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There are many stories of ancient Jedi, pilgrims and wanderers, faithful vagabonds and clever travelers, who lived day by day with only the Force to guide their path. To the modern Jedi Order, these figures were both venerable and pitiful. It was a harsher and more pious life than most modern jedi could imagine, and certainly far removed from the experience of any Coruscant initiate. Still, these tales of hardship and excitement and trusting in the Force are creche favorites, and every youngling knows dozens of them by heart.
Some nights, these tales are the only pricks of light she has left in the cold black starless galaxy.
Ganodi had not managed to escape the Temple, because she had not been there when the massacre came. She had not even been on-planet. She’d been on Rodia, accompanied only by distant cousins she had never before met, for her coming of age pilgrimage. She hadn’t even known what was happening until after it was over. All she’d known was that something was happening- something unspeakably horrible. Her heart beat hard enough to break her ribs, and her stomach clenched hard enough to reject her dinner, and she’d collapsed to the floor with a wail as foreign terror drowned her in an instant.
As soon as she was fit to walk again, Ganodi ran. Her family had offered to keep her safe, but they didn’t deserve that- these strangers she shared blood with. Not when it would get them all killed along with her. At least this way, she was only risking herself.
So Ganodi packed a bag, took a set of native headdresses that would help disguise the shape of her antennae and frills, and set off towards her own death. It was hard not to think of it this way, when every day the news plastered up pics of dozens of her family, her real family, who had been killed in the last twenty four hours.
But Ganodi knew she couldn’t think like that, or it was already over for her. It was like in the caves of Ilum. Her own despair was a chain around her ankle. Only trusting in the Force would set her free.
That’s what she told herself, dozens and hundreds of times, every night when she dared try to sleep.
I am one with the Force, and the Force will guide me.
I am one with the Force, and the Force will guide me.
But the Force was dark and in pain, and a vacuum of distant death when it was not cacophonous with suffering.
The Force will guide me, she thought grimly one night, after weeks of running that already felt like years, in the soul-silent aftermath of a jedi death within the same star system, or it will swallow me up and we will perish together.
Ganodi had never believed in much, and these days she was left with precious little at all, but she had always believed in the Force above all else. It was far greater than she, or anybody, or even the galaxy itself. It was far older, far stronger, far wiser, far more powerful. It contained the histories of everything that had ever been and every spirit that had ever lived, and it would continue onward into infinity, carrying Ganodi and everything she knew along with it. That was what she believed, had always believed, far more deeply and truly than any other initiate she knew. It was an evident truth she felt every time she awoke to the sparkling stars of her clanmates around her, or when she went to the gardens to practice her meditations and shivered with the passing sense of an old dead Master coming to visit.
That was what she always thought it was, anyway. She’d only admitted it once to her clan, and never again- not after Zatt had given her an hour long lecture on why such a thing was scientifically impossible, even for a Jedi, and Katooni had defended her from him with a look on her face that made it clear she didn’t actually believe Ganodi, but was only stepping up because she didn’t trust Ganodi to defend herself.
Ganodi knew it was true though- the Masters did walk among them in the Temple. She’d felt the faintest touches of their foreign spirits, on the rare occasion she’d managed a deep padawan-level meditation. Little smells and colors and thought-touches from lives that were not her own. Maybe they walked in other sacred places too, like Ilum. Maybe it was the passing ghost of some old Jedi, maybe even another initiate, who had helped her find her crystal in the caves. It would explain why Master Yoda trusted them to go into such a dangerous place by themselves, if there were centuries of old Jedi spirits watching over them in his stead.
Thoughts of Jedi ghosts kept Ganodi up at night these days, when it was not the more practical concerns that did so.
Some news channels reported that the Jedi Temple had been bombed from orbit, so that the new palace could be built there. Some channels reported that the Temple had been razed, and that the flames had burned for days, filling the upper levels of Coruscant with so much smoke that all the businesses had closed for weeks. Some said that the Temple had not even been touched. That there was still food left out on the tables growing mold, next to the rotting corpses of the Jedi who had been eating it.
What happened to Jedi ghosts, when there were no Jedi left?
What happened to the Force, when its children had all been slaughtered?
Ganodi doesn’t speak much at all these days, nor read, nor play, nor dance. The Order didn’t leave all training duties to the Masters, and so all initiates were trained well in practical things, such as surviving off the land, or finding temporary shelter and work in a foreign land, or laying low when in a dangerous situation. Ganodi does not want for food or water or a place to sleep- though the food is sparse, the water sour, and the old blankets spread across a pourstone basement floor. No, what haunts Ganodi, what her teachers and masters had completely failed to teach her, was what to do next. Or rather, they had taught her, and it had all been for naught.
