Arc III: The Hunt
Deyross Haven — 21 BBY
Earis Kaul Flashback
Deyross Haven looked different under occupation.
By day, the town pretended it was still itself: nets strung across posts, boats drifting along canals, market boards chalked with prices that no one believed. People worked because work kept the hands busy and the mind from spiraling. Children were kept close. Doors were kept half-shut. Conversations ended the moment a shadow moved the wrong way.
By night, the pretense fell apart.
Searchlights swept the water in slow, indifferent arcs. Patrol craft hummed along the canals like insects drawn to blood. Metal footsteps sounded on wooden planks where feet used to be. Once, Deyross Haven had smelled of salt and old boards and fish oil warmed by sun.
Now it smelled of scorched wiring and cold power cells.
Earis Kaul watched it from a ridge of dark stone a mile outside town, the canal network spread beneath him like veins. Mist clung low over the water, turning distance into a suggestion. Deyross's lights burned in blunt clusters, interrupted by the harsher, colder glow of Separatist lamps at the docks — equipment that did not belong, and did not care whether it did.
The Council had not sent them to liberate the town.
Not yet.
They had sent them to observe.
To determine the size and composition of a Separatist detachment that had taken the settlement quietly, without a full assault. A "small occupation force," the briefing had said — a wedge driven into the planet's coastal infrastructure, likely to secure supply routes.
Monitor. Catalog. Return.
Do not engage unless necessary.
Earis had listened. He had nodded. He had accepted the words the way a Knight accepted weather: acknowledged, inevitable, not worth arguing with.
Then he had arrived and seen the town.
And the words had become ash in his mouth.
Behind him, under camouflage netting and sensor-dampening cloth, six clone troopers waited in a tight, disciplined cluster. They sat with weapons near, armor dulled with mud to break reflectivity. They didn't speak much unless Earis spoke first, and even then their voices stayed low. They were here because the Council had deemed the mission "low-risk," and low-risk missions were where clones were sent to learn how Jedi moved.
Earis didn't need a lesson.
He needed the town freed.
He could feel the Separatists' presence like grit against his teeth — not in the Force, because droids did not register there the way living beings did, but in the pattern of life. In how citizens avoided certain bridges. In how fishermen refused to cast nets near the western canal where patrol craft lingered. In the way Deyross Haven had stopped gathering at night.
Stopped laughing.
Stopped believing the morning was guaranteed.
The first day, Earis had walked the outer ring with the clones beside him, disguised, passing as travelers. The town had been cautious but not hostile — Deyross Haven was too used to strange faces drifting through to waste energy on suspicion unless given reason. Earis had listened. He had asked about "fish runs" and "weather shifts" and "dock repairs."
And people had answered around the truth like water around stone.
A woman on the south boardwalk had kept glancing at the sky whenever she spoke, as if expecting something to fall. A man on a canal barge had told Earis, without being asked, that the docks were "closed for maintenance" now, and his eyes had been too wide when he said it.
On the second day, Earis and the clones had climbed into abandoned storage towers and watched patrol patterns: two droid squads rotating every hour, a heavier unit arriving every third shift, and a command node at the docks that pulsed with signal traffic whenever craft moved.
On the third day, they had found the Separatists' anchor: a concealed landing pad beyond the north breakwater, masked by fog and rock. Droids moved there with purpose. Supply crates were unloaded. Power cells were swapped. A small force, yes — but small forces became larger if left alone long enough.
Earis had reported none of this to the Council.
Not yet.
He told himself it was because the Council would demand further observation before action, and by the time permission came, the town would be locked down completely.
He told himself it was strategy.
He told himself many things, those days.
Because the man who should have corrected him did not.
Master Rhyss Tal spent most of their time together in silence.
Tal was tall and spare, built like someone who had never wasted motion or strength, his posture relaxed but unyielding. His skin was weathered by years in open air, his dark hair cut short and threaded with gray despite his relative youth. His eyes were deep-set and steady, the kind that seemed to measure distance rather than emotion, and his presence carried a quiet gravity that made Earis unconsciously match his breathing to it.
