Yahla Sota was meant to follow a handful of her older clan members into the role of Jedi. Deep down, her greatest wish is to prove worthy of her Jedi training... whatever that might mean now. She has the same stoic determination of many Togruta from her clan, but much more wanderlust. Smart, athletic, sometimes brash-- she has always been stubborn about what she believes in, or doesn’t.
sudden loss
The workshop aboard the republic ship the Crucible had, until now, held only safe, mild emotions for Yahla: Satisfaction with the simplicity of making her lightsaber hilt. Puzzlement tinged with frustration about which modifications would most befit her first real Jedi weapon. Admiration at how impressive and beautiful the others’ sabers turned out to be.
After the ambush, all of that seemed buried beneath half a universe of ice. Her still-brand-new lightsaber may as well be shattered or smashed amongst all the bent shelving, cracked casings, strewn emitters. The damage wreaked by that detonator and the horrid vacuum it had let in— the warped, burned-looking scar along the ship’s hull— Yahla could not look at any of it.
She sat as if pinned against the cold metal of the workshop table leg, barely feeling the floor under her or the arms of her friends reaching around her. It wasn’t numbness; her body was overwhelmed with the lingering pressure of near-suffocation and the dark Force-fingerprints of her master’s former padawan. Whoever it was, he had wanted to fight Master Dorovan. He had tried to crush the breath out of her as provocation. Would there be bruises on her throat? Would they make her look weak for the next confrontation?
Zumlith’s solid frame knelt close. Tentative voices asked if she was alright. Kynthe wanted to know what had happened. The cold within her seemed to muffle everything and cut off all meaning from the sounds. Yahla’s mind refused to take in anything more, instead racing out blindly in a hundred directions. Her memories, questions, hopes, and anger all spun and tightened together within a snare of denial.
No no no, no. No!
Not this.
Not the Crucible—not here. The Sophizo instead. Master Dorovan’s library. He’ll be back…
There are more lessons. There must be more lessons.
NO!
Why?
What serenity? Where?
Xorian. If only you’d seen his face.
WHY?!
Master Dorovan. He’s… He didn’t have to… he...
Not here.
What if—
No, no, no. But what hope could there be.
And what if you deserve this loss?
The dark, dark void of space. It had never seemed like such a vicious predator before.
Could the Force save him. Could it? Of course it could.
The Force could keep anyone. Anything.
This war…
Why?
“Take wisdom from it,” he’d said.
We didn’t have enough time.
Xorian. Black suit, black helmet. Black words. Darkness on darkness. What light would ever make up for it?
Master Kenobi sent us in this ship. His ship.
How could we not have known? How could he?
How?
But Master Dorovan… He might— He must go on.
Everything must.
Eventually, Yahla felt her breath settle. For a moment, as she clenched her eyes shut and bowed her head into the crook of Veka’s elbow, a shining memory blinked across all of the emptiness. Sunrise, long grasses, her hand tightly holding her grandmother’s.
She looked up, brought herself back to reality, and scrubbed the hem of her robes across her face. She couldn’t cry. She shouldn’t cry. She was not crying.
Yahla inhaled shakily, and when the last of her tears had been blinked away, she found her gaze fixed on the shape of a black lightsaber hilt wedged between a half-tipped cabinet case and a jumble of broken drawers. For several long moments she stared, either sensing or imagining the dark condensation of anger and pain clinging to it. She could keep that. Use it. And find him.
the republic fallen...
Repairs on the Sophizo after their desperate crash landing took many months. That and surviving were all they could think about. The jagged peace Mygeeto tries to maintain with imperial forces on the planet feels just as pointless as the fighting ever did.
Yahla keeps busy. Scavenging. Hunting. Doing whatever needs to be done
to keep everyone in their small pack alive and warm enough.
She spends hours tinkering, planning experimental upgrades for their droid, Clive, or for the speeder. Occasionally she'll feel a small sparks of a dream… will she ever see all those old temples she hoped to see? or have they all been destroyed by now?
