The ruins didn’t want us there.

  That was the first thing I felt when we reached the eastern ridge. The quiet pushback of old stone that remembered a different age and didn’t trust newcomers. The air grew cooler as we descended through the broken archway, each step echoing a little too sharply, as if the space still resented the intrusion. Toran didn’t notice any of this. He marched ahead with the unstoppable certainty of someone who had never once believed a building could kill him.

  “Look at this!” he called over his shoulder, spotlighting a half-collapsed hallway with his glowrod. “Perfect for a collapsing-floor puzzle!”

  “No,” I said immediately.

  Meral, beside me, whispered, “Absolutely not.”

  Kyle Katarn, who’d insisted on tagging along “to supervise,” squinted at the unstable slab. “Mm. Too soon for collapses. But that alcove might be good for a low-grade pressure plate.”

  “No pressure plates,” Meral muttered.

  Toran spun around. “We can add cushions! Safety cushions!”

  Kyle barked a laugh. “You want to simulate battlefield conditions using pillows?”

  “Yes,” Toran said confidently.

  “No,” Kyle and I said at the same time.

  Kirana Ti was at the rear, quiet and alert, eyes mapping every surface like she could see the fault lines under the stone. Mara Jade—who had apparently decided that “I’ll come by to look at it” meant “I’m now part of this project”—walked with her arms crossed, expression flat, gaze sharp enough to cut through walls.

  “This whole place is a death trap,” Mara said.

  “Yes,” Kirana agreed calmly.

  “That means we can fix it,” Toran said.

  Mara’s eyebrow arched dangerously. “That is not what that means.”

  But Toran was unstoppable. By the time we reached the first open chamber—a wide circular space with a cracked mosaic floor and an upper ledge half crumbled onto itself—he spun around dramatically.

  “This,” he announced, “is where it begins.”

  Kyle nodded. “Yeah. I can work with this.”

  Meral whispered, “I’m scared.”

  I whispered, “Me too.”

  ? ? ?

  We spent the better part of the morning walking through the crumbling passageways. Moss grew along some of the walls, ancient symbols etched half-gone beneath it. The corridors curved in ways that didn’t match standard temple architecture—even old Massassi structures always had some kind of directional purpose.

  This did not.

  This was older.

  Less orderly.

  More… exploratory.

  Toran found a forked hallway and made a triumphant sound. “THIS! THIS is where we can put the fork-choice challenge. Wrong path leads to—”

  “No pits,” I said.

  “Or spike walls,” Meral said.

  “Or falling ceilings,” Kirana added.

  “Or electrified panels,” Kyle said reluctantly.

  “Or stealth sentry droids shooting training bolts at children,” Mara said.

  Toran deflated slightly. “You’re all so unimaginative.”

  Mara gave him a look that could calcify water.

  “Fine,” he said. “Basic illusions. Force echo puzzles. Light movement exercises. Maybe some moving platforms.”

  “That,” Kyle said, “we can do.”

  Watching Kyle Katarn get interested in something was like watching a starship engine spool up. Quiet at first, then catching suddenly with dangerous enthusiasm. He pointed at a far wall.

  “That area can mount mechanical pivots. Wooden platforms. Adjustable heights. Instructors can set difficulty on the fly.”

  Toran brightened. “YES!”

  Mara pointed to the upper ledge. “You stabilize that stone, and we can use it for a stealth ascent course.”

  Kirana walked the perimeter of the chamber, fingertips grazing the cracked mural, and said, “The Force feels tangled here… but not malicious. If we clear the debris, this room could house the first challenge.”

  While they discussed logistics —and Toran practically vibrating— Meral drifted to my side.

  “You okay?” she asked softly.

  I nodded. “Just thinking.”

  “About the forms?”

  “Yes. And… the dreams. Visions. Nightmares. Or whatever they are.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Still bothering you?”

  “I’m not sure ‘bothering’ is the word.”

  “Then what word would you use?”

  I took a slow breath. “It felt like a memory.”

  “Yours?”

  “...No.”

  She nodded once, as though she understood perfectly even though she couldn’t, not yet. But Meral had a way of accepting things gently, making space for them without forcing definition onto them.

  “Tell me when you’re ready,” she said.

  And she meant it.

  ? ? ?

  By midday, we’d gathered enough data for the next month of work.

  Kyle took measurements.

  Kirana examined stress fractures.

  Mara took notes on where students would definitely cheat.

  Toran sketched wild diagrams that hurt my eyes.

  Meral catalogued stable ground from unstable with uncanny precision.

  I… helped where I could.

  A few times, when Toran asked, “Which path flows better?” I closed my eyes and felt the space — the energy the ruins held, the way movement rebounded off the walls, the subtle pull toward certain corridors. The Force didn’t whisper instructions, but it hummed faintly, like listening to wind moving through an old instrument.

  “That way,” I’d say.

  “Not that corner.”

  “This turn is wrong.”

  “That beam shouldn’t be touched.”

  Sometimes Kyle nodded immediately.

