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When Barriss Offee is five years old, she meets Luminara Unduli for the first time. The Jedi Knight has come to the creche to read a story to the Initiates of Krayt Dragon Clan. Barriss is painfully shy, and feels especially nervous before the tall, elegant figure clad in black robes. Luminara reads a Mirialan folktale about a trickster goddess who overcomes her foes without ever raising a blade. Her voice is soft and melodious, and despite her nerves, Barriss is entranced. After finishing her story, Luminara stops for a moment and turns to Barriss with a soft, warm smile.
“Hello, little one. What is your name?”
Barriss freezes up. Luminara senses her panic and projects warmth-calm-comfort to her through the Force.
“B-Barriss, ma’am. Barriss Offee.”
“What a beautiful name, dear. It’s wonderful to meet you, Initiate Offee.”
“W-why did you want to talk to me? Am I in trouble?”
“Far from it, young Barriss. I simply wanted to get to know a fellow daughter of Mirial a bit better. I take it you enjoyed my story?”
“Yes! It was so cool how she won by being smart! When I grow up I want to be smart like her, so I don’t have to fight people to beat them. I like sparring, but I never want to be in a real fight, ever.”
Luminara smiles and chuckles softly. “You are well on your way to being a wise Jedi, Barriss. Fighting should be our last resort—after all, I’m sure you know what Master Yoda always says about the Force.”
“A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never attack!” Barriss says proudly, placing her hands on her hips.
“Exactly. You are an excellent listener, it seems.”
Barriss is starting to feel comfortable enough to ask a question of her own. “Ma’am, why do you wear different robes than all the other Jedi?”
“That's a wonderful question, Barriss! These are Mirialan robes, from one of our homeworld’s Force traditions; they’re one of several customs my lineage keeps alive within the Jedi Order, and has for generations. My tattoos are another of those.”
Barriss sighs. “I feel like I don’t know much about being a Mirialan, for being a Mirialan.”
“If you ever want to know more, I would be glad to teach you, Barriss. It is important to me to pass on our culture as my master did to me, and as I have to my own Padawan. Perhaps when you’re old enough you can become part of our lineage as well.”
Many years later, when Barriss talks to Master Luminara about their first meeting, Luminara tells her that she knew immediately then that Barriss would be her next Padawan. Barriss shares a similar sentiment.
When Barriss Offee is fifteen years old, she learns what happens when the Jedi forget Yoda’s mantra about never using the Force for attack. Master Luminara is assigned to the strike team to rescue Knight Kenobi, Padawan Skywalker, and Senator Amidala from Geonosis, and, perhaps naively believing the situation could be resolved with minimal bloodshed, she chooses to bring her Padawan along.
Barriss knows many of the young Jedi cut down on the killing floor of the Petranaki Arena. Several of them were fellow members of Krayt Dragon Clan, who had listened alongside Barriss to Luminara’s folktale of intellect triumphing over violence on that day ten years ago. Eyes wet with tears, she surrenders to the Force to guide her. She may be joining her clanmates in death soon, but she will do so with purpose, to protect the innocent as good Jedi do. (She wonders if anyone in the arena has any innocence left.)
She, alone out of the Padawans brought to the arena to rescue the two Jedi and the senator, survives. She barely remembers the course of events that ends with her being offered a hand by a soldier in white plasteel, leaning over the sill of an LAAT gunship; the first of many rides she will take in such a vehicle over the next two years. She is four years younger than the next-youngest survivors, nineteen-year-olds Anakin Skywalker and Aayla Secura—discounting, of course, the clone troopers, who, despite their accelerated development, are only nine standard years old when they’re deployed on Geonosis.
Guilt plays havoc with Barriss’ mind and body. She stops eating, stops sleeping, and barely speaks. After a series of intense arguments with the Council and Chancellor Palpatine, Master Luminara is finally able to secure a dispensation for her not to be sent into combat for the next year. She hopes the war will be over by then, but a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach tells her otherwise.
When Barriss Offee is sixteen years old, she’s on Geonosis again, the fates having played a cruel joke on her with her dispensation ending just as Master Luminara is sent back to the desert world. (After certain revelations a year later, Barriss wonders if her ill fortune was actually the design of the fates, or rather that of the Chancellor). She hasn’t interacted with many Jedi her own age since the war began—for some reason Barriss can’t comprehend, the Council has agreed to the plan to take literal children into war zones and give them command over soldiers, so many of her peers have spent the last year mostly offworld. It’s only a momentary pang of relief when one of them comes back, since they’ll most likely be sent out again in a week or so, and Barriss feels a black hole in the pit of her stomach every time she hears that one of them won’t be coming back.
