Arc II: Knighthood
Year: 26 BBY
The air on this moon tasted like rust and rain.
Not the clean rain of Coruscant—filtered, managed, polite—but the kind that fell crooked through broken clouds and hit the ground already carrying the memory of metal. The terrain beneath Tein's boots was a shelving ridge of dark basalt and lichen, sloping down into a shallow valley where dead trees leaned like ribs and the wind ran between them with a soft, constant rasp.
Far off, a river cut through the stone in a thin line of reflected gray. It wasn't loud from here. It only flashed sometimes, like an eye opening and closing.
Tein stopped at the edge of the ridge and let the world settle into him.
He didn't scan like a soldier.
He listened like a Shadow.
The wind had layers—one high and clean, one low and wet. Birds moved somewhere in the dead canopy, but their calls were wrong: too spaced, too measured. Either trained, or hungry enough to conserve sound. The Force around the valley was not dark the way Dathomir had been—dense, intentional, watching.
This was emptier.
And emptiness was its own kind of trap.
Behind him, boots scraped rock.
A hesitation.
Not fear, exactly. Not yet.
Tein didn't turn. He didn't need to.
"El-Je," he said quietly.
The boy froze.
The pause was small, but Tein felt it: a flinch not in muscle, but in intention—an unconscious attempt to vanish by becoming still. It was a survival reflex, raw and sincere.
And it wasn't useless.
It just wasn't enough.
"Again," Tein said.
El-Je exhaled through his nose—short, controlled, trying to make obedience look like calm—and stepped forward until he stood two paces behind Tein on the ridge. He was taller now. Not fully grown, but no longer the fragile shape Tein had pulled out of chains.
Thirteen.
Lean. Wired. Eyes too watchful for a child who should still be surprised by the galaxy.
A cloak hung from his shoulders, dark and plain. Not a Padawan braid. Not Jedi robes. Nothing that would announce him to a passerby. Nothing that would make another Jedi's gaze linger.
Tein kept it that way.
Not because he wanted to deny the boy.
Because he wanted him alive.
"Tell me what you hear," Tein said.
El-Je closed his eyes, then opened them again as if he didn't trust the world not to change while he wasn't watching.
"The river," El-Je said. "Far."
"Yes."
"And… wings." He tilted his head slightly. "Not birds. Something heavier."
"Yes."
El-Je swallowed, then forced himself to keep going. "And something else."
Tein waited.
El-Je's gaze drifted to the valley, to the dead trees, to the fog that hung low and refused to lift even when the wind pressed through it.
"It feels…" He frowned, irritated at his own lack of language. "Like a room someone left."
Tein let that sit.
Then he nodded once.
"Good," he said. "Now tell me what you don't hear."
El-Je blinked. The question didn't fit the shape of the lessons he expected. It never did.
He tried anyway.
"I don't hear… people."
Tein's eyes stayed on the valley.
"Closer," he said.
El-Je's jaw tightened. He looked again—really looked—letting his gaze move across the ridgeline, the low ground, the places where something could hide.
"I don't hear…" He hesitated, then said it like a confession. "I don't hear fear."
Tein turned his head just enough to look at him.
El-Je held his gaze. Unflinching. But Tein could see the strain beneath it: the boy reaching for the right answer the way a drowning person reached for air.
Tein said, "That's the point."
El-Je frowned. "No fear means it's safe."
Tein's voice didn't rise. It didn't sharpen.
It simply landed.
"No fear means it's prepared."
The wind moved again. A dead branch snapped somewhere below, not from pressure, but from age—an old sound, tired and final.
El-Je's eyes flicked down into the valley.
Then he looked back at Tein, frustration building behind his calm.
"How am I supposed to know the difference?" he asked.
Tein held his gaze a moment longer than comfort.
Then he said, "By not needing the Force to tell you everything."
El-Je's mouth tightened. The boy hated that answer. Not because it was cruel.
Because it was true.
Tein stepped forward, boots crunching lichen, and started down the ridge.
"Come," he said.
El-Je followed.
Not because he trusted the valley.
Because he trusted Tein.
That was its own danger.
They descended in silence, using stone shelves and narrow cuts to stay off the open ground. Tein moved like he belonged to the terrain—weight balanced, steps measured, breath never loud enough to be a clue. He didn't look like someone sneaking.
He looked like someone who understood that the world did not owe him permission to exist.
El-Je copied him.
Close enough that Tein could see the mimicry: the boy tightening his shoulders to match Tein's looseness, shortening his steps in an attempt at quiet that only made the gravel shift more.
Tein let him try.
There were lessons you couldn't speak into someone.
They had to bruise into place.
They reached the valley floor.
The fog here was colder. It clung to skin and fabric like it wanted to be worn. It smelled faintly of wet iron and old leaves. Tein felt El-Je's breath change—small and involuntary, the body recognizing that the air was wrong.
Tein didn't comment.
