My spectacles are cracked.
I did not notice when it happened. Sometime during the battle, or after, when I was moving through the High Circle on my knees looking for Morvin, my spectacles cracked across the left lens and I have been seeing the world in two halves ever since, one clear and one fractured, which feels appropriate. Which feels, in the way that terrible things sometimes feel, exactly right.
I am sitting among the ruins of the High Circle. The Great Tree is gone. Not fallen, not damaged. Gone, the way things are gone when something vast and without mercy moves through them, and what remains is the root system, cracked and exposed, reaching upward into empty air as though still looking for the trunk that is no longer there. I have been looking at those roots for two days. I cannot stop looking at them. I planted a seedling beside that tree the year I arrived on this island. I have written its shadow into a hundred scrolls. I did not think I would outlive it.
I did not think I would outlive many things that are now gone.
We are so few.
Kit is in the infirmary. He breathes and he wakes and he eats what is brought to him and he does not speak and his eyes when you look into them have the quality of someone who is very far away inside themselves, standing in a corridor watching a door at the end of it, waiting to find out whether what is on the other side is survivable. His lekku hang still. I have never seen them still before. I did not know they could be.
Mobe-Joan sits on the cliff edge for hours at a time. She will not speak to me. She will not speak to anyone. She looks at the water with an expression I recognize because I have worn it myself in the last two days, the expression of someone trying to locate the exact moment at which things became irreversible, trying to find the seam where a different choice could have been made, knowing there is no such seam and looking anyway.
The new initiates, the children who arrived with their wide eyes and their wonder, sit in a cluster near the far hut and watch us with the faces of people who have been told their whole lives that the galaxy contains light and have just received their first significant evidence to the contrary. I do not know what to say to them. I have spent my life writing things down and I do not have words for what I would say to a child who arrived here three days ago and watched the sun go dark.
Master Morvin is gone.
I will write that plainly because I cannot write it any other way. He is gone, returned to the Force by the hand of the student he called a beacon, the one whose arrival I recorded on a fresh page with a freshly cut quill on a morning that felt, I remember this clearly, like the beginning of something good.
I was right about that. I was simply wrong about which kind of beginning it was.
We saw it. All of us who remain saw it, and we will carry the seeing for the rest of our lives, however long or short those lives turn out to be. We saw the Great Imbalance, the thing the Prime had theorized and debated and written careful philosophical positions about for a generation. We had imagined it as something external. A force from outside the Order, a darkness that would come to us from the stars wearing a face we did not recognize.
It did not come from the stars. It came from inside the temple. It came from the High Circle where Morvin had stood on our first day and told us the Light was a hearth and we were the tenders of the flame. It came from a woman who had healed the sick and saved the dying and walked between two armies without flinching and bent the deep ocean to her will, and it came because a man she loved handled the most sacred thing she carried with the carelessness of someone who did not know and did not care what he was touching.
We saw the gold turn red. We saw the hands that had glowed white with healing become the source of lightning no one in the history of the Prime had ever seen before, a light that did not mend but unmade, moving from person to person with the same intimate precision that her healing had always carried, the same knowledge of exactly where to place the energy, only reversed. Only given a different instruction.
Velara Mahlynn Misith has gone into the Outer Rim. Into the dark between the charts where we cannot follow, or cannot follow yet. She took with her the broken crystal and the red light and whatever she has become in the hours since she walked out of this temple, and I do not know how to write about her in the past tense because she is not gone, she is simply somewhere I cannot see her, which is different from gone and in some ways worse.
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We have spent two days in council, those of us who remain. We have sat in the surviving chambers of the temple with the sound of the ocean below and the smell of ash above and we have talked about what we witnessed and what it means and what must be done.
We have found a name for what she became.
It came from Mobe-Joan, the morning after, before she stopped speaking entirely. She said it quietly, standing at the edge of the High Circle looking at the broken tree, and the rest of us heard it and no one disagreed. We take the name from her fallen house, from the world that made her and sent her here and could not have known what it was sending. From this day forward, what she became, and what any person becomes when the Force is turned inside out by grief and rage and the cold current beneath both, shall be called the Sith.
It is a word for the rot that grows in the dark. It is a word for the light that has been reversed. It is a word we hope to never need again and intend to spend the rest of our lives preparing for.
