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His failure to bring the Sith to justice weighed on Yoda. Countless beings and worlds would suffer for it; he could hear their screams reach back toward the present to meet him, even as the screams of his murdered family had not yet faded.
But Yoda could not let himself drown in present or future grief, nor dwell on “if-only”.
Sidious lived. It fell now to Yoda, and Obi-Wan and any other Jedi who had survived, as well as their friends to keep hope alive by whatever means they could.
That path stretched out ahead of him, long and uncertain, too clouded to see to the end of it. But some routes were clear enough, their pitfalls evident even from this distance. Yoda could see the Empire hunting him, marked as such a terrible enemy that any who aided him would be brutally punished, and their families, their communities, their whole worlds facing the same cruelty, whether they had known of him or not.
Yoda turned away from that route. For him to confront the Empire directly would only ever end in failure. His journey would go in another direction, to a brighter future that he could not yet see.