He was a presence Earis could never fully read — calm the way deep water was calm, hiding movement beneath the surface. Tal was not old, but he carried age in the way he spoke: infrequently, carefully, as if words were tools that dulled if used too often.
Tal's lightsaber hung at his side like it belonged there and nowhere else — a green-bladed promise kept in reserve, not brandished.
When Earis pushed for action, Tal listened.
And then Tal said the one word Earis hated most.
"Wait."
The first time, Earis had argued.
"We have their patterns," he'd said. "We have their node. The town's afraid. They're tightening their grip. Waiting helps them."
Tal's eyes had remained half-lidded, as if he were listening to Earis and something else at the same time.
"Waiting helps us," Tal had replied.
The second time, Earis had forced himself to sound reasonable.
"A surgical strike," he'd suggested. "We cut the node, disrupt patrol coordination, then withdraw. Minimal loss. Maximum disruption."
Tal's tented fingers — a habit Earis had noticed whenever his Master chose patience over response — had folded and unfolded once.
"You want to cut a knot while the rope is still tightening," Tal said.
"What does that even mean?" Earis had snapped.
Tal had looked at him then — fully, directly.
"It means," Tal said, "that you are assuming the shape of the danger is fixed."
Earis had swallowed his frustration.
"Is it not?" he'd asked, trying for calm.
Tal's gaze had drifted past him, toward the town.
"No," Tal had said softly. "It is not."
On the fourth day, Earis stopped arguing out loud.
He argued inside instead, where pride could sharpen without consequence.
He began to feel the waiting as insult.
As if Tal did not trust him to act.
As if Tal wanted him to become a Knight who stood and watched while people suffered, because that was what the Jedi did best — stand in circles, speak in careful phrases, and call restraint a virtue while civilians paid the cost.
Earis didn't speak that thought.
But Tal seemed to know it anyway.
That night, after dusk turned the canals black and the fog thickened into a low, suffocating blanket, Tal spoke without being prompted.
"You are looking at the town," he said, "and thinking you are seeing what I refuse to see."
Earis stared at him.
"I am seeing what is there," Earis said.
Tal nodded once.
"Yes," he said. "And you are also seeing what you fear will happen if you do nothing."
Earis's mouth tightened.
"Isn't that the point?" he asked. "To prevent it?"
Tal's voice remained gentle.
"The point," Tal said, "is to prevent it without becoming the thing that creates a different catastrophe."
Earis felt heat rise in his chest.
"Waiting is a catastrophe," he said.
Tal's gaze lowered, as if the words cost him more than he allowed to show.
"Sometimes," Tal admitted, "it is."
Earis stared at him, ready to seize on that admission, ready to force a fracture in Tal's certainty.
But Tal didn't give him anything else.
Just silence.
Just patience.
Just that sense Earis could never quite name — the sense that Tal already knew where the path led, and was trying, quietly, to bend it.
Earis hated that most of all.
Because it felt like being treated as a child.
⸻
The clones did not speak against Tal's orders.
They did not question the Council.
They followed the Jedi they were assigned to follow.
But they watched Earis.
They watched him the way soldiers watched a commander who might actually use them.
CT-4127 was the quietest. He moved as if sound was optional and rarely worth spending. When he spoke, it was brief and exact. The others called him Latch, because he was the one who remembered which doors were locked, which pathways looped back, which mistakes would get someone killed.
CT-1904 was restless energy held in armor — eyes always moving, posture always angled toward action. He'd earned the nickname Rook from the others, not because he was new, but because he played defense like it was an art: positioning himself where the first blow would fall, so others could move freely.
CT-6118 laughed under his breath when stress spiked, like his body had chosen humor as a survival reflex. He called himself Sable, which Earis had learned was less a name than a statement: I am still here. Sable kept everyone talking, not loudly, but enough to keep their fear from coagulating.
The other three volunteers were competent, brave, and would die.
Earis did not know that yet.
On the fifth day, Earis found a boy on the outer boardwalk quietly carving a Separatist symbol into a plank with a stolen knife, pressing hard as if the wood could be punished into meaning. His hands were shaking.
