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Meetra Surik is ten years old, and once again, she has been abandoned.
She has trained hard to be a Jedi Padawan, to be his Pawadan. No other youngling on Coruscant can use Jar'Kai like she does, lightsaber in one hand and training daito in the other. Not even Alek had been that good. And Master Kavar specializes in a blend of Jar'Kai and Juyo. But Master Kavar has left for the Outer Rim, and now an unfamiliar woman kneels in front of Meetra.
Her name is Vima.
Meetra finds it hard to care, but swallows the angry rebuttal. She knows it's unbecoming of a Jedi Padawan.
If anyone will even take her as their Padawan. One day, Meetra is about to be apprenticed to a member of the Council, and the next, she has no Master at all. Is this how Jedi patience is rewarded?
Vima can sense her frustration, and assures her it's natural, but everyone must find their own path -- her and Master Kavar alike. There is already a surprisingly strong bond between them, so even though Meetra has been left behind for her own safety, even though he cannot train her, the Force will surely bring them together again.
Meetra remains unconvinced. Master Kavar has left to fight the Mandalorians on Althir III, against the rest of the Council's wishes. Doesn't that mean he will be exiled? Doesn't that mean he will fall to the Dark Side?
Vima smiles. Fondly, Meetra thinks. She is very beautiful. Her skin and her blazing hair are darker than Meetra's pale features, and her robes are a striking shade of blue like the sky.
Kavar may face repercussions, but that is the life of a Jedi. There is always a path back. Vima's own Master is the greatest proof of that: he was Ulic Qel-Droma, Dark Lord of the Sith.
Meetra is unable to contain her surprise. The woman in front of her is Jedi Master Vima Sunrider. She should have recognized her.
And, when Vima was Meetra's age, she ran away to seek out Ulic to be her teacher. Her mother, Nomi, new Grand Master of the Order at that time, hadn't found the time to train her, and Vima would accept no one else. She didn't even know why.
Sensing Meetra's thoughts, Vima confirms that is an option. Although Kavar will be in an active battlefield, not on a frozen border world; Meetra may have to escape from Coruscant several times.
The humor relaxes Meetra, somehow. She takes a deep breath, and accepts that her being Master Kavar's student is not the will of the Force… not right now, anyway. She is worried, though. Atris says she's already old to not have a Master. How long does she have before she is kicked out of the Order?
Vima asks: how does she know she does not have a Master?
Meetra is puzzled for a moment, before Master Sunrider tells her to show her the Jar'Kai velocities Kavar speaks so highly of.
Meetra is twenty-three when she returns to the Jedi enclave on Dantooine from another extended mission beyond Republic Space. She has earned her reputation as a knight-errant. She enjoys following the flow of the Living Force, meditating between the stars, finding worlds that have not felt the steps of the Jedi in years. Equally, she has earned a few weeks' recuperation on the peaceful plains of Dantooine.
Master Vandar has asked her here personally; he thinks it is time the wandering Jedi took an apprentice of her own. Meetra is not so sure. Truthfully, she would rather be on Coruscant, pestering Atris. Her old friend has already taken over as Historian on Coruscant, despite her young age. Meetra is warm with pride for her friend. But she thinks of Vima's welcoming guidance when she needed it, and she thinks: perhaps she could be that for someone else.
So the last thing she expects is some kind of rally in the courtyard. She can see Bastila Shan, Vima's new Padawan, lingering conspicuously outside the edge of the crowd. Her scowl is so much more suited to Vrook than it is to the young girl, Meetra allows herself a surreptitious laugh. And she can see Alek, orating from the shade of a thick, twisting tree.
Meetra is aware of the Revanchist movement. Masters Kavar and Kae openly support it. But Arren Kae had not traveled the Tion Hegemony and Hutt Space, and seen the Mandalorian advance in person, the firestorms left swirling in atmosphere in their wake.
Yet Meetra is still a bit surprised when she finds herself beside Alex. He looms over her, but blinks at her in surprise and falls quiet. The entire crowd seems to hold their breath waiting to see what she will say.
Meetra looks around them, at all these faces. She recognizes so few of them. But, in an instant, she feels connected to them, united by the oaths they swore by Jedi. She knows that she will die for any one of them.
She raises her lightsaber to the sky, and speaks.
