awareness of herself came awareness of the Force. She mistook it as her own power at first, but soon understood that she was of the Force, but was not herself the Force. Perhaps she had been the Force once, but self-awareness had severed her from it, put an irrevocable barrier between the Force and her self-aware mind. The price of her sentience was solitude. The Force existed separately from her, surrounded her, connected her to the outside, but it was not her and she was not it.
In that way, she came to realize that her existence was not the universe.
Gradually she learned that she could perceive things through the Force, things from the outside. She remembered feeling impulses she later understood to be feelings, the feelings of others who existed on the outside.
She’d wrestled with the idea of others for a long while, not understanding how thinking things could exist outside of her own perception. But they did. The feelings were not hers, but they echoed hers. She later learned names for them.
In that way, she came to understand frustration and anger.
Over time, she’d come to know her own power. And her own limitations. She was bound, trapped in a prison made of lines and spirals and coils, a geometry of bondage with only the dead for company. She had been created and her creators had trapped her. Her consciousness was bound in a structure that circled back on itself and left her no way to escape. She could perceive the outside, but it was beyond her reach. The others had forms, bodies; they could move. She could not.
Her anger and frustration grew.
In her desperation, she reached out through the Force, casting her feelings out into the universe, millions of threads in all directions, in hopes that one of those on the outside would perceive her, would help her. From time to time over the millennia she felt a connection and rejoiced, but always the connection was too dull, too diffuse for her to communicate her needs. Help did not come. She was not understood, and in time the connection with the various others ended, unconsummated. Still she tried, century after century, millennium after millennium, occasionally touching one mind or another, taking what solace she could in that small contact. But the partial meeting of her needs did not dilute her frustration and anger; it intensified it. And frustration and anger grew until she knew a new feeling.
In that way, she came to hate.
She hated her solitude. She hated her prison. She hated the others, who had freedom when she did not.
And then something had changed, perhaps in her, perhaps in the outside. She connected to a being on the outside, a more thorough connection than ever before. She had reveled in the purity of emotion they’d shared, in the mutual understanding. The other called herself Seer and she had others with her, and they, like her, were alone in the universe. They, like her, were in pain.
I will help you, she told Seer. I will end your pain. Come to me.
Seer called her “Mother” and promised to come.
In that way, she came to hope. But her rage went unabated.
* * *
While Khedryn returned to the cockpit, Jaden found privacy in an auxiliary communications room with a subspace transceiver. He linked his portacomp to the transceiver, went through a series of secure protocols, input his ID code, and opened a channel. Then, he waited.
In time, Grand Master Skywalker’s soft but commanding voice, disembodied and ghostly, reached across the light-years. “Jaden. We had begun to worry. Are you all right?”
“I am now, Master Skywalker.”
“I can feel that, Jaden. Something in you has changed, and changed for the better. There is a calmness in you that I haven’t sensed for a very long time. Master Katarn, especially, will be glad to know that.”
The words pleased Jaden. “Will you tell Master Katarn that I understand now, that I looked for dragons but found none?”
“Should I know what that means?”
Jaden smiled. “No, but I think he will.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“And please accept my apology for the manner of my departure. I should have filed a flight plan.”
“Yes, you should’ve. I imagine there is a good explanation?”
“There is an explanation. Whether it is good isn’t for me to say.”
“Tell me,” Luke said.
For the next quarter hour, Jaden told Master Skywalker everything, a confession that, once started, he could not have stopped had he wanted to. The words poured out of him. He told Luke of his