Earis crouched beside him.
"Why are you doing that?" he asked.
The boy looked up, eyes bright with unshed tears.
"Because I can't do anything else," he said. "Because they took my father and nobody stopped them."
Earis's chest tightened.
He looked across the canal and saw a patrol craft drift past, smooth and uncaring, its searchlight gliding over doors and windows and faces.
The boy's knife scraped again.
Earis reached out gently, closing the boy's fingers around the knife.
"Put it away," Earis said. "Not because you're wrong. Because they'll kill you for it."
The boy's eyes narrowed, anger and fear braided together.
"Are you going to stop them then?" he demanded, with rage and fear intertwined in his question.
Earis hesitated.
Not because he didn't have an answer.
Because he had too.
"I will," he said.
And he meant it.
That night, Earis sat under netting with the clones, watching the fog swallow the docks again, and he realized his patience had run out.
Tal meditated on the ridge, alone.
Earis did not look at him.
He did not reach for him in the Force.
He did not invite correction.
He simply made the decision he'd been circling for days.
And because it was the kind of decision that curdled into doubt if exposed to daylight, he chose the night.
⸻
They left while Tal was still.
No alerts.
No spoken plan above a whisper.
No visible ripple of disobedience.
Just disciplined movement, careful footfalls, and the soft slide of armor against damp cloth as they descended toward Deyross Haven.
Fog swallowed them.
It was perfect cover.
It was also a trap waiting to happen.
Earis told himself he could handle the difference.
The command node sat at the docks, a squat structure of durasteel and repurposed civilian equipment, surrounded by patrol routes and automated sentries. The Separatists had grafted their control into Deyross's nervous system and expected the town to obey.
Earis would sever the nerve.
He raised his hand once.
The clones fanned in silent arcs, six white ghosts in darkened armor. Blaster muzzles tracked the same target at once, disciplined and calm.
Earis breathed.
Then he moved.
A quick, clean Force push toppled a stacked pallet of crates into the path of a passing droid patrol, blocking sightlines and buying a heartbeat.
That heartbeat was enough.
Blaster fire erupted in coordinated bursts, not a spray, not panicked — precise, staggered, timed to keep droids from identifying the true source. Two sentries dropped, optics shattered, torsos punched through with blue-white energy.
Earis ignited his lightsaber.
A blue blade snapped into existence, bright enough to make the fog recoil.
He vaulted onto the dock rail, landed in a crouch, and surged forward.
The first droid raised its blaster.
Earis cut it in half before it could fire.
He didn't fight like a Knight displaying skill.
He fought like someone cutting a path through a locked door.
Droids fell in sparks and severed limbs. The Force flowed through Earis as momentum, as timing, as a sharp, righteous certainty: this is what I should have been doing all along.
Behind him, the clones advanced in tight discipline, covering angles, clearing side corridors, dropping any unit that tried to flank Earis while he carved.
For a moment — a dangerous, intoxicating moment — it worked.
They hit the node's outer door with a thermal charge.
The blast punched inward, showering metal into the fog. Earis surged through, blue blade raised, slicing through internal droids and wiring, severing signal conduits in glittering sparks.
Rook's voice came through the comm, calm and controlled.
"Node's scrambling. Patrol routes are lagging. We've got maybe ninety seconds before fallback protocols kick in."
"Then we're gone in sixty," Earis replied.
He meant it.
He even believed it.
Then the night changed.
The alarm didn't scream from the node.
It screamed from the town.
Searchlights flared to life in sudden, coordinated patterns, sweeping the docks from angles Earis hadn't accounted for — lights hidden beneath the waterline, mounted to structures that had seemed civilian.
Deyross Haven's fog brightened from within like a lantern turned cruel.
Earis felt the trap snap shut.
"Latch," Earis barked.
"Already seeing it," Latch replied, voice flat. "They weren't just occupying. They were waiting."
Heavy units deployed from concealed bay doors along the canal walls. Not a full army — but enough. Enough to turn a surgical strike into a kill box.
Blaster fire hammered the docks from three directions.
