the breathing sea.
What am I then? She would pester those ladies, and they would laugh, saying, You will know, perhaps tomorrow.
But before she could decide, her father took her to Sundari.
Ah, Sundari — where there was nothing. A world ringed entirely by desert. And yet it was there where she spent her life.
The bombings came daily. Not like the waves shattering against Kalevala’s cliff rock. These sounded as though they meant to split open her skull. What they brought was not seabirds—only screams, raw and tearing, as if clawed hands shot from the blast raked through her skin, peeling flesh, pecking at her nerves—
This is honor! They told her whenever she begged to go home. Be a Mandalorian. Remember who you are.
Who am I?
Every detonation drove the question into her chest like a shell. With each thunderous collapse, with each shriek breaking open the air, something of Kalevala was taken from her. She began to forget the whisper of tender grass against bare feet, the softness of cloth floating with wind around her limbs, the warmth of those women’s arms, skin against skin—its itch, its damp heat. Above her now circled only fire, red, streaking like blood. She once wondered whether that flame really carried threads of blood.
She saw a man blown to pulp before her. The warped crimson spread across the ground with the second blast. So yes—the fire did carry blood.
But those sounds that once shook her heart became duller; being dragged into bunkers became routine; corpses ceased to shock. And as the war burned wider across the wastes, she was sent away to study on Coruscant—far from the place her father called home. He told her, before she left, to bring the republic and peace back to Mandalore. Remember who you are.
Again the question. And now she had to figure out what peace meant. Yet there was no peace here either. The teachers spoke of war the same way the men in her father’s court had—calling battles by fanciful names, every conflict was a great war, a glorious war. And this place was like Sundari too: bare, encased in steel and light.
Then—cruel timing—before she could learn who she was or what she ought to do, news arrived of her father’s death. She left school, barely having lived in it at all, and returned to Sundari.
There was no time to mourn. She was secretly handed off to a Jedi and his Padawan, a boy her age. Together, in flight and fear, they survived a year.
During that year, her days were in the streamwater, in the rustle of grass, in bickering or quiet closeness with the boy. Kalevala returned to her. She and Obi-Wan held hands, with no fabric between them; they had run in panic and their palms were wet, cold, trembling, but she felt warmth piercing straight through her chest again. It would not last forever—she knew that.
I’ve loved you always.
She didn’t speak of her feelings. He left, and she returned to Sundari. She had barely found her footing when former officials arrived with a child—small, maybe eight. This is your sister, they told her. She had been raised on Kalevala, so they had never met.
So on the flight back from that remote moon she became, all at once, a sister. Hours before she had still been the girl kissing a boy under the last light, heartbeat fluttering painfully up her throat. Now she was a guardian to a child, a Duchess of people, of “New Mandalore”, charged with shaping a new government, a new nation. She was seventeen. She never finished school. She never returned to Kalevala. She was shut inside Sundari again.
Through the next twenty years she insisted on peace—her father’s wish, but more than that, her own longing. She stopped asking who she was. She had no time. She had to be the responsible duchess: diplomacy, administration, welfare, schools, hospitals, rebuilding a land seared by war as relentlessly as waves eating into cliffs. She had to become the steady elder sister, then in time the reliable aunt.
She would often stand in the hall, alone, staring blankly at her own portrait—it was her, also not. Almec, calling her weird, asked why she’d chosen such an abstract, distorted image—fragments of shattered colour merging and repelling each other, struggling as they pieced together “her”. The eyes in the portrait gazed through the thin glass, through towers of metal rising one after another, through layers of flickering white light, forever looking toward Kalevala.
The first time she looked at her sister, she saw the freedom she herself once had on Kalevala. She would not allow war—the sandstorm of so called honor—steal that from the girl’s memory. She wanted to preserve that shard of Kalevala—
But she was wrong. Far too selfish. Her sister was not the girl she once was. The girl she had been did not belong to her anymore. In the end Bo-Katan turned from her as she herself had once turned from Kalevala—pulled away by violence clad in the costume of honor.
And I always will.
Years later, Sundari brought Obi-Wan back to her. But it was all too late. The words were spoken, the last of them. Her fingers traced the warmth of his bare cheek; their hands clasped. If he had not been wearing gloves, he would have felt her palm—damp, cold—just as it had been twenty years ago. The thought tugged a faint smile from her. She was there again—
With him barefoot in the stream, walking far. But instead of returning to the camp, the water led her to Kalevala’s cliff. Its sheer face rose into the sky; each crashing wave sent tremors into the earth. The wind, salted and wild, peeled the damp cloth from her skin. Unburdened, she ran forward until she fell, breathless, into the grass. The blades teased her nerves, pricked her skin. She didn’t care. She lay there laughing in bursts, drinking in the air, joining the seabirds, listening to the waves explode against stone, crashing.
Crashing again, she forgot the duchess;
Crashing again, she forgot the failed sister;
Crashing again, she forgot the solemn aunt.
She had lived—
and at last she cast off the question that had shadowed her for so long:
Who am I?
She no longer cared. She never had to care again.
Forget it—
forget her.
Alone,
back to Kalevala.