Return To Serenity

[Sreeya]

News of the Coruscant temple bombing was everywhere, and it wasn't long after the initial explosion of the Will Of The Force. Andraste knew the Empire was doing exceedingly well and effectively destroying Jedi landmarks and temples. Although she understood this was glory for the Empire, none of that was on her mind this day. Andraste knew that she was risking quite a bit by making her way to Empress Teta, but it was a desire she couldn't fight against. As she realized the efficiency the Empire had shown when it came to destroying temples, the realization hit her hard. The first thing she thought of was her time of training under the Jedi, specifically under Jhon Cordatus. With a pang, she realized that he must have been killed at the Coruscant bombing as well.

Although Andraste had gone to Sith after training under the Jedi for four years when she was twelve, she had never told anyone about the location or details about the temple. It was information she would take to her grave. The Sith could find out the details and destroy the temple, but it would not be her doing. This place held a special place in her heart, and it always would. She knew it was too risky to try and enter the temple, nor did she have a desire to taint the inner sanctum with her taint of the Dark Side. The Sage Halls were a piece of paradise, and she wouldn't let even a hint of the Dark Side poison its interiors.

She could see the courtyard she had trained in ahead of her. That was when she had just been twelve years old and Jhon had found her in an orphanage. He had taken her there after she had revealed her love of flowers, her love of beauty. He had picked up on it, he had understood it and he took her to a place where she was surrounded by it. That had been many years ago and the courtyard was just as beautiful today as it was back then. The temple was intact, untouched, still standing. It was as she had remembered. It brought her peace, though she knew it was only a matter of time before her brethren found a way to destroy it. She wanted to visit the place she had once called home before it too shared the fate of the other Jedi temples.

Andraste took a few more steps and paused before the courtyard. She was clad in civilian clothing, suppressing her Force aura to ensure no one picked up on her presence. She did not have a saber or any weapons on her. She had intended to simply take in sight of the temple, then turn and leave as mysteriously as she had appeared. As Andraste recalled all her memories within the temple, all the smiles and laughter, all the positive attitude, all the warmth..it all hit her at once. Emotions began to well within her. She saw Jhon within her mind, and how he had guided her and remained by her side until she fled the Jedi. And now..now he was probably dead, from the work of those she called her brethren.

Visions of the news coverage of the Coruscant temple played repeatedly within her mind. She pictured the temple before her in flames, the people screaming, the agony, the pain and all of it exploding into a symphony of death. Andraste clutched her head, closing her eyes. She refused to see it, refused to see the courtyard in flames. Refused to see the fire catching onto the flowers, the plants, refused to see the smiles disappear, refused to see the pain. Andraste gasped as tears formed at her eyes. It had hit her all at once. Beauty would never exist. It was fleeting. It would be destroyed. It would be destroyed by her people. She couldn't escape it. She was a part of it.

Andraste dropped to her knees, inwardly cursing herself for ever being born. Her moment of weakness lowered her suppression of the Force, but only slightly. It would have to take an immensely powerful Jedi to be able to sense her at all. Andraste kept her face buried in her hands, her palms wet with her tears. The mental images refused to leave her, and they would haunt her dreams. Her home would be destroyed, just as her guide had been.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

The attack on Coruscant left the Jedi Council in disarray. Only the Grand Master and the Sage Master were left alive, left to hold the shattered remains of the Jedi leadership together with nothing but their will and whatever influence they held over the collective body of the New Jedi Order. No doubt confidence would be shaken; how could something like this have happened? Even the Sage Master had that question.

Jhon was preparing to leave the Sage Halls, temporarily, of course, but he needed to view the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. At least, all that remained of it. He kept his feelings in check for now; no doubt they would intensify once he saw the ruins. Its shattered foundation was all that physically remained of 26,000 years of a Jedi presence on Coruscant. It had been severely damaged before—the First Hutt War, the Great Territorial War, the Great Galactic War, the Clone Wars—but never had it fallen completely.

But with precious little time before he had to leave, another matter caught his attention. Through the Force, there was a blip, a look through the veil that someone had thrown over themselves. It was a veil of darkness, one entrenched in the evils of the dark side, of the Sith, but it was a darkness that still bore the light of a candle within it. It was a darkness that had not been that way forever, nor would it have to be that way for eternity. It was a darkness that could find illumination again.

It was a ghost. It was the Sage Master’s lost apprentice.