Jedi Knight Meetra Surik leaves Dantooine behind. She fights at Nouane and Dagary Minor, at Thustra and Obroa-Skai. Loss after loss. She does not accompany Revan and Malak to Cathar; she leads the other Revanchists to Ithor, then Eres III, Charros and Randon. To her surprise, the Jedi follow her eagerly with Revan's blessing.
General Surik leads from the frontline on Taris and Vur IV, at Vorzyd and Lucazec. Revan goes where he is needed, commanding from the bridge of the Interdictor, or standing at the tip of the spear with his lightsaber ablaze in the dark, but Meetra is always boots on the ground, shoulder-to-shoulder, robes stained with mud and tattered by ripper flak in the thick of the fighting throngs. Revan, Malak, and Meetra; the mind, body, and spirit of the Revanchist crusaders. When she discards her bloodstained white Jedi cloak once and for all in the fires in the liberation of Taris, all the other Revanchists step forward and follow suit.
Meetra is twenty-six when Dxun tries to swallow her whole. Revan's plan is sound, it gets Meetra and her forces planetside through the relentless anti-air fire, and they move quickly, unpredictably, in small strike teams. But this world is like an enemy itself; it is no wonder the Mandalorians feel at home here. They sacrifice their own communications to jam the entire moon, cutting Meetra off from her strike teams. Mud claws at her boots, vines grasps at her body, ravenous beasts snap at her heels, and kilometers of minefields and spike pits dare her to make a single mistake. She has already lost most of her men when victory is finally within her grasp, after months of vicious war in the heart of the jungle moon.
They follow her anyway, without question. She will die claiming this victory for Revan, and they will die for her. She watches the very last soldier under her command beaten into paste by a brute with beskar crushgaunts, and watches a Republic cruiser crash itself into the last remaining standing fortress, using the sheer force of gravity to overcome the automated anti-air fire.
Hollow-eyed, nostrils filled with the smell of burnt flesh, alone in the jungle among the bodies, an idea forms in Meetra's mind.
In the skies over Malachor V, General Surik commands from the bridge of the Centurion, one of the most powerful destroyers in the Republic fleet. They arrive to the battle late -- and all according to Revan's plan.
The Mandalorians have taken the bait, the remnants of their fleet pouncing too eagerly on what they thought was a divided Republic force stopping for supplies. Now they are boxed in by the rest of the fleet, Revan's flagship at the head, nose-to-nose with Mandalore's cruiser. The rest of his ships are too low in the atmosphere -- the planet's mass shadow won't allow them to jump to hyperspace to escape. To do so would tear the ships apart.
Meetra turns to Bao-Dur. She does not need to say a thing; he has been with her the whole way. She never could have done this without him. Neither of them hesitate; they both know that what they do now is necessary, for every sentient in the galaxy who has not yet died at Mandalorian hands. All Meetra needs to do is nod.
Bao-Dur punches a command, eager to be the one to end the Mandalorians once and for all, even if no one remembers his name. And far below beneath the surface of Malachor V, the Mass Shadow Generator activates.
It is one thing to think of a way to destroy a planet. It is another thing to watch it die by your hand.
The Mass Shadow Generator jumps the entire planet to hyperspace -- but only partially. With no null quantum field, no inertial dampeners, no hyperspace shunt, the spacetime ripples immediately cascade out of control, the mass shadows of the planet, then the Mandalorian fleet, then the gravitic anomalies native to the Malachor system compounding the effect in on itself. For just a fraction of a second, they create a black hole at the heart of Malachor V.
It is one thing to watch a planet die. It is another thing to feel it.
Malachor V implodes. The Mandalorian fleet crumples toward the surface. So do many Republic ships, too entrenched to escape. And Meetra Surik feels it all. The piercing scream that leaves her mouth is not hers, it only echoes through her. Tears flow from her eyes like blood. The fear and agony of hundreds of thousands of lives being instantly extinguished flows into her. The hand on her hip clenches; with the blind desperate strength of a dying woman, in her Force-enhanced grip her lightsaber is crushed into shrapnel. The crystal within shatters with a scream, and Meetra's blood flows from her hand to the deck below.
She has never felt horror like this in all her life. It is more pain than any person can survive. All she wants is what anyone would want: she wants it to stop.