  Sometimes Kirana paused thoughtfully.

  Sometimes Mara went completely still, eyes narrowing, quietly filing that away as Something To Worry About.

  But Toran… Toran just trusted me.

  Entirely. No questions. No hesitation.

  If I said a passage was wrong, he wrote a big X over it.

  If I said a platform should tilt left instead of right, he adjusted the sketch.

  “Why?” he’d ask, head tilted.

  “It just feels that way.”

  He grinned. “Good enough.”

  ? ? ?

  We hiked back up the ridge with dirt on our boots, moss in Toran’s hair, half of Kyle’s shirt torn by a low archway he definitely walked into on purpose, and a remarkably long list of “Things That Will Definitely Kill a Person If Not Reinforced.”

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  Mara carried that list. And looked deeply concerned.

  As we reached the entrance, Toran threw his arms wide.

  “Today was productive. THIS is going to be legendary.”

  Kyle clapped him on the shoulder. “Kid, this is going to be a disaster. And a legend, yeah.”

  Kirana nodded once. “But it will be done safely.”

  Mara looked at Kirana, then at Toran, then at the ruin, then at her datapad.

  “We’re going to need more bacta,” she said grimly.

  ? ? ?

  By late afternoon, everyone scattered.

  Kyle vanished into the workshop muttering about fulcrum angles.

  Mara stalked off to find Luke and probably tell him about our imminent deaths.

  Kirana went to meditation.

  Meral drifted toward the archives.

  Toran headed toward the training yard, already planning the next step.

  And me?

  I found myself heading to the quiet grove behind the Temple.

  ? ? ?

  I sat under a broad-leafed tree whose branches dipped low, a green umbrella against the thick sunlight. The hum of the jungle was everywhere—wingbeats, distant animal calls, the rustle of leaves brushing against one another like old friends.

  My saber rested across my lap. Warm. Steady. Alive in a way I was still getting used to. I wasn’t thinking about the dream, or the forms, or the ruins.

  I was thinking about Toran’s grin.

  And the way Meral had understood without demanding explanation.

  And the way my instructors had looked at me earlier — not like a student, but like a source of something precious.

  It felt like balancing on the edge of a question I didn’t know how to ask.

  A wind passed through the grove. Soft. Warm. Carrying something faint: an echo, a hum, a ripple I didn’t have a name for yet. I breathed. It breathed back.

  Somewhere, in the deep places of the Force, something turned over in its sleep.

  Something old and waiting.

  ? ? ?

  The days that followed felt strangely soft at the edges, like the world had taken a long breath after everything the past months had shoved into us. There were drills, lessons, meals—but the pressure that had lived in my chest since Dantooine eased a little, loosening into something warmer.

  Training didn’t stop, of course.

  At the Praxeum, training never stops.

  But it changed shape.

  ? ? ?

  After dinner one night, the three of us spread out across the southern training field—no instructors, no watchers, just open space and fireflies drifting between us.

  Meral sat cross-legged, eyes half-lidded, breathing slow and steady.

  Toran practiced short bursts of Rai-Tor footwork.

  I walked the edges of Voras-Nheh, letting my steps curve and uncurve around invisible lines.

  At some point, without deciding to, we drifted closer. The air between us shifted. I’d felt resonance before. Never enough to frighten, always enough to wonder... but this was different. This was three overtones brushing each other gently, not merging, just acknowledging.

  Meral’s breath steadied the ground beneath us.

  Toran’s energy crackled like a hearth fire.

  My pulse sat somewhere between them.

  I didn’t speak. Neither did they.

  It was enough that we were there. Together.

  Moving not in synchrony, but in harmony.

  A triad doesn’t need matching melodies.

  Only complementary ones.

  ? ? ?

  The next morning, Luke returned from Coruscant. His shuttle touched down on the main pad while we were wrapping up a sparring block. Even from a distance, even through the heat shimmer, I could tell something in him had shifted.

  He looked… tired. Not the physical kind. The soul-deep kind that lives behind the eyes.

  Students gathered, murmuring, curious. Luke smiled at them—gentle, warm—but the smile had to travel farther than usual before it reached the surface.

  He looked past the crowd and found us - Toran, Meral, and myself. His gaze softened, and for a moment he looked like a man stepping out of a storm into a warm room.

  “Welcome back,” I said.

  He nodded. “It’s good to see you three.”

  His eyes lingered on me for a heartbeat longer, thoughtful, as if he saw the change in my stance — or heard the echoes I still couldn’t name. He didn’t ask questions. He rarely did at first. He let things come in their own time.

  “We’ll talk later,” he said.

  I felt the future lean in through the doorway of that simple sentence.

  ? ? ?

  That night, in my room, I woke from sleep without waking.

  The walls were gone. The bed gone. The Praxeum gone.

  Only dust beneath my feet, rust-colored and fine like whisper. A slowly dying sun hanging in the sky. A red-skinned figure in dark billowing robe sitting atop a worn throne, a familiar gray cube hovering above their palm.