He watched how the boy reacted instead.
El-Je's eyes moved constantly. He tried to keep his head still, but his attention darted in sharp lines: tree to fog to rock to Tein's back. He was trying to map the space fast enough to control it.
Control was comfort.
Tein knew that instinct well.
He also knew where it led.
They walked deeper.
The dead trees thickened, their trunks slick with moss that looked too pale, too clean. Fungal growth bulged from splits in bark like flesh that had forgotten how to stop swelling. The river's flash was gone now, blocked by terrain.
The valley became a corridor.
Tein paused beside a stone outcrop and crouched.
He ran two fingers over the rock.
Wet. Cold. A faint tremor of vibration, like something distant moved under the ground and the stone carried the rumor of it.
El-Je crouched beside him, copying.
"What is it?" El-Je whispered.
Tein didn't answer immediately. He didn't want El-Je learning that questions always earned relief.
He pointed instead—two fingers, precise—toward the base of a dead tree three meters ahead.
El-Je followed the line of Tein's gesture.
At first, he saw nothing.
Then he saw it.
A thin filament stretched near ground level, almost invisible in the fog—a line so fine it could have been spider silk.
Except it was too straight.
Too deliberate.
El-Je's eyes widened a fraction.
"A trap," he whispered.
Tein nodded.
"And what does it want?" Tein asked.
El-Je stared at the filament, then at the ground around it, then at the dead tree.
"To… catch someone?" he said.
Tein waited.
El-Je swallowed. He forced himself to look beyond the obvious.
"It wants to make noise," El-Je corrected. "So something can find you."
Tein's expression didn't change. But something in him eased.
"That's better," he said.
El-Je looked at him. "Is this what you do? Always? Just… traps and shadows and listening?"
Tein's gaze stayed on the valley.
"Yes," he said. "When I can."
El-Je's frustration flickered again, quick and sharp. "What about when you can't?"
Tein stood slowly.
His injuries from Dathomir had long since healed into scars—some visible, some buried beneath muscle. But the memory of green magick on his skin still lived somewhere deep, ready to tighten his spine when the air tasted wrong.
"When I can't," Tein said, "I survive."
He stepped around the filament without touching it, moving as if the fog itself would betray him if he pushed it too hard.
El-Je followed—careful, slower now.
They made it past the trap.
And then the valley shifted.
Not physically.
In attention.
Tein felt it first: the Force's subtle rearrangement, not dark, not violent—just the way a room changed when someone opened their eyes inside it.
El-Je stopped behind him.
"What—" he began.
Tein lifted one hand.
Silence.
A shape moved in the fog ahead. Not a person. Not an animal.
Something long.
Something low.
It slid between trees without sound.
El-Je's breath hitched.
Not loud enough to echo.
Loud enough for the Force to taste.
Tein felt it—felt the smallest spike of the boy's fear flare and then clamp down as El-Je tried to swallow it.
Somewhere, far behind Tein's awareness, in a sealed place he did not allow himself to look at, something ancient stirred at the edge of that fear.
Not speech.
Not presence.
Only hunger, recognizing a familiar flavor.
Tein did not react.
He did not turn inward.
He did not feed it with his attention.
He kept his focus on the fog.
The shape came closer.
It resolved into a creature with too many joints, its body plated in dark, wet armor like river stone. Its head was narrow, its mouth a slit until it opened and showed teeth like broken glass.
It smelled them.
Not by scent alone.
By heat. By breath. By the weight of living bodies in a dead place.
El-Je's hand drifted toward his belt—toward the training hilt Tein allowed him to carry. Not a true lightsaber. Not yet. A weighted cylinder, balanced like a promise but incapable of betraying them with light.
Tein saw the movement.
He did not stop it.
He said, very quietly, "Do not ignite anything."
El-Je nodded once, fast.
The creature shifted its weight.
Preparing to lunge.
Tein moved first.
Not with speed meant to impress.
With speed meant to end options.
He stepped into the creature's line and drove his palm forward.
The Force answered—not as spectacle, not as lightning—but as a simple, brutal command.
Stop.
The creature's body slammed against an invisible barrier and halted mid-motion, joints locked in sudden refusal. Its claws scraped stone, trying to find purchase in the denial Tein had wrapped around it.
El-Je stared.
Tein did not look back.
He kept his hand extended, fingers slightly curled as if holding an unseen throat.
Then he said, without raising his voice, "Now. Tell me what you see."
El-Je blinked, shaken. "It's… stuck."
"Yes."
El-Je forced himself to breathe.
He looked closer. He noticed the creature's legs—how they were placed. The angle of its spine. The way its head tilted as it tried to understand why the world had become wrong.
"It's not… strong," El-Je said slowly. "It's desperate."
Tein held the creature in place and let El-Je learn.
"Desperate things bite," Tein said.
El-Je swallowed.
"What do I do?"
Tein's answer was immediate.