Meetra Surik is twenty-seven when she returns to Coruscant in silence, alone. She is deaf and blind and dumb before the Council. Without feeling them in the Force, their faces are unreadable, their very shapes unclear. Meetra has come here of her own volition, to answer for her crimes, to demand the Council recognize their own, but her words sound hollow. Her tongue is stiff. Her thoughts are cloudy. The silence howls in her mind.
The Council gives her no answers. Grand Master Nomi Sunrider herself resigned her position to join Revan at the Second Battle of Onderon. Even she knew the Mandalorian threat had to be faced, and yet the Council gives Meetra no recognition. They don't even give her punishment. Vima told her there is always a way back, but as she meets Atris' eyes, Meetra realizes that even the Jedi hold grudges.
Her heart wavers. She had looked up to the woman when they were younger; Atris was intelligent and skilled and dedicated, and she had earned her incredibly young appointment to the Council. Once, she had thought Atris might follow her. Once, Meetra had thought, maybe…
Now there is only icy durasteel in her gaze. Feeling more than she has felt in months, Meetra ignites her lightsaber. For just a moment, everyone in the Council chamber freezes. Then she turns and plunges it into the heart of the stone pillar in the antechamber, engaging the activation lock so it remains in the stone even as she marches out of the Temple, as defiant as the day she first joined Revan.
She is alone again.
Meetra Surik is thirty-five before she returns to known space. She has spent eight years wandering, as she used to, chasing in vane the peace she had found in it so long ago. She meditates just as Vima once taught her, but she feels nothing. There are no whispers of the Force. There is no taste of truth. She listens, but she only hears the yawning maw of Malachor V, no matter how far she goes. Peace is a lie. She brings the war with her everywhere.
Then, out of nowhere, the Harbinger. A Republic cruiser, here?
Years ago, Meetra believed that coincidence was the fool's excuse when he saw the Force at work. But the Force no longer guides her. For the first time in her life, only she can make her choices.
The Harbinger dies in space, a fitful, choking end. Peragus follows, a dead colony on the corpse of a world revived for one last spectacular gasp. And that gasp may have stolen the last breath from Telos, because of Meetra.
A third world killed, she muses without mirth. She is getting too used to the feeling.
When she sees Atris again, she is filled with so many feelings at once. It has been so long since she has lived by the Jedi Code, she has forgotten its teachings. WIth no Force, no Jedi, for eight years Meetra Surik has simply been, and now that she is back in Republic space, it feels like another galaxy.
But she is beginning to feel the Force again, through Kreia. The old woman saved her life from Darth Sion -- twice -- and in so doing forged a Force Bond between them, like Master and apprentice. Only why Kreia is so interested in her, she does not know.
The Force does not feel as it once did. It feels like a memory. Like a scent from Meetra's childhood, she cannot recognize it, but her body reacts to it instantly. It feels like she is at the bottom of a deep, deep well, but she can finally see the light through the top. The pressure has shifted, subtly, the air is no longer stagnant and compressed. The faint echoes of the Force are the most beautiful sound she has ever heard.
So when she senses Atris -- fear, admiration, anger, so much anger -- it overwhelms her. They part coldly, and Meetra must learn, finally, what has happened to her. What Malachor V did to her. She must know why Atris looks at her like that.
And standing on the bridge of the Ravager, the sister-ship to her own cruiser which she had watched sucked down into the maw of Malachor V, she thinks she begins to understand.
Kreia and Visas and Atris spoke of Darth Nihilus: a man who had clawed his way out of the cracks of Malachor, changed, a wound in the Force, a hunger without end that consumes planets.
They are wrong. Standing before him -- it -- Meetra realizes the truth. The blade at his side flickers and flares, the crystal cracked and reforged. The hilt is layers of shorn metal wrapped back together into a familiar shape. But a lightsaber, a ship, these are only ornamentation.
Nihilus is a shadow in the Force, black hole, a gaping wound. It is what she made at Malachor. It attempts to feed on Meetra, but the gravitic pull of the singularity reaches into the vastness -- into the cave which now contains Meetra, the echo chamber of her heart where the drums of war still ring, and it doubles back on itself. The ripples cascade out of control, the shadow of Meetra, then the bonds of their companions, then the scabbing wound that is Telos compounding the effect in on itself.