Earis deflected one bolt, then two, then six — blue blade flashing, sparks hissing into fog. The clones returned fire in disciplined bursts, but the volume increased too fast.
Sable laughed once — sharp, involuntary — then swore.
"We're boxed," Sable said. "We are boxed."
"Fall back," Earis ordered.
They tried.
The canal walkway behind them erupted in a controlled explosion, planks splintering, water surging up through broken boards. Retreat became forward by necessity.
Earis shoved a crate stack sideways with the Force, crushing a line of advancing droids beneath collapsing metal.
For a moment, space opened.
Then it closed again.
A bolt grazed Earis's shoulder, heat kissing too close.
Another bolt struck one of the volunteers — the clone went down hard, armor smoking, and didn't rise.
Earis's breath hitched.
No time to process. No time to grieve.
He drove forward, blue blade cutting and cutting, the Force pulling him through impossible gaps, but the enemy numbers did not behave like numbers.
They behaved like inevitability.
Rook took a hard hit to the chest plate — armor scorched, but holding — and kept moving, firing from his knee, covering Earis without hesitation.
Latch dragged Sable behind a crate as bolts stitched the fog.
Sable's laughter was gone now.
He was breathing hard.
"Commander," Sable said, voice tight, "we're not making it out."
Earis opened his mouth to deny it.
And then the Force shifted.
Not droids.
Not blasterfire.
A living presence — sudden, vast, and calm as death.
Master Tal arrived like a storm that did not rage.
He was simply there — stepping into the kill box as if it were an open corridor, green blade igniting with a low, steady hum. The fog around him seemed to thin as though the air itself wanted to make room.
Earis's heart sank.
Relief and shame hit him at once.
Tal's first strike bisected a heavy unit at the waist.
His second crushed a cluster of droids with a Force wave that bent metal like thin foil.
He moved with an economy Earis had never understood until now — not flashy, not fast for its own sake, but impossibly exact. Each motion created space. Each decision rewrote the battlefield.
Tal reached Earis in a handful of heartbeats and placed a hand on his shoulder.
Solid.
Present.
The touch cut through Earis's adrenaline like cold water.
"This," Tal said calmly, blasterfire screaming around them, "is why I waited."
Earis stared at him, breath ragged.
"You knew," Earis said.
Tal's eyes held him.
"Yes."
"You let us—"
"I tried," Tal said softly, "to let you choose differently."
Earis's throat closed.
"You never told me," he forced out. "You never told me what you saw."
Tal's jaw tightened — the smallest fracture in his composure.
"Because I did not want you to become a Knight who relies on visions instead of instincts," Tal said. "Because precognition is a gift that becomes a cage."
Another explosion rocked the docks.
Tal's attention did not shift. He was utterly in the present, even while Earis was drowning in consequence.
"Go," Tal said.
Earis shook his head. "We can still—"
Tal smiled.
Not approving.
Not amused.
Just… proud.
And unbearably sad.
"Live," Tal said. "That is the lesson."
Tal raised his hand.
The Force seized Earis and flung him backward — not violently, not to harm him, just enough to break contact. Enough to put distance where Earis would have closed it again out of stubbornness and guilt.
Earis stumbled, catching himself, eyes wide.
"Master—!"
Tal stepped forward alone.
Green blade low.
Body relaxed.
A man walking into the center of a storm because he had decided the storm would not take his student.
Tal moved, and the battlefield shifted around him.
He became a pivot point — droids crushed, redirected, severed. Blaster bolts bent away as if the air refused to let him be hit. The Force around him was not wrathful.
It was clear.
It was disciplined.
It was sacrifice shaped into motion.
Earis watched, frozen, as Tal cut a path that could not exist.
And then the enemy adapted.
Heavy artillery fired.
Not at Tal.
At the space behind him.
At the clones.
At Earis.
Tal turned his head slightly, sensing it before it landed.
He lifted his free hand.
The Force surged outward, a barrier so immense Earis felt it in his bones — pressure, heat, then a ringing silence as the blast detonated against invisible resistance.
Tal staggered.
Just once.
Enough.
A bolt found the gap a heartbeat later.
Then another.
