Prelude: The Hunting Book

  Recorded by Master Jedi Thorne, Scroll-Keeper and Council-Elder of the Jedi Order. Written in the fourth month after Ahch-To.

  I have started a new book.

  This is worth recording because in thirty years of keeping the scrolls of the Prime I have never started a new book mid-season. The old ones were organized by year, by mission, by the names of the students who came and went and grew into the people the Force needed them to be. They were records of discovery. Of arrival. Of the steady, patient work of building something that might outlast us.

  This book is different. I am calling it the Hunting Book, though I have not written that on the cover because I am not certain I want the word hunting associated with the Order in any permanent way. We are not hunters. We are guardians. We are seekers. We are the tenders of the flame.

  And yet.

  The Sith is in the Outer Rim.

  I write that sentence and I sit with it and I write it again because the discipline of the record demands that I not look away from difficult things, that I press them into the vellum plainly and without the softening that grief and fear and the long complicated human impulse toward hope would prefer.

  The Sith is in the Outer Rim. She has been there for four months. In that time she has not been idle.

  I have collected seventeen separate accounts from traders, from planetary officials, from the scattered Force sensitives we have found and brought into the Order who passed through the Outer Rim in the years since Ahch-To. The accounts do not always agree on the details. They agree on the broad shape of things. A woman. Bright lightning. Planets changed, sometimes by force and sometimes by something more complicated than force, an intervention that looks from one angle like destruction and from another like a brutal and unsentimental kind of order. Wars ended. Not the way wars ended on Vardos II, through negotiation and the patient lighting of common ground. The way a fire ends a fire. By removing everything it might consume.

  She is building something. I do not yet know what.

  I must clarify, I write the word Sith because that is the name the Code requires and the Code is the law I wrote with my own hands in ash ink on the worst morning of my life and I will not undermine it in the very record that is supposed to uphold it.

  But there are moments, in the late hours when the candle is low and the island is quiet and the ocean does what the ocean always does, when the name that wants to come through the quill is not Sith.

  She is Princess Velara.

  I knew her. That is the thing I carry that the Code does not have a word for. I knew her before she channeled the darkness. I watched her arrive on this island in white silk and red leather with a silver crown on her head and more raw capacity for light than anyone I had ever trained. I wrote her name on a fresh page on a morning that felt like the beginning of something good. I taught her that love amplified the Force. I demonstrated it with my own hands, twenty boulders rising to the ceiling of the library while I thought of Shebi and Lindy, and she watched and believed me, and I was right, and I was not entirely right, and the distance between those two things is Morvin's grave.

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  I do not write Velara in the official record. I write Sith. But I am writing it here, in the opening pages of the Hunting Book where the accounting is honest, so that whoever reads this after me understands that the thing we are hunting was once a student on this island who laughed quietly at something Warren said at dinner and healed a young Lanai's crushed leg and held a creature the size of a city above the ocean with nothing but open hands and the Force and the particular quality of attention she brought to everything she loved.

  She loved completely. That was always the truth of her. She loved completely in a universe that was not careful enough with what she gave.

  I am not excusing what happened. I am recording it accurately. The Code requires both.

  We are twenty-three.

  I write that number and I feel two things at once and I have decided that feeling two things at once is not weakness but honesty, which is the only quality a Scroll-Keeper cannot afford to be without.

  The first thing I feel is grief. We were twelve when we began, twelve seekers on a salt-washed island at the edge of everything, and we lost Morvin on the morning that the Great Tree fell and I have not stopped losing him since. He was the wisest of us. He was the still point around which everything else organized itself, that small green figure with his cane and his ancient eyes and his voice like low gravel that could stop a room without raising itself. He told us the Force was a hearth and we were the tenders of the flame and he was right about that too and he paid for being right with his life and I miss him every day with a specific and undiminishing weight that I have stopped expecting to become smaller.

  The second thing I feel is something quieter and more stubborn than grief. We are twenty-three. We started with twelve and we are now twenty-three and the number grew in the years after the worst thing that had ever happened to us, in the aftermath of the fire, in the long slow work of building again from ash. There is a Wookiee among us now who speaks of the great web connecting roots to stars and moves through the Force with the patient certainty of old growth timber. There are two children from the Mid-Rim who arrived frightened and are no longer frightened. There is a girl from the outer territories who can feel a lie in the Force the moment it is spoken and who reminds me, in the quality of her attention, of someone I do not write about in the official record.

  Twenty-three is not enough to hunt a Sith. I know this. I write it plainly because the record requires plainness and because writing around difficult truths is how you arrive, eventually, at catastrophe.

  But twenty-three is eleven more than we had on the morning I thought the Order might not survive the week. And the Light that moves through each of them is real and clear and nothing that happened on Ahch-To has diminished it.

  We started with twelve. We are twenty-three. The flame was not extinguished. It was, in the way that flames sometimes are when the wind hits them correctly, spread.

  Morvin would have written that down. He would have pressed it into the vellum in his careful, deliberate hand and underlined it once, which was the only emphasis he ever permitted himself, and he would have looked at it over the rims of his spectacles with that expression he wore when something confirmed what he had always believed.

  I underline it for him.

  The Sith is in the Outer Rim. We are twenty-three. The hunting begins.

  May the Force be with us.

  It is going to need to be.

  Thorne, Scroll-Keeper and Council-Elder. Third Year of the Order. Ahch-To.