Nihilus cannot feed on her. When it tries, it only tears into itself, cannibalizing itself in its hunger. Its voice is a thousand tolling bells, a chorus of pain and fury, and now Meetra recognizes the sounds. When Nihilus falls, its body implodes with crimson lightning, dark clouds roll out of its empty robes and dissipate into the stale air of the ghost ship as it begins to fall apart without its master. Meetra feels as if she has finally let out a breath she has been holding for nine years, and she sucks in air like she has been held underwater.
When she takes the bone-white mask in hand, the echoes of distant screams quiet, and the ripples of the Force grow stronger. But they will never be as they once were -- Meetra will never. She is not a wound in the Force, she is something else. A bone shattered and regrown. A scar. She takes Nihilus' lightsaber in her palm, and it fits perfectly, the crystal at its heart sings in chorus with the one that bonded with her on Dantooine. A shadow of Revan, a shadow of Meetra; Jedi and Sith, life and death. This is what Kreia speaks of, what she searches for: something between, beyond, everything and nothing.
When she returns to Malachor, it must be alone. Her companions try to follow, and she cannot stop them, but they cannot interfere no matter how badly they want to. At the end of it all…
There is no great revelation, no great secret. There is only you.
Bao-Dur activates the Mass Shadow Generator one final time. Meetra does not know where he goes after. Perhaps he stayed in the shadows below, relinquishing his pain to the void. But she knows he is at peace, finally, because she feels it, too, not just through their Bond, but deep in her heart, in that part of her which never left Malachor V. The wound is finally cauterized; no more does the shadow of Malachor continue to bleed out into the darkness. The screaming silence finally rests, and the galaxy can begin to heal.
Atton wants to go with her. They all do, but perhaps Atton most of all. This time, Meetra takes the proper time to sit with them, to try to explain. She gives them the answers that she can, but she knows it is not enough. Especially not for him. She takes more time than she needs to. She allows herself a little hunger, filling the void just for a little while.
But their destiny is to rebuild, to heal the galaxy and themselves until the scars can no longer be seen like Meetra's. She has trained them, without truly knowing the extent of her lessons. Atton the assassin, Mira the crusader, Visas the blind, Mical the reject, Brianna the forsworn -- they have all become, fully. They are themselves; always what they were, but never again. They can see, and they can learn, and understand. A new Council, for a new age. New guardians.
And they will judge Atris fairly. Meetra cannot. She is many things, but she has never been objective, and certainly never about Atris. Perhaps in time Atris, too, can heal, and become what she never allowed herself to be. Or perhaps she will continue to fester, until the kinder thing would have been to kill her in her secret chamber on Telos. But Meetra couldn't. She does not know what awaits Atris. She feels the Force again, in echoes and ebbs and riptides, but it is different. Its nudges and pulls no longer feel pressing, inexorable. She no longer senses the future, only the present, the ripples that reach her and the ones she creates. Meetra stands apart, and she makes her own decisions.
She knows herself now, and through herself, knows war better still: knows the truth that they were deluded at Malachor V. War can never be ended, no matter how careful the planning, how total the victory, how final the fatal blow. It is an endless ripple cascading out of control, war causing war causing war causing war, a black hole at the heart of life itself.
Meetra thinks that Revan has learned this, as she did. Through Admiral Carth Onasi, and Mandalore the Preserver, and through Bastila Shan, the proud little Padawan from Dantooine, now sitting as Master of the Order of the new Jedi Council. Yet still, Revan left.
Meetra considers the old Council's words carefully. Kavar, Atris, Zez Kai-El, even Vrook. Had she truly learned nothing?
No, she has learned everything. Her entire life has been a process of becoming herself; how could she ever wish to change it? Revan was never wrong to fight. They had saved the Republic from one threat; it was only the nature of the Force for more to rise. Ripples upon ripples upon ripples, wounds inflicting wounds.
But if more threats still loom, Revan would face them. That is who he is. And despite everything, Meetra still believes in him. She is no slave to the Force, nor to pain, nor to Revan. She chooses.
She knows what to look for now. She settles into the cockpit of the Ebon Hawk, closes her eyes, and listens to the void, waiting for the echo. Then she feels it: the bond they still share, faint and distant, but as unmistakable to her as her own face. The crystal hearts of her blades pulsate at her hip.
She follows it into dark space, alone.