He never truly knew for sure what had happened to Andraste, but it didn’t take a Jedi’s intuition to put the pieces together. She had left him when she was still a child; Jhon’s teachings were never enough for her. She never really seemed to believe that she could have the life he promised she would lead, the life of a Jedi who followed the Way. She grew impatient with the wait; she wanted that life the moment she laid eyes on the Sage Halls. Yet life doesn’t work that way, a lesson she never understood.

One could only imagine what she had been through, and that was the interesting about ghosts. They were a metaphor, a conduit for the memories of the past and curiosities of the future to connect the world of one’s own to one that was unreachable, one such as the fortress that Imperial Space, once open to the Jedi, had become.

That candle within her was connected to Empress Teta. That much was clear to him. If Andraste was a Sith Lord, then she was protecting the Sage Halls. The Sith had already navigated the Deep Core to destroy The Will of the Force. Why not the Sage Halls? It had barely changed, so she could give the Emperor exactly what he needed to destroy it.

As he left the temple grounds and saw her, saw her knelt on the ground, he could feel her despair, her desperate agony. Her emotions were on the surface, driving her, consuming her; such was the way of the dark side. No matter her allegiance to the Sith, he could see that the destruction of the temple on Coruscant, that the thought of the future of the Sage Halls, was killing her inside.

It meant he was right, right about her protection of Empress Teta—of the Sage Master himself. Perhaps that was the imprint of their time together. The Jedi Council had called Andraste’s case hopeless, a lost cause, but Jhon didn’t believe in such things. Hopelessness was a fool’s inability to grasp untested possibilities. Even an act of kindness, of moral righteousness, without any clear hope for success by those who lacked a clear understanding of the Force, could become a significant act in the long rung.

For now Andraste sat there, next to the flowers, ones that she had so loved when she was a girl so very long ago, and they remained teaming with life. Their vitality didn’t disappear in the presence of her darkness. Instead they almost seemed to radiate further. That was her light, the spark that was still inside her. The love she held for flowers, for nature, for life itself, was what could bring her back.

“A flower cannot blossom without light,” he finally said. “In darkness they can only wilt.”

 

[Sreeya]

Andraste pulled her hands away from her face. Instead of tears, for a moment she thought she saw blood. The blood of the Jedi that had died in the blast. The blood of the Jedi that were on the mobile ship. The blood..their blood..the blood of the padawans she had once known. Their blood was in her hands. She was Sith. She was responsible. Andraste quickly rubbed her hands in the dirt, trying to furiously rub it away. It took her a while to realize she had simply imagined it. Her eyes were bloodshot from tears, her breathing labored from being distressed. For a moment, she hadn't even felt another presence.

The familiarity of the voice hit her like a ton of bricks. She was taken back to a time long ago, where she had often heard the voice. It had never talked down to her, never chastised her, but always showed her how to be better. She heard her own voice then, yelling back in response. She felt the frustration, the impatience, the...regret. It hit Andraste like a sharp bite with linger effects, like poison suddenly coursing through her veins. She slowly looked up to face the owner of the voice. For a moment she wondered if she were hallucinating again. He appeared as an angel, a god that exuded the light side of the Force so strongly that it almost repelled her. It pushed back against the twisted being she had become, the aura that clung to her like a stench. Andraste simply gazed at him, not moving from the ground. She looked fragile, torn and afraid, much like the first time he had set eyes upon her. It took her a while to find her voice, and it was weak.

"I only know darkness, master. I've always known darkness. It's why I could never taint the sage halls. It's why I could never bring my curse upon the others."

She hadn't even noticed that she had called him master. It was second nature, as if nothing had changed. Andraste slowly rose to her feet, looking down at all the dirt and mud caked in her hands.

"Why does it pain me so, master? Why does it twist me from the inside? Why does it break me? Why do I hear their screams? Why do I feel their suffering?"

Andraste lowered her gaze.

"I have failed as a Jedi. And now I am failing as a Sith. I am a perversion of the Force. A failed child of the Force."

 

[Brandon Rhea]

Master... Jhon heard that word every day. Most of the time he felt uncomfortable when he heard it uttered. He understood what it meant and what people conveyed when they said it. It was used as a sign of respect, not servitude, and yet he couldn’t help but feel that it was not the appropriate term to use.

Yet he was never more pleased to hear it now, as a sign of respect, as one that was uttered with barely even an afterthought. He never owned Andraste as a master would a slave, and he felt, hoped, that she knew that too. If she did, then the respect she held for him, the warmth that emanated from her when she realized he was in her presence, was all she needed to embrace. That affection was her way home.

