They didn't camp on the ridge.
Tein didn't like repeating shapes.
A place that held you once could hold you again—by memory, by pattern, by the simple truth that predators learned routes the way water learned stone.
So they moved until the wind changed.
Until the air stopped tasting like the valley's rust and began to taste like nothing at all—thin, dry, honest. The ground underfoot became harsher the higher they climbed: fractured plates of basalt that clicked faintly when weight crossed them, shallow seams filled with pale grit that slid like ash if you stepped wrong.
El-Je learned to step wrong quietly.
That was the difference.
By the time the light shifted toward something brighter—still muted by cloud, but less bruised—they reached a shelf of stone tucked beneath an outcropping that jutted like a broken jaw. The overhang cut the wind. The rock above them wept a slow, mineral drip that left dark streaks down the face like old tears.
Tein stopped there.
Not because it was comfortable.
Because it was hard to see from a distance, and inconvenient to approach. Because silence here was neutral, not curated.
He crouched, palm to the stone, and let his awareness widen just enough to taste the space.
No voices.
No engines.
No deliberate emptiness.
Only weather, and the thin, far-off movement of things that lived without wanting to be noticed.
He nodded once.
El-Je exhaled, relief trying not to be relief.
Tein made it practical.
He unpacked without ceremony—two thermal wraps, a compact heat unit, a strip of ration protein that smelled faintly of spice and fuel. He set the heat unit into a shallow depression in the rock where the wind couldn't steal it immediately, then pressed a piece of mineral slate over the top to diffuse the glow.
The result wasn't warmth.
It was less cold.
El-Je sat with his back to the stone and watched Tein's hands the way he watched terrain: for tells, for meaning, for the quiet rules that made survival possible.
"You picked this place because it's ugly," El-Je said.
Tein didn't look up.
"I picked it because it's quiet."
El-Je's mouth tightened, then he tried again.
"Quiet like safe."
Tein finally glanced at him.
"No," he said. "Quiet like it hasn't decided what it wants from you yet."
El-Je swallowed and looked out at the open shelf of stone beyond the overhang.
The sky was a flat, pale sheet. Clouds layered so thick they turned light into a smear. Nothing in the distance moved except the wind worrying at low scrub that grew in stubborn clumps between fractures.
It looked empty.
Now El-Je knew better than to trust that.
Tein ate first—not because he was hungrier, but because it was a test El-Je didn't realize he had already passed. Tein's eyes stayed open as he chewed. His attention never collapsed into the act.
El-Je copied him.
After a few minutes, Tein pulled a small object from a pocket in his belt and set it between them on the rock.
It wasn't a lightsaber.
It was smaller than El-Je's training hilt, heavier than it looked—an irregular cylinder wrapped in dull insulating mesh, one end capped in scorched metal.
El-Je stared at it.
"What is that?"
"A lesson," Tein said.
El-Je didn't move his hands. He didn't reach. He waited, because he'd learned waiting was sometimes the only way to survive something you didn't yet understand.
Tein rolled the object in his fingers.
"A kyber stabilizer core," he said. "Not a crystal. Not a weapon. Just the part that keeps a failure from becoming an explosion."
El-Je blinked.
"You carry that?"
"I carry what I can't replace easily."
El-Je looked at the stabilizer again, trying to understand why Tein was showing him this now, on a cold shelf of rock on a nameless moon with a dead valley behind them.
Then Tein said,
"You asked what we are."
El-Je's throat tightened.
"Yes."
Tein set the stabilizer down carefully—like it mattered.
"We are hidden," Tein said. "And if we're hidden, we don't get resupplied like the Jedi do. We don't walk into a Temple and ask for parts. We don't announce ourselves to people who would remember our faces."
El-Je felt the familiar pressure in those words: don't meet them. don't be seen.
Tein didn't soften.
"If you want to learn," he said, "you learn how to build a life that doesn't require permission."
El-Je stared at him.
"Is this about… a lightsaber?"
Tein held his gaze.
"It will be."
The words landed heavier than El-Je expected.
A lightsaber was not just a weapon in the stories.
It was belonging.
Proof.
Something in him lifted—hope, sharp and immediate—
—and he tried to crush it before it could show on his face.
Tein noticed. He let it exist.
"Not today," Tein said. "Today is about the cost."
El-Je frowned.
"Cost of what?"
Tein gestured outward, toward the blank stone and blank sky.
"Visibility," he said. "A lightsaber is light. Light is attention. Attention becomes questions. Questions become names."
El-Je's fingers curled into his cloak.
"So I just… never get one?"
Tein didn't hesitate.
"You will."
El-Je's breath caught.
Tein didn't let the moment turn into comfort.
"You will," he repeated, "when you can carry it without needing it to tell you who you are."
El-Je looked again at the stabilizer, as if it might answer for him.
Then, quietly,
"Do you have to steal it?"
Tein's expression didn't change, but the space between them did.
"No," he said. "Sometimes you buy. Sometimes you trade. Sometimes you salvage."
A beat.
"Sometimes you take."
El-Je swallowed.
"From who?"
Tein did not answer.
Not yet.
Instead, he stood.
"Up."
El-Je rose.
Tein pointed toward a narrow fissure along the stone shelf—a crack widening into a shallow cut you could follow if you knew what to look for.
"There's a drop point two ridges east," Tein said. "We reach it before the cloud cover lifts."
El-Je blinked.
"Drop point for what?"