Her lightsaber is in carefully-disassembled pieces under her bunk aboard the ship. She has unmade and remade it half a dozen times, reassembling it properly for a week or so every few years, taking time to practice until all the memories and energies of the Force become too heavy. Too painful.
She contributes to Veka’s efforts with The Web, delivering supplies and sharing information, keeping out of sight of the Empire, for the most part successfully.
Occasionally she feels pangs of longing for the past, wondering about her family or whether the Empire has taken over Shili by now. Would she recognize her native planet if she returned? Would anyone there recognize her?
Even less often, she wonders how long she’ll feel tied to this snowy place. It’s become a home— but Yahla can’t fully settle in it. She takes every opportunity to fly away— to scavenge spacejunk from orbit, scout locations for drop points or hideouts, to relay supplies or messages from here to there. Being up in the air, or the void, tuning out Clive’s chirps, she feels the most like herself.
But she can never stay away for long. As pointless as Veka’s work with all these refugees sometimes seems to her, it’s something that makes Yahla feel needed. Almost important.
When there aren’t any errands to run or supplies to organize, she’ll open that drawer under her bunk. The ivory and metal pieces of her lightsaber slide and jangle next to a few broken holochrons. At the very back of the drawer, wrapped in a thin rag, sits Xorian’s black lightsaber. She’s tried to disassemble it, too, but its ebony surfaces seems impenetrable.
mid-rescue beneath the Hutt's palace on Nar Shadaa...
It all happened so fast-- the unexpected blaster bolt to Axim’s ribs, Veka's shout of defiance-- and then moments later Yahla’s saber blade had burned straight through the so-called rebel leader’s armor, flesh, sternum. The fluid motion of it all belied the years her weapon had sat uselessly in a drawer. In her mind, Yahla was twelve years old again, this was only a holochamber training.
But the woman sinking to the ground here was no droid. Not a dummy separatist agitator. There was no time for wisdom and correction from Triv. or Zis. not even from her fellow learners. Instead, she pulled the saber away from the woman's body and knelt down to ask “Who is behind all this?”
“Why should I tell you anything?” Koha spat. “Jedi dog.”
Yahla held the blue-green blade--was it a darker, more shadowy green than it had been yesterday?-- right up against the dying woman’s jawline and held her fading gaze. Koha turned away slightly and with a sighing croak, said “A galaxy without the Jedi meddling in things would be a galaxy without so much suffering.”
The words burned themselves deeply into Yahla’s heart. Layers of her own past sufferings added kindling. The loneliness of her first weeks at the temple. The cold humiliations and bewilderment on Ilum. Her witness to fighting, restless armies, the blood of clones and Jedi and Muun alike. The rebel traitor was not wrong.
But Axim is still alive. Veka had already rushed on to rescue the boy they'd come for-- the force-sensitive young man Brakka had been keeping as an entertaining slave.
The suffering must be for something. Even if everything and everyone might be against us and trust is foolish, we can’t give up on this.
infiltrating a star destroyer...
As Kynthe disappeared into the corridor, Yahla took a centering breath and kicked at the dummy binders she’d been wearing. They slid with a slight jangling into the wall. If they timed this all well enough-- “You’ll all be alright,” she murmured to the young ones in cages behind her. “You won’t be left behind.”
Even so, she couldn’t help but sense waves of darkness and fear all around the detention block. The whole ship was bathed in a black, sinister purpose. After several moments with no updates over their coms-- nothing from Clive, nothing from Kynthe-- Yahla carefully, delicately looked around the doorway into the corridor, checking for any point of contact. There was a terminal nearby-- close enough investigate, provided that the break Commander Peketh had sent the guards out of the way for held out long enough. Things seemed quiet, so Yahla took the chance. She was able to slice into a tactical security channel. Maps, live-feed personnel markers... all of it clicked into place as she scrolled through. Things seemed quiet, but it was all wrong. They knew we were here. Dozens of armed troopers were marching in holding patterns-- one set orbiting Kynthe’s position, another penning in Yahla, just waiting to close in.