I have laid out a new scroll. My finest vellum. The ink I am using today is not the beetle-black and berry gall I have always used. I mixed it this morning from the ash of the Great Tree and the salt water from the cliff, because what I am writing today should be marked, should be visibly different from everything I have written before it, should carry in its very composition the evidence of what it cost.
This scroll is not a record of discovery. It is a wall.
We have learned something true. It is a terrible truth and we did not want to learn it and we would give almost anything to unknow it, but it was demonstrated to us beyond any argument and we are scholars and we do not look away from evidence because it is inconvenient. The truth is this.
The Force amplifies. It amplifies everything it is given. Joy, yes. Strength, yes. Healing, yes. But also grief. Also rage. Also the bottomless cold that lives beneath both when the thing a person has built their power around is taken from them carelessly by someone who did not understand its value.
Velara was the most powerful student the Prime had ever trained. We said that to each other often and with pride and we did not fully reckon with what it meant. It meant that when the Force amplified her grief it amplified it to a scale the island could not contain. It meant that the same capacity that had made her a miracle made her a catastrophe when the anchor was removed.
The anchor.
I said that word to my students. I said it standing in this library with the holograph of Shebi and Lindy in my hand and twenty boulders orbiting the ceiling and tears on my face, and I told them love was the anchor that kept a Jedi from drifting into the cold. I believed it. I believe it still. I believe it and I watch what it produced and I understand that I was right and I was also not entirely right and the distance between those two things is the distance between the High Circle before and the High Circle now, between the Great Tree standing and the Great Tree in ash and splinter on the stone.
Love is a bridge. This is also true. But a bridge can be walked from either direction.
I sit with my cracked spectacles and my ash-ink and I write the thing I have to write.
By the authority of the remaining Council of the Prime, I record the First Decree of what will henceforth be known as the Jedi Order.
The Force is our only kin. The Light is our only home.
A Jedi shall know no marriage. A Jedi shall claim no crown. A Jedi shall hold no singular love above the light of the Force itself. Attachment is the path to the shadow. To be a Guardian of the Light one must be a vessel, emptied of the singular, so that the universal may remain.
There is no emotion, there is peace. There is no ignorance, there is knowledge. There is no passion, there is serenity. There is no chaos, there is harmony. There is no death, there is the Force.
I write these words and I mean them and I know what they cost and I pay the cost anyway because the alternative is another Velara, and I will not survive another Velara and neither, I think, will the galaxy.
We will seek out the Sith. We will look for the red light in the dark places and we will not flinch from what we find because flinching is how you become the thing you are afraid of. We will hunt what she became and what any person becomes when the Force is given the wrong anchor, and we will remember what we saw here, and we will build something strong enough to hold against it.
I must say one more thing before I roll this scroll and seal it.
I am not certain we are right.
I mean the Decree. I mean the rule of no attachment, no singular love, the empty vessel. I mean all of it. I believe it is necessary. I believe we have no better answer and we have thought carefully and we are not acting from panic but from evidence. I believe it. And I am not certain it is right.
Because I think of Shebi. I think of Lindy. I think of the twenty boulders rising in the library when I held their faces in my mind, the Force moving through me not as a scholar moves weight but as a father moves mountains to keep the world safe for the people he loves. I think of what Velara was when the anchor held, the things she did, the lives she saved, the wars she ended, the depth and breadth of what the Force could do through a person who was completely and wholly anchored.
I think of what she was. And I think of what she became. And I do not know how to hold both things at once except to write them both down and seal them in the same scroll and trust that someone, someday, will be wiser than I am and will find a way through the space between them.
We are the Jedi Order. We begin today, in ash and grief and the salt air of Ahch-To, with cracked spectacles and trembling hands and the weight of everything we have lost pressing into the stone beneath us.
We begin anyway. That is what the light requires.
May the Force be with us.
It is going to need to be.
Thorne, Scroll-Keeper. First Year of the Order. Ahch-To.
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Did the tragic fall of Velara feel like a fitting origin for the Sith?
Did the shift from Thorne’s belief in love to his decree of non-attachment change how you view the Jedi Order?
Most importantly, would you like to see more short stories like this that explore the "hidden" or "forgotten" history of the Star Wars universe?