  Then came the words. Not from the figure. From everywhere.

  A voice braided from many tones, speaking in an unearthly harmony:

  “…not yet. Soon.”

  The sitting figure’s eyes opened a sliver, two impossibly bright crescents — and the dream cracked around the edges like a mirror before it shatters.

  I gasped awake, heart racing, sweat cooling too fast against my skin. My room was silent except for my own breath. Nothing around me moved. But something inside me did. Something I didn’t have a word for.

  Something coming.

  ? ? ?

  Morning came in soft and gold, as if the sun had decided to apologize for the dream that tore me awake in the middle of the night. I didn’t tell Toran. Or Meral. Or anyone.

  Not because I wanted to keep secrets but because I didn’t have language for it yet.

  You need words before you can give a thing away.

  ? ? ?

  The codification council scheduled a review session two days later.

  Tionne was buried in datapads and sheets of sketches, Kam kept correcting stances with two fingers and a frown, Kirana was organizing Tionne’s notes with terrifying precision, and Kyle was claiming everything was “fine” until it wasn’t.

  Luke observed from sidelines, thinking, evaluating, sometimes stealing a sheet of flimsi from Tionne’s growing pile of sketches to study it.

  They put me in the center again.

  But it felt different now. Not like I was being examined. Like we were all standing around the same unlit fire, figuring out how to coax it into flame.

  Tionne flipped through the datapad with too much devotion.

  “Kae’rin, demonstrate the opening of Kal-Vath again.”

  I did. Slowly, deliberately this time.

  Kirana Ti nodded. “The base stance is good, but it needs a beginner-friendly progression. Most trainees don’t have your balance.”

  Kyle muttered, “Most people aren’t rooted to gravity like a tree,” while Toran raised his hand and said, “I like gravity,” as if this were relevant.

  Kam ignored both of them. “What matters is that Kal-Vath cannot be taught without breath discipline. We must require stillness training first.”

  Tionne scribbled.

  Meral mirrored the stance beside me to feel its structure.

  Toran attempted it and fell over. Again.

  It felt… ordinary. Warm, even. Like building something with people I trusted, even if none of us fully understood what we were shaping.

  The proto-forms weren’t ceremonies.

  They weren’t rituals.

  They were beginnings.

  ? ? ?

  Some days later, Toran dragged me and Meral back to the ruins with Kam’s reluctant permission and Mara’s deeply suspicious supervision.

  The clearing at the entrance had changed. Kyle had already installed wooden scaffolding along the first corridor. Kirana had reinforced two cracked pillars with binding tape and a local equivalent of structural adhesive. Mara had placed little colored markers on the floor that meant Absolutely No One Step Here Unless You Want to Die.

  Toran beamed like a child who had been given an entire planet of toy blocks.

  “Look!” He pointed at a section where the floor had been deliberately removed to reveal a shallow pit. “Platform retracts upward when you shift your weight wrong. Non-lethal!”

  “Non-lethal,” Mara echoed flatly, “because I vetoed the spikes.”

  “They would have been rubber spikes,” Toran said.

  “Toran,” she said.

  “Fine,” he sighed.

  We spent hours there. Mapping paths, testing footing, adjusting trajectories, arguing about leverage and height and physics and ethics. Meral identified four weak spots in the ceiling that any apprentice would absolutely try to climb.

  Kyle said that meant they should climb them.

  Kirana said that meant they needed reinforcement.

  Mara said that meant we needed an evacuation route.

  Toran… agreed with everyone. Simultaneously. Without contradiction.

  I watched them work, this odd collection of Jedi and almost-Jedi and whatever category Mara Jade lived in, and realized why we found ourselves here, rebuilding old ruins into a crazy Corellian’s idea of fun pastime:

  This wasn’t just a project.

  It was a future.

  ? ? ?

  Later, when we were climbing back toward the Temple, Toran slowed until he fell in beside me. Not bouncing. Not running ahead. Just walking.

  “You’ve been quiet today,” he said.

  “I’m thinking.”

  “About… ?”

  “Everything.”

  He nodded like that made perfect sense. It probably didn’t to him, but Toran’s superpower is accepting things he doesn’t understand.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” he said. “I just… wanted you to know I’m here.”

  I breathed out softly, letting that settle.

  “I know.”

  The path curved upward. Roots crossed the ground in thick lines, catching the light in strange patterns. Toran kicked a stone out of the way and scratched lightly at the back of his neck.

  “You know,” he said, “I keep having this feeling.”

  “What kind?”

  He shrugged. “Like we’re all… on the edge of something. Something big. Bigger than the usual ‘galaxy might collapse’ stuff.”

  “That’s vague.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s more like a… hum. In the background.”

  I swallowed.

  The same hum that lived in my dream.

  The same hum that pulsed in my chest.

  “What do we do about it?” I asked softly.

  “Nothing yet,” he said. “We just keep going. Together.”

  thank you. I appreciate your time and hope you'll stay for more.