When you have acquired a means of secure communication, here are the emergency lines you should contact, organized by region. They will be routed to the Temple, and a knight is always on the line, so help will reach you as soon as possible once you make contact.
Those are several of the ways a child or young adult can secure relatively safe passage off planet, by bartering or social manipulation. Luckily, most traders and smugglers will pass through larger thoroughfares of trade soon enough, and from there it shouldn’t be too difficult to secure transportation back to Coruscant.
Here is the link to the current set of available false idents, organized by race and physical profile. Use of one of these will immediately ping through the Republic Security Systems, straight to the temple, and a Jeid Master will be sent to check up on you as soon as possible.
Ganodi was awake most of the night, and asleep most of the day, and she wasn’t sure how to cope with the fact that she might not die at all. That perhaps she would never be caught- why would she? She was an initiate, barely a footnote in the Jedi Order, and she kept her head down. There was a high probability that she would never be caught. That she would survive to the end of her first year alone, and a very many number of years after that. That this might be her life forever.
She wept for hours, the night she realized that. She cried and cried, and her arms ached with the need to hold her clanmates close. Her sister and brothers. Last week another stocker at the shop had asked her if she had any family. In hindsight, Ganodi realized the older woman had been asking about any parents or guardians. But Ganodi at the time, taken aback and wrong footed, had said: I had a sister and four brothers.
The woman had not asked more, after that, and Ganodi had spent the rest of her long workday thinking about her clan.
She hoped somebody else had made it. But it was hard to imagine anybody surviving the slaughter at the Temple, let alone an initiate.
*
*
*
Long after Ganodi was genuinely worried about being discovered, she continued to relocate frequently. Every couple of months at the most, but sometimes every week, she would pack up her slowly increasing collection of worldly objects and walk away.
At first she thought of it as caution. Then, as anxiety. Then, as habit. But after five long years that had passed all too quickly, Ganodi had to recognize that she was simply making up reasons.
The truth was that some days, Ganodi awoke slightly differently than other days. As if the air pressure had shifted just slightly overnight. She would untangle herself from her blankets, pat herself down to check for all her most valuables, and look around at wherever she was with a new set of eyes. The community house, or the backroom, or the attic, or the alleyway- these places that she had slept in for days or weeks already- would suddenly seem odd and new, like an unfamiliar alien planet she had only just landed on. And at the center of her back, a tingling pressure like the touch of a gentle aging hand pushing her forward.
It’s time to go, the Force seemed to say to her, and Ganodi would listen.
Unsettled by this revelation, Ganodi meditated on it extensively. She performed moving meditations most often nowadays, often when traveling on foot, or when performing manual labor. This meant that she had hours every day to turn her mind outward and search for answers.
Was that you? She flung out far and wide, tearing down all but the most crucial of her mental defenses and baring herself naked to the Force. Was it always you?
There was never any answer to that question. Ganodi should have known there wouldn’t be one. The Force was not her teacher, not her master, not her family. It was larger than all of that, for all that it encompassed the remnants of them. It did not exist to serve her in whatever way most suited her. It existed, and she existed, and Ganodi sometimes thought that perhaps it was she that existed for the sole purpose of serving it.
Not what makes a Jedi, the Force is, Master Yoda had told her clan once, Hear it, feel it, use it, many can. Not just Jedi, hmm? Simply hear, a Jedi does not. Listen, a Jedi does. Do not stop at hearing it, younglings. The easy part, that is. To be a Jedi, listen you must.
So Ganodi stopped meditating on questions she already knew the answers to, and began meditating on those she did not.
Where do you need me? She asked instead, spending an entire week of ditch-digging on the search, focusing herself on Master Yoda’s advice- aiming not to hear the Force, but to listen. I am one with the Force, please guide me.
Finally, on the sixth morning, Ganodi woke from a troubled sleep to the faint memory of a terrifyingly vivid forest fire, and a discontented restlessness nipping at her heels and urging her Northward. And on the eighth morning after that, when Ganodi finally crested the northern hills to catch sight of the heavily populated valley, stricken with drought and surrounded on all sides by dense dry forest, her restless spirit settled, and for the first time in a long time she was filled instead with a gratifying sense of purpose.
(And that night, when it seemed as if the entire valley had gathered to celebrate the miracle of the forest fire that had been halted just in time by the surprise intervention of ancestral magic, Ganodi let a charming young farmer ply her with sweet drink and take her by the hand, and they danced all night, and they sang, and they held hands when they fell asleep in the grass together just before dawn. And mere hours later when she was awoken by what seemed to be a sudden but indiscernible change in the winds, she did not feel sad to leave, she felt blessed beyond words to have been brought there.)