When Barriss hears that another Padawan about her age will be on the mission with them, her mood brightens a bit, in spite of her objection to Padawans being sent into combat at all; it might be nice to have someone to talk to who isn't Master Luminara or a lab-grown soldier. Her old shyness and nerves have come back in full force in her year of mostly-isolation, though, and her stomach ties itself in knots in anticipation of meeting another teenage Jedi. All the anticipatory anxiety in the galaxy, however, does not prepare Barriss for her first meeting with her.
Ahsoka Tano is an enigma to Barriss; she bickers with her master (why did the Council agree to let a twenty-year-old barely-Knight train a Padawan?), takes reckless actions, and spends most of the mission teasing Barriss for her by-the-book nature. She should find Ahsoka obnoxious and insufferable. And yet, she doesn’t. She feels drawn to the Togruta-shaped ball of chaos for reasons she can’t understand, driven by confusing feelings that might be normal for a teenager but are highly irregular and extremely unhelpful in the midst of a war. Then they’re trapped in the tank together, and Ahsoka holds her hand, and Barriss tries her best to deny her extremely inconvenient crush.
That works, more or less, for another year, until Ahsoka comes back from Zygerria and joins an increasingly despaired Barriss for latemeal at the Temple caf. From there, a whirlwind of events take place, and at their conclusion, the Chancellor is dead, the Republic and Jedi Order are saved, and Barriss has a girlfriend.
Ahsoka’s lineage is jokingly known by many around the Temple as the “Disaster Lineage.” If Barriss’ lineage is defined by adherence to Mirialan customs, Ahsoka’s is defined by adherence to extremely complicated and messy master-Padawan dynamics. Ahsoka’s master is barely older than her, had a Sith Lord pouring poison in his ear for over a decade, and is married to a prominent politician, and while Obi-Wan may seem more put-together by comparison, he too had a Padawan thrust upon him before he’d even had the chance to be a Knight, after the traumatic death of his master (Qui-Gon being a complicated character in his own right), and to add insult to injury, was put in charge of training the moodiest and least emotionally open Jedi in the Order. Then there was Obi-Wan’s grandmaster, the once-respected Jedi Master Dooku, who became the ringleader of the Separatists and secret apprentice to Darth Sidious. In short, no one in Ahsoka’s lineage is a normal Jedi.
By proxy, that now seems to include Barriss and Luminara as well. By any rights, the bond between the Disaster and Little Mirial lineages, formed because of the romance between its two youngest members (although perhaps it has older roots, as Barriss and Ahsoka are both convinced that Luminara and Obi-Wan had something between them at some point in the past), doesn’t make any sense. But it works, somehow. Anakin Skywalker and Luminara Unduli would not exactly be two Jedi you would expect to be friends, but Luminara’s soft, compassionate approach to Jedi teachings seems to help Anakin to be more emotionally open and less possessive, while Anakin is able to convince Luminara to live a little every once in a while. Barriss, for her part, gets along well enough with Obi-Wan, but Anakin is difficult for her to categorize—he’s mercurial; sometimes the model of a kind, compassionate, selfless Jedi, but other times closed-off, brooding, and frightening. At least since Sidious’ death the latter episodes are rarer and more fleeting, and he’s getting the help he needs.
One evening, Anakin and Barriss are uncharacteristically alone together, and they somehow end up on the topic of Geonosis. She tells him about her fallen crechemates, and the survivor’s guilt that she still carries, and without hesitating for a moment, he offers her his hand to hold. It’s a sweet gesture, and exactly the kind of comfort Barriss needed in that moment. She thinks back to being trapped in the tank with his Padawan, and how she had offered her hand to Barriss. She suddenly realizes how much of her master’s Padawan Ahsoka is.
When Barriss Offee is nineteen years old, she meets her future Padawan, on a visit to the creche with Ahsoka. Shorne Ohil of Nexu Clan is almost a spitting image of Barriss on the day she met Luminara; a quiet, shy Mirialan girl with her nose constantly stuck in heavy, leather-bound books that are probably outside of any scope of recommended reading for seven-year-olds. She tells Shorne about Mirialan traditions, and the unique nature of her lineage, and Shorne gazes up wide-eyed. The next time she sees Shorne, the girl asks where she can get robes like Barriss or Luminara’s, which leads to a three-generation outing to Coruscant’s Little Mirial district, much like those Luminara took Barriss on while she was still an Initiate.
They eat at a dingy, cramped traditional Mirialan restaurant, and the food is just as delicious as Barriss remembers from her childhood. Then Barriss and Luminara bring Shorne to the tailor’s shop that has sewn every set of robes for Barriss, Luminara, and Luminara’s other former Padawan, as well as Luminara’s master Katri, and probably Katri’s master before her as well. The elderly Mirialan woman who runs the shop tells them that she’s incredibly honored to sew robes for another member of the lineage (yes, Shorne isn’t technically part of the lineage yet, but that distinction is little more than a technicality), and how she fears Shorne may be the last she gets to work with, as old age has begun to catch up with her at long last, and she doesn’t know how many years she has left. The shop isn’t going anywhere, though, as she introduces her granddaughter, who she has taken as an apprentice and is teaching everything she knows. The girl is a little younger than Barriss, and as they lock eyes, Barriss knows they understand each other on a level beyond words. They may not be part of the same Order, but they have the same responsibility to pass on their culture to future generations. In every way that matters, this girl and her grandmother are part of Barriss’ lineage.