The Sage Master knelt down beside her. She lowered her gaze but he looked straight on towards her, his head and eyes held high, as if to tell her that there was no reason to feel guilt or sadness. He could sense the conflict within her. She didn’t know what to be. Her passions fueled her darkness, but her heart bred love.

“You were never a failure,” Jhon’s warm voice said to sooth her fears. “Failure is the word used by those too quick to judge. Where they see failure, I see a lesson not yet fully understood. I am living proof of that, given my own past.”

He knew he didn’t have to recount his own story, his own demons. That was one of the first things he ever told her once she became his apprentice. He thought it might create a bridge between them, one that showed her that even the most conflicted of souls has a path into the light. Perhaps that why she was still here now, a Sith Lord talking with her old Jedi Master and a member of the High Council, instead of killing him.

“Yet you do understand it, at least on some level,” he surmised aloud. “You understand that light still penetrates through the darkness, even if you don’t accept it. That’s why you feel their pain and suffer as they suffered, even if you don’t know why. Your suffering is your understanding of the lessons I taught you, but your conflict is your difficulty in accepting them.”

He stopped, pausing for a moment, thinking back to something in their past, before saying, “Think back to our first time off world together. It was nothing particularly exciting, but it was revealing, at least I hope. We heard the screams of a young girl who had fallen into a well. Without hesitating, without thinking, you jumped into the well. Without rope, with nothing but your powers in the Force, you rescued the girl. Not because you wanted to gain favor with her parents or to gain the praise of her people. It wasn’t even because you didn’t like her screams. It was because she was suffering, and you couldn’t stand to see her suffer.

“This is your nature. This is human nature. On some level, we all have benevolence, we have righteousness, we have propriety and wisdom. It follows that no human, no sentient, can stand to see the suffering of others. Not even a Sith, whether that Sith be you or your Emperor. He may not jump into the well to save the girl, but on some level, however deep within him, he would feel her suffering. It’s why no one is beyond redemption, because the faintest spark can produce the greatest of lights.”

Jhon stopped again, collecting his thoughts. “This was what you sought to understand but have not yet fully comprehended. All of your confusion, all of your questions, and all of the good you feel in the midst of your darkness is all connected.”

The Sage Master leaned to his right, pulling a small, red flower from the ground. As he plucked it from the grass, the eastern winds blew it ever so softly, and it relished the breeze. The pedals opened further, revealing the life force inside of it, a life force that any Jedi could feel.

“And I’ve never doubted it’s all connected to this,” he said, handing her the flower. “This is perhaps the purest and most beautiful thing you’ve ever cherished in your life. Never let go of that cherishing, as it is your nature. Not literally, of course, but this is what you’ve cherished in your life because this flower is life. It is life in its purest and most beautiful form. It is a symbol of nature, a symbol of love. No matter how deep you bury it, you have the love of humanity in your heart, and this is how you show it.”

 

[Sreeya]

Andraste did not pull away as he knelt down next to her. Though she felt his aura clash against hers, oddly enough it was almost warm and welcoming, as it had been when she had first met him as a child. She silently wondered if she had ever exuded such an aura while under the tutelage of Jedi. Andraste listened as he recalled the incident where she had rescued a girl. Suddenly, the idea seemed so far away. Seemed like it was a different person, and not her. Before she could say anything, he had gone on to say that no Sith was above feeling the pain of others. As he mentioned the Emperor, Andraste stiffened slightly. She hoped he wouldn't catch it. The simple words threw her mind for a spin, as she had recently been conflicted with the idea of Exodeus being a monster, but with traces of humanity.

As he handed her the flower, she studied it for a long moment. Andraste's mind was a culmination of contradicting thoughts. She couldn't understand why Jhon was telling her all this. Why couldn't he see the monster she had become? Why didn't he hold a grudge against her? Why did he not blame her when her people had brought so much destruction against the Jedi? Andraste gazed into the flower, pondering the story he had recalled.

"I believe that anyone born of the Force is given a role in the galaxy. That role is to serve the galaxy in one way or the other."

She looked into his eyes then.

"The good cannot exist without the bad, master. The reason life is so precious is because it is so fleeting. Because the threat of having the life's candle snuff out is so easy. If life were everlasting, there would be nothing to appreciate, nothing to be thankful for. I saved that girl then because I was driven by an inherent desire to fulfill a role as a Force user. I was trained as a Jedi and as such I adopted the role of a savior instead of destroyer."

Andraste remained silent for a moment, thinking to her time with the Sith.