"Parts."
His heart leapt.
Tein's gaze sharpened.
"Control it."
El-Je forced his breathing to slow.
They moved.
The fissure Tein chose wasn't a path. It was a scar—narrow enough that shoulders brushed stone, deep enough that wind pooled inside like cold water. The walls sweated mineral damp. Pale lichen clung in bone-colored scraps.
El-Je didn't touch it.
He watched his footing.
He watched Tein's back.
He watched the thin strip of sky.
Half an hour in, Tein stopped and crouched.
El-Je halted cleanly behind him.
Approval flickered in Tein's eyes. Not praise. Just recognition.
Tein pressed two fingers to the stone.
Closed his eyes.
El-Je waited.
Then a faint tremor reached him through the rock:
A pulse.
Regular.
Artificial.
"Ship?" El-Je whispered.
Tein nodded.
"Low-altitude. Scanning."
Heat crawled up El-Je's spine.
Jedi. Republic. Questions. Names.
Fear spiked—
small,
sharp,
immediately buried.
Tein felt it.
For a fraction of a moment, far away and sealed,
something ancient noticed.
Not awakening.
Remembering.
Then the sensation passed.
Tein guided them deeper into the fissure until even sound felt crowded. They pressed to the wall. The air smelled like wet metal.
Above, a shadow crossed the narrow sky.
El-Je went still.
Tein's hand hovered near his shoulder.
Not touching.
Anchoring.
The ship passed.
Silence returned.
They climbed out of the fissure as the light thinned into bone-pale gray. Ahead, the ridge folded around a shallow depression in the basalt. A natural bowl.
At its center sat a small matte crate half-buried in stone.
Tein approached it like it might bite.
He scanned the bowl without seeming to.
Then he knelt and opened it.
Inside lay parts wrapped in oilcloth. Scorched conduit. Calibration rings. Dull emitter shrouds. Fasteners that only mattered when they failed.
And one thing more.
Tein lifted it.
A kyber housing.
Empty.
El-Je's breath caught.
"That's—"
"A shell," Tein said. "A promise."
El-Je stared like it proved his life was becoming something real.
Tein watched carefully.
Not to crush the hope.
To keep it from becoming dependence.
"We're not building a symbol," Tein said. "We're building a tool you can carry without letting it carry you."
El-Je swallowed.
"Where do we get the crystal?"
Tein's voice stayed level.
"Not from the Temple."
El-Je's jaw tightened.
"So from where?"
Tein let the question sit.
"From a place that doesn't care who you are," he said. "Only what you do with what you find."
"Is it dangerous?"
"Yes."
Tein didn't need to explain why that mattered.
They lifted the crate together.
El-Je slipped once. Corrected. Said nothing.
Tein shifted the weight without comment.
They crossed back toward the ship.
Behind them, the valley swallowed memory.
Above them, the sky stayed blank.
And somewhere, sealed away and patient,
that ancient presence remembered the small, quiet fear it had been given—
and waited.
⎯⎯
The lesson did not begin with the Force.
That unsettled El-Je more than he expected.
They were back aboard the ship, landed now on a barren moon whose surface cracked like old bone. No settlements. No ruins. Just wind and stone.
Tein had chosen it deliberately.
The ramp stayed down. Interior lights dim.
"Sit," Tein said.
El-Je obeyed, cross-legged on the stone.
"No blade."
El-Je unclipped the training hilt and set it aside—within reach, but not close.
That mattered.
"Close your eyes."
He did.
Sound widened. Wind breathed across the ground in waves. The ship hummed faintly, restrained and waiting.
And beneath it all—
The Force.
Not loud.
Not dramatic.
Just there.
"Tell me what you feel."
"Everything," El-Je said.
"That isn't an answer."
He tried again.
"It's heavy. Like the air is thicker. And I keep wanting to grab it."
Tein's reply was quiet.
"That instinct is the danger."
El-Je opened his eyes.
"I thought the Force was something you use."
Tein crouched in front of him.
"It is. But not the way you think."
He handed El-Je a small, flat stone.
"Set it down," he said. "Without moving your hand."
El-Je reached inward.
Pressure spiked. Pain flickered behind his eyes. The stone jerked—
Then dropped back into Tein's palm.
El-Je gasped.
"I almost had it."
"You almost hurt yourself," Tein said.
Silence hung between them.
Then Tein said:
"I was not reaching on Dathomir."
El-Je frowned.
"Then what were you doing?"
"Denying," Tein said simply.
He stepped back.
"Feel the Force. Do nothing with it."
El-Je hesitated.
Then obeyed.
The urgency eased.
The Force did not move.
It aligned.
His breath steadied without effort.
"That space," Tein said softly, "is where most Jedi stop listening."
"Why?" El-Je asked.
"Because it doesn't feel powerful. And because nothing in the galaxy rewards restraint."
El-Je looked at the stone.
It hadn't moved.
Somehow, that mattered.
"Tomorrow," Tein said, "you try again."
"And after that?"
"After that," Tein said, "we find out what you can do without the Force at all."
A colder fear flickered in El-Je's stomach.
Tein saw it.
He didn't comment.
They returned to the ship as the light shifted toward evening, shadows stretching long across the stone.
Behind them, the small stone stayed where it had always been.
Unmoved.
Unclaimed.
And far beyond El-Je's awareness,
something ancient felt the absence of fear
and waited for the next moment
it would not be absent.