After the tailor and her apprentice take Shorne’s measurements and show her a few different styles of robes and head coverings to choose from, the three stop at a small house of worship, where a priest is instructing his followers in the same traditions Barriss and Luminara try to respect. There are some ideas in the tradition, though, that are incompatible with the Jedi Code; Luminara points these out to Shorne, and explains that while her lineage are Mirialans, and proud of their heritage, they are still Jedi Knights, and the culture of the Jedi is just as important to them. They and the priest have differing perspectives, neither of which is better than the other, or more or less respectful. Traditions are, after all, only worthwhile if they serve the needs of the community, and Shorne, Barriss, and Luminara’s community is the Jedi Order.
Barriss spots a statue of the trickster goddess Luminara told the story of on the first day they knew each other. Without thinking, she reaches out a hand and touches the statue, then, fearing she has committed a cultural slight, she freezes, head snapping toward the priest, who thankfully gives her an approving nod. Shorne comes up beside her and asks who the statue is, and Barriss tells her what she can remember of Luminara’s tale. “Well, that’s not exactly how I’ve heard the story,” says the priest, smiling. Luminara intercedes—“no, because it’s the way I told it. I’m surprised Barriss still remembers.”
She shouldn’t be, thinks Barriss. How could she forget the first meeting with the most important woman in her life (with apologies to Ahsoka, who has to settle for second place), not to mention a story that has guided her throughout her years as a Jedi? Barriss still admires the trickster goddess just as she did fourteen years ago, and still strives to solve problems with wisdom and cunning rather than violence, as the goddess did.
“The way you were talking about her,” says Shorne, “she sounds a lot like you, Miss Offee.” If Barriss hadn’t been absolutely certain this girl was her future Padawan before, the swell of warmth in her heart now confirms it beyond any doubt.
When Barriss Offee is twenty-three years old, Shorne Ohil becomes her Padawan. The girl is brilliant, kind-hearted, and promises, as all Padawans seem to their masters, to be a far better Jedi than Barriss ever has been. She is less of a miniature version of Barriss than she seemed at first, with much more of a mischievous streak that is greatly encouraged, to Barriss’ chagrin and secret amusement, by her Auntie Ahsoka. She favors the elegant and precise Form II over Barriss’ preferred Form III, and promises to be a strong duelist, especially with all the practice she gets against Ahsoka, Anakin, and Obi-Wan.
It strikes Barriss that Shorne is not the product of a single lineage; rather, she is the first member of the Little Mirial lineage to be trained as an honorary member of the Disaster Lineage as well. It’s no surprise that Ahsoka hasn’t taken a Padawan of her own—Shorne spends almost as much time with her as she does with Barriss. Over time, Barriss sees how Shorne embraces both the Disaster flair for the dramatic and the Little Mirial softness and reverence for what came before, and it is the most beautiful thing Barriss has ever seen. (Ahsoka once again has to settle for a strong second place.)
Jedi (with some extremely rare and controversial exceptions) do not marry or have children, but Barriss has never understood those who see this as a great loss. She has love in her life, so much of it in fact that her heart feels like bursting. She deeply loves her former master, adores her sweet little Padawan, and of course, loves her beautiful girlfriend dearly. She and Ahsoka need no vows between them to know exactly how they feel about each other—if anything, vows would weaken their relationship, which is built on a foundation of service to the Light and the greater good. She could not love her girlfriend as freely as she does if she had any fear that Ahsoka might one day value her over the good of the galaxy. As for having children, Barriss couldn’t care less about passing on her genetic material, to say nothing of the process of childbirth, which she is all-too-familiar with from her work as a healer. She would much rather her legacy be one of teaching the next generation well, and leaving the galaxy, and the Jedi Order, better than she found it.
The Force surrounds everything and binds the galaxy together, and as a custodian of the Force, Barriss is but one strand in a vast web of connections that span across said galaxy. Many Jedi think of lineage as, well, a line, a chain of masters and apprentices snaking forward through time, but Barriss thinks there’s more to it than that. She sees strands projecting out from her in all directions, from Luminara to Ahsoka, Shorne, the tailor and her apprentice, her crechemates in Krayt Dragon Clan, even the trickster goddess herself. She owes a part of who she is to each of them, and in turn she keeps a piece of them in her own heart, reminding her of who she is and what she believes in.
Barriss Offee is twenty-five years old, and she is a Jedi, like so many before her, and so many yet to come. And she is happy.