"When a child of the Force is born, their allegiance to the Force does not lean one way or the other. Human nature may be indicative of benevolence inherently, but that does not make the light side of the Force the objectively correct path to follow. Nor does that apply for the dark. Light can pierce through darkness, but darkness has to exist first. One cannot exist without the other. One has no purpose without the other. My confusion stems from the fact that I was born human, with human beliefs of preservation because preservation is part of our evolution."

Andraste took a few steps away, twirling the flower between her fingers. She looked ahead at the sage halls once again.

"If you remove the objective evolutionary laws that bind us and add to that the morals and destinies and the Force.. the Force that allows us to understand a transcendent plane of existence for us, one that allows us to recognize our role in the galaxy..that is where I recognize my bind to the Dark Side. That is where I find my place. I have found it as a child. You have seen it, master. So had the others. Do you recall how the other Jedi cringed and stepped back as you brought me to the temple? Do you recall how they feared me? Do you remember the hushed whispers and the doubts cast your way? There was even talk of how I was too dangerous to let live."

She turned to Jhon again.

"I am too dangerous to let live, master. You are not above recognizing that. I am bound to the Emperor. I was bound to him before you found me. I never told you the details of why I came to be at the orphanage. I am telling you this now. The Emperor found me when I was eight years old. He found me when he was the shadow hand of Emperor Judicar. He found me and sought me out because I gave off a scent..I gave off a scent he could track. Why could he track it? Because I was born to embrace the Dark Side of the Force before I even understood it myself. Why did a Jedi not find me? I had been alive for eight years, yet no Jedi had come to seek me out. Padawans are found so young..and raised at the temple. Yet I was found by the Shadow Hand himself, and he could not bring himself to destroy me. It was not benevolence, master."

Andraste sighed.

"It was because of the role I am born to play. It was because of my purpose, the purpose I serve for the Sith. Benevolence is primitive in the human condition, but the Force points to our destiny. Points to our fates. My fate is joined with the Sith...it is bound to the Emperor."

It sickened her to tell this to Jhon. She worried he would look down upon her. Although he was a Jedi, she valued his opinion above most she knew. However, she owed him the truth, and had owed it to him for a while. Andraste couldn't help but look at the flower. It was beautiful and pristine, untouched by evil. It would take only a moment to destroy it, to watch the petals cascade down into the ground. It would take only a second in comparison to the long time it took the flower to come to exist.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

“Allegiance to the Force isn’t about human nature,” he told her. “Allegiance is a choice, not an inherent truth. Human nature is true, it is absolute, but it’s the choices we make that can twist and contort it into a corrupted version of itself. Whether you embrace the light side or the dark side is up to you. Your nature and nurture help direct you towards your path, but your future is not set. You decide your own destiny.

“That, I believe, is something you may not grasp,” he told her. “You believe yourself to have a particular purpose in life. You call it your destiny, but you misunderstand the very concept of destiny and confuse it with fate. Fate is a false notion by false prophets, something that tells you what will absolutely happen, but no one can see into the future with absolutes. It was a lesson the old Jedi learned in their final days, and it was a lesson Emperor Palpatine learned as Darth Vader rewrote the future Palpatine had seen. Destiny is about possibilities, not absolutes, and whether you fulfill your destiny is up to the choices you make.”

Her words about the new Emperor were a difficult course to navigate. Jhon held nothing against her; judgment was not of the Way. He was concerned for her, concerned for the choices she would make, worried about her future and her safety as if she were his own daughter, but no thoughts of judgment crept through his mind. He sought to understand, not to condemn.

“It’s difficult to look back on the past and ask why things didn’t happen a different way,” Jhon said, “but it was not about destiny. Your Emperor found you through the choices he made, and you are with him through the choices you made. A Jedi may not have found you first, but I did find you. It wasn’t the Emperor that caused you to leave Empress Teta, but your own choices. This Emperor and your view of destiny are the center of all of your conflict.”

He motioned to the flower again. “Think about it. Your heart tells you to love life, yet you’re drawn to a man who has made it his purpose to extinguish it. That is the conflict within you. It is not a struggle of fate, but a conflict between your good nature, the nature that tells you who you really are, and who you think you’re becoming. But who you’re becoming is your choice alone.

“The Emperor made a choice too,” Jhon said. “He made a choice to spare your life. Perhaps it wasn’t benevolence in its truest meaning, but perhaps he could not bring himself to do it for another reason. Perhaps it was the good nature, however dim, within him as well, that one spark that exists within even the most corrupt of souls. Anything I say about that is speculation at best, but I assure you it was not fate.