Tal's green blade flashed, deflecting, but the volume was too high, the angles too deliberate. The Separatists weren't lucky.
They were prepared.
Tal took a hit to the side. Then another across the shoulder. Sparks burst from fabric as the bolt burned through.
His breath hitched.
Earis surged forward instinctively —
And Latch grabbed him by the arm, dragging him back behind cover with strength born of desperation.
"Sir," Latch said, voice steady in the way only soldiers could be steady at the end, "he bought us a corridor. If we don't take it, he dies for nothing."
Earis's chest seized.
Rook's voice cut in, raw and sharp.
"Move! Now!"
Sable fired until his rifle overheated, then fired again, hands shaking.
They ran.
They ran through a corridor Tal carved with his life.
Behind them, the Force screamed — not the Force of droids, not the Force of battle.
The Force of a Master refusing to let the future happen the way he'd seen it.
And then—
It stopped.
The moment Tal vanished from the Force was not dramatic.
It was simply a hole where steadiness had been.
Earis nearly fell.
The clones kept him upright.
They dragged him through fog and broken planks and water-slick stone until the dock lights faded behind them and only the dark remained.
Six had gone in.
Three came out with him.
Latch. Rook. Sable.
The others were gone.
Tal was gone.
Deyross Haven remained occupied.
And Earis Kaul finally understood the cruelty of waiting:
Waiting didn't just delay action.
Waiting demanded faith.
And Earis had never learned how to have it.
⸻
They reached the ridge before dawn, fog thinning into gray.
The camouflage netting still hung where they'd left it, useless now. Their camp looked like a child's attempt at secrecy.
Earis stood under the paling sky and stared at his hands.
They were shaking.
Not with fear.
With rage that had nowhere to go.
Rook removed his helmet, face streaked with soot and canal water. His expression was carved into something hard, like he had decided he would never be surprised again.
Sable sat down heavily and laughed once, broken and silent, then pressed his palms into his eyes until his breathing evened out.
Latch stood, unmoving, watching Earis the way he watched doorways: calmly, as if waiting for the next threat.
Earis looked at the place where Tal had been meditating.
The stone was cold.
Empty.
He could almost hear Tal's voice saying anchor, then proceed, and it made his throat burn.
"I disobeyed," Earis said aloud, the words tasting like metal.
No one answered.
They didn't need to.
"I thought I was saving them," Earis whispered.
Sable lowered his hands.
"You were trying," he said, voice hoarse. "That counts for something."
"No," Earis said, and surprised himself with how certain he sounded. "It counts for this."
He gestured toward the town below. Toward the searchlights that still swept the water. Toward the civilians who would wake to another day of occupation, and never know a Jedi had come close enough to save them and failed.
Rook stared down at Deyross Haven with eyes like stone.
"What now, sir?" he asked.
Earis should have said report to the Council.
He should have said wait for reinforcements.
He should have said obey.
Instead, he felt Tal's absence like a wound and thought of the boy carving hatred into wood because he had nothing else.
He thought of how the Separatists had been ready, prepared, waiting for a Jedi to make the predictable move.
They hadn't feared the Jedi.
They had accounted for them.
Earis swallowed.
"Now," Earis said slowly, "we learn how to make them afraid again."
Latch's gaze sharpened.
Sable's laughter didn't come this time.
Rook nodded once, small and grim, like he already understood the shape of the road ahead.
Earis looked down at Deyross Haven and felt something twist into place inside him.
It wasn't the Dark Side.
Not yet.
It was something more dangerous to a Jedi than anger:
Certainty.
The certainty that waiting was weakness.
The certainty that if fear was the only language the enemy respected, then fear would become a tool.
And someday — not today, but someday — he would shape it into a signal so loud nothing could ignore it.
Even if the signal cost lives.
Even if the cost was his own people.
Because he had learned the lesson his Master tried to spare him from:
The galaxy does not reward patience.
It rewards whoever acts first.
And deep in the quiet of that thought, a shadow of another lesson waited — one Earis had not learned yet, and would not understand until much later:
Some fears are not tools.
Some fears are doors.