Yahla scrambled to pinpoint some means of escape-- “We have to get out of here…” she said under her breath. Something must have happened to Clive before he could rendezvous with their mole. "Please please..." Finally locating one docking bay of unattended ships, she jammed the terminal to download the coordinates and send them to the others. As it was sending, she opened her comm and quietly transmitted four seemingly-random words in Ithorese, along with the word “trap” in basic.
“What?” she heard Kynthe’s voice over the comm.
Suddenly her sense of the danger they were in deepened further; it felt like all the stars in the galaxy dimmed all at once. The door to the detention area slammed shut. Behind her, she heard the unmistakable sparking hiss of a lightsaber igniting.
“What happened to Clive? Is--” Kynthe persisted.
“Haven’t heard from him!” she spat, reaching deftly for her own saber.
The ensuing duel felt desperate. Yahla blocked the dark cyber-faced woman’s first attack, brought her own weapon down across Ren Kathis's shoulder. The woman hurled insults and taunts, gathering the Force to slam Yahla’s body into the wall. It hurt, but she didn’t fall. This fight wasn’t about her. If she could free those prisoners… No pain or victory mattered if they could simply somehow escape with those children, without losing them to blaster bolts or to the dark side.
Yahla leaped back across the length of the corridor, reengaging, pressuring the woman and her blood-red weapon to the side of the narrow space. While the blades of their sabers glared and sparked against each other, Yahla searched for a way to pin her adversary down just long enough-- to somehow keep her out of the way--
For a fraction of a second, Yahla felt a grey, cold pressure at the edges of her mind-- the presence of this adversary trying to infiltrate Yahla’s mind. The look on the woman’s face transformed from glib and taunting to frustrated, half-confused. The mental invasion failed. Something inside Yahla was impervious to the darkness in that moment.
Something, somehow, pulled open the doors to the detention area. A horde of spacerats poured into the corridor, crawling in a rush toward them both. The youth from Nar Shaddaa stepped out next, silent, almost as if he were still half asleep.
Yahla reached out to him, to the others, hoping to sense some shared thread of hope among all this chaos. What she saw as she stepped back to untangle her feet from the gathering rats was the sharpest, most vivid image the Force had ever shown her--
A much younger version of this dark woman, crouched amid incessant, blazing blasterfire. Her two guardians being shot down. The girl herself losing her eye, succumbing to darkest clouds of pain.
Beneath this image, Yahla felt all the echos of her own loss and knew that Ren Kathis was seeing those scenes just as vividly.
The wrenching emptiness of Master Dorivan leaving her, and all the anger simmering in the aftermath. The heavy, black, slicing numbness of General Faellii’s horrific death.
The shock of these shared memories staggered them both for a little. Yahla leaned back on the wall to regain her balance as the spacerats pile over each other, scrabbling and gnawing at the dark woman’s boots.
The boy grimaced slightly. “I don’t know what you want with me, but it’s probably better than what she wants with me.”
Yahla widened her eyes in answer. “We don’t want anything-- we just--”
But there wasn’t time for conversation, not even time to ask the kid’s name. The spacerats began to to overpower Ren Kathis and she dropped her saber for a moment, long enough for Yahla and the boy to run.
On their way to the loading bay, Yahla struck down at least a dozen stormtroopers. From the other side, Kynthe fought their way clear. Confusion cloaked Kynthe’s face on seeing only one freed prisoner.
“What about the others?”
Dozens more stormtroopers converged from corridors on all sides of the loading bay. Behind one group they could see the dark cloaks and glowing red saber of Ren Kathis.
Yahla ran past Kynthe and Clive to the bridge, focused on readying the ship for escape. It didn’t matter where they headed. Anywhere but here. While everything clicked and whirred into place, she tried to make a place for the boy to sit, introduce him to Kynthe and Clive--
Kynthe paid no attention. They towered over the pilot’s seat and shouted at her, “Its better to die for what’s right than--”
Yahla kept her attention on the ship, its controls, the launch area, and sternly replied: “Not always.”
to perhaps be continued...