“I think perhaps your greatest struggle is that you see the universe in its absolutes,” he said. “You see good and evil, and I see everything in between. You think of the strong and the weak, yet you leave little room for those between them. This much was clear to me the day we met, in the orphanage. Even then you thought you were a bad person, yet I saw a girl who was good, a girl who struggled to overcome the conflict within her. I never once thought you were a bad person, even now.”

He rested his hand on her shoulder, gently reassuring her, as he said, “Never think that you are too dangerous to be left alive. Never worry that I think poorly of you. You mean more to me than you know. No matter where you go or what you become, you will always be my Padawan.”

 

[Sreeya]

Andraste closed her eyes, tears streaming down her face as he continued to speak. His words only confused her more, and she felt a surge of anger course through her as he spoke of her choices. It only made her feel more guilty, as if it had all been her own doing to walk down the path of the Sith. How could he think that? How could he believe she would willingly serve one side of the Force? Andraste calmed down as he set his hand on her shoulder. She suddenly felt like a child again, his warmth exuding into her and making her feel as if she were in the presence of her kin..in the presence of family. It was an odd sensation, but a welcoming one she had felt within Jedi. However, Andraste rose to her feet, taking a few steps away from him.

"It was not my choice to leave, Master. Do you not recall?"

She cast him a sideways glance.

"I return to the Sith because of what exists within me. You offer reassuring words, but you seem to overlook what caused me to leave in the first place. It was something I worried about before going to train with Jedi, and it was confirmed while I was with them. It is the beast that exists within me. It is the chaos, the thirst for carnage. It devours the energies of those I slay and it is an insatiable hunger. I cannot control it. I left because I attacked other padawans. I left because I was one step away from mutilating them and leaving Teta in a blood bath and tainting the entire temple. I left.."

Andraste crushed the flower in her hand, biting her lip.

"I left because I am a monster, Master. Humanity exists within me. Benevolence exists. Love exists. But so does the darkness. So does my curse. It cannot be harnessed and it will destroy the Jedi. It is what binds me to my Emperor. It is why I am drawn to him, why I..."

'Why I love him..', the words echoed within her mind. She did not utter them, but the thought came too fast for her to silence it from Jhon. Andraste looked ahead at the temple, simply gazing upon it.

"I will not endanger those here at the temple. I returned to pay visit to what I once considered a home. I haven't told the Sith of its location and I will take that information to the grave with me. However...however I am beyond redemption. I myself am beyond it.. I am beyond it just as you are beyond falling to the shadows of darkness. You will prevail over it at every turn, just as I cannot obey the Light Side of the Force no matter how human I may be."

Andraste walked towards him then. She grasped his hand and dropped a single petal of the flower into his open palm. She then closed his fingers over it, gazing up at him, her eyes red from tears.

"I will always be your padawan, Master. But that padawan is one of many shattered parts of me."

 

[Brandon Rhea]

Memories of the day she left the Sage Halls years ago were as clear as they were the moment they took place. Her actions, her attack on other Padawans, were troubling, but not entirely unexpected—nor were they something that he would have used to condemn her. A Jedi’s life was one continuous failure to live up to expectations, and what was important was learning to overcome the struggles one faced and become wiser for it. That was what always troubled Andraste, but those demons were not her true nature.

Life and love were all around her...inside of her. She could not hide it, even if she tried. She may not have believed it, may not have even known it, but Jhon could sense it. He knew what she would soon have to confront.

“You will not find what you’re looking for with the Sith,” Jhon said. “You yearn for redemption, I can feel it. You say you’re beyond it, but you’re just trying to convince yourself it’s the case. You despise what you’ve become and so you curse yourself, but you are not cursed. We all have darkness inside of us, even me, but that doesn’t mean we have to surrender to it. It doesn’t mean you have to surrender to the Sith.

"You already have what it takes to turn away. Redemption comes from the release of oneself, not the exaltation of oneself. It comes through compassion, not greed. Love is the answer to the darkness. Those feelings are who you really are. Embrace them, not your fears.”

The Sage Master stood up as well, beginning to walk back towards the Sage Halls, towards the Order she was forsaking, but he was not yet finished. He stopped and turned back around, catching her gaze, smiling in reassurance that he still did not blame her or condemn her for anything she said.

“I will not stop you from leaving,” the Sage Master said as he leaned over and pulled another flower out of the ground, handing it to her. “Just remember to hold onto this and the Force will be with you. Always.”