"Decide," he said.
El-Je's eyes flicked to Tein. "Decide what?"
Tein's voice stayed even, but it carried weight.
"Whether you want to be the kind of person who kills what frightens you," he said, "or the kind of person who ends danger without becoming it."
El-Je looked back at the creature.
Its mouth opened wider now, saliva threading between teeth.
It wasn't evil.
It was hungry.
And hunger could still kill.
El-Je's fingers tightened on the training hilt.
Then he loosened them.
He stepped forward—one cautious step, then another—until he was close enough to see the creature's eyes: dull, animal, confused by resistance it could not understand.
El-Je raised the hilt like a club.
Then he stopped.
He shifted instead—picked up a stone with his free hand, heavy and sharp-edged, and tossed it into the fog to the left.
The stone hit another rock with a loud crack.
The creature's head snapped toward the sound instinctively.
Tein felt the creature's focus break for a fraction.
El-Je moved in that gap.
He drove the hilt hard into the creature's jaw hinge—not to crush the skull, not to split bone, but to dislocate. The creature's mouth snapped wrong, teeth clacking uselessly.
It shrieked—wet, ugly, frightened.
El-Je stepped back immediately, keeping distance.
Tein released the Force hold.
The creature staggered, tried to lunge again, failed, and then turned—scrabbling into the fog, fleeing on legs that moved too many directions at once.
It vanished.
The valley fell quiet again.
El-Je stood frozen, breathing hard.
Tein lowered his hand slowly.
He watched El-Je the way he watched the terrain—looking for the aftershock, the place where the moment would settle into the boy's bones.
El-Je looked down at the training hilt.
Then up at Tein.
"I didn't kill it," El-Je said.
Tein nodded.
"And you didn't let it kill you," Tein replied.
El-Je's breath shook once. He tried to hide it. Failed.
Tein didn't comment.
They started moving again, deeper into the valley, toward a narrow rise where the fog thinned and the rock climbed back toward open air.
El-Je walked closer to Tein now—not clinging, not begging for protection, but instinctively seeking the shape of certainty beside him.
After a long silence, El-Je said quietly, "Is this what the Jedi do?"
Tein's steps didn't slow.
"No," he said.
El-Je's brow furrowed. "Then what are we?"
Tein let the question exist for a few breaths.
Then he answered in the only way he could without lying.
"We are not what they would understand," he said.
El-Je's throat tightened. "Why can't I meet them?"
Tein felt the resentment beneath the words—small, early, not yet sharpened into something that could cut, but present.
A crack forming exactly where it was destined to.
"Because if they see you," Tein said, "they will decide what you are before you ever get the chance."
El-Je's eyes flashed. "And you won't?"
Tein stopped walking.
The fog pressed around them. The dead trees watched with their empty branches.
Tein turned to face him fully.
He did not soften his voice to make it easier.
He made it honest.
"I fight that impulse every day," Tein said. "Because I know what it feels like to have your life named by other people."
El-Je swallowed.
Tein held his gaze.
"I am not the Council," Tein continued. "I am not the Republic. And I am not the Nightsisters."
A pause.
"But I am not harmless either."
El-Je's lips parted, then closed again. He didn't know what to do with that truth.
Tein stepped closer—just one step. Not to intimidate.
To make the choice real.
"If you stay with me," Tein said, "you learn how to survive. You learn how to see traps before they close. You learn how to use what you are without letting it use you."
El-Je's hands tightened at his sides.
"And if I don't?" he asked.
Tein didn't hesitate.
"Then I take you somewhere safe," he said. "And I leave."
El-Je stared at him.
Not because the choice was difficult.
Because it was new.
No one had ever offered him the freedom to say no and meant it.
The fog shifted again. The valley breathed.
El-Je looked past Tein for a moment—toward the dead trees, the traps, the creature that had almost killed him, the way the world could turn hungry without warning.
Then he looked back at Tein.
His voice was quiet.
But it held.
"Teach me," El-Je said.
Tein watched him for a beat longer, as if measuring whether the boy understood what he'd just agreed to.
Then he nodded once.
"Then the first lesson," Tein said, "is that you will not ask for permission to survive."
El-Je blinked.
Tein started walking again, leading them up toward the thinning fog.
"And the second?" El-Je asked, keeping pace.
Tein's eyes stayed forward.
"The second," Tein said, "is that fear is not your enemy."
A pause.
"It's your signal."
El-Je's brow furrowed. "Signal for what?"
Tein didn't look back.
"For truth," he said.
They climbed out of the valley.
Above them, the sky opened into pale gray, and the wind felt cleaner—less like a mouth, more like weather.
Behind them, the fog swallowed their tracks.
And somewhere far away—sealed, unseen, and quietly traveling with them through the galaxy—an ancient hunger settled back into stillness, having tasted only the smallest thread of fear.
Not enough to reveal itself.
Just enough to remember it was fed.