Entire Saga

“Here, let us try something for which I now believe you are ready.” With that, she produced the package that Karr had only just delivered to her.

“I don’t understand….”

“I do. Dok-Ondar does. He sent you this package.”

Karr frowned. “But he sent it to you.”

“He sent it to me so that I could give it to you if I deemed appropriate. Try to keep up, boy. Look, this should tell you a great many things about the Jedi, if you’re strong enough to see them, which I now believe you are.” She snipped away the twine that held the package shut and opened it to reveal a large cylinder of rusted golden metal. She held up the bruised and dented object and asked Karr what he saw.

“Is that…? I guess it looks like an arm.” It began a few centimeters above the elbow joint, where the jumble of twisted connection wires suggested it’d been ripped free of some poor droid somewhere.

“Very good, yes. That’s precisely what it is. Although how Dok-Ondar retrieved it from the belly of the beast that swallowed it is beyond me. He is a master collector, however, and when he sets his sights on something, he does not rest until he acquires it. You know the feeling, am I right?”

Karr nodded. His journey to find himself, to find out about the Jedi, was both fresh and old. Granted, he and Maize had only left Merokia days before, but he’d been obsessed with the Jedi since his grandmother called out his connection to them years before. Since she had given him hope that his headaches weren’t so much a curse but rather a blessing that needed to be nurtured. And that if he could learn about the Jedi, he could learn about himself. He’d done his best, but sometimes the galaxy must also play its part.

“We have reached that moment,” she said, pushing it toward him as if she had heard his thoughts. “I want you to touch it, but you must prepare yourself. I know the droid who wore this arm, and I know how much he’s seen, and how much he knows. This old arm may have quite a lot to say.”

Eagerly, as if he hadn’t even heard the warning, Karr seized the old metal arm with both hands.

And the whole galaxy exploded behind his eyes. He struggled to keep up with the flashes of images, one after another, two at a time, ten at a time. Men and women, coming and going. Starship battles, lasers flashing. The Death Star! He knew it in an instant, watched it collapse into a fireball the size of a moon—twice even—while small ships streaked away from it. He saw Wookiees and space slugs. And tiny Wookiees. Or…not Wookiees? Something Wookiee-like, certainly a forested moon or planet with these hairy little tribes of creatures who looked like toys, carrying spears and shouting battle cries.

He saw holograms and droids, two in particular—one astromech unit and a shiny gold protocol number, almost certainly the original owner of the arm.

He saw great sweeping dunes with large and small sand creatures. He saw murders and marriages, near misses and fatal blows. But most of all, he saw Jedi Knights! Bold and strong and everything Karr had ever dreamed of.

Padawans and generals, men and women and everything in between, human and otherwise, every color. Thousands of them across the galaxy.

Older people, younger people. Troopers and smugglers. Learning and growing, embracing the Force and letting it guide them. He learned of Order 66 and of Palpatine.

He saw strength and honor.

He saw.

He saw Skywalker, a child in a podrace. A teenage boy Karr’s own age, apprenticed to Kenobi. He saw them both, generals and masters, trainers and trainees. Fathers and sons. He saw a young woman with elaborate hair and beautiful clothes, quiet and thoughtful and wise but anguished. He saw children, a girl and a boy, who were separated as infants and sent to different corners of the galaxy for their own protection.

From their own.

From.

From the knight in black, who would’ve killed them both. From their own father, warped into something appalling, turned more machine than man.

He saw.

He heard…

Maz Kanata’s voice. “There’s much to see, I know. Does it hurt you, this time?”

“It…hurts…but it also soothes?” he said vaguely, unsure if it was true at all. He could scarcely hear his own voice above the ruckus. “It’s…it’s so much.”

She nodded. “Yes, that’s closer to the truth. But you can take it, I know you can. You need to. This was for you, one way or another. This is the story you needed to see and hear, in order to understand.” She placed a hand on his shoulder.

Karr hadn’t even realized that Maz had left her perch on the desk, much less that she was close enough to touch him. Reality moved in fits and starts, jerking him back and forth between what he saw and what he knew, between what he was learning and what he was feeling.

Gradually, the visions faded, and Karr began to find his bearings. Suddenly, he was alive, right then, sitting in a chair in Maz Kanata’s office between Jedi ruins above and Jedi ashes below.

Finding a place in the middle.

Finding his balance.

[...]

When the long, dramatic vision was over, Karr sat in the chair across from Maz—holding the golden arm in his lap and staring at his hands, as if perhaps there was more yet to see. His mind cleared up, and nothing was doubled, but his eyes were filled with tears. Tears of joy. Tears of loss. Tears of elation. It was exactly what his grandmother had said it would be: wonderful! And he felt her there beside him. He had felt her the entire journey, really, and he was happy they shared that experience just as they had planned. His heart finally quit racing, and he stopped breathing so hard. When he looked like he’d collected his thoughts enough to speak, Maz asked, “How was that?”

It was the kind of question that required multiple answers, but he only had the energy for one. “Helpful.”

Maz Kanata was surprised. “Helpful? Is that all? You’ve been given the history of the Jedi—or a large portion of it, at any rate. And all you have to say is that it was helpful?”

“No,” he admitted. “It was wonderful, too. All of it. I’ve been waiting so long. Trying to piece together who the Jedi were and what the galaxy was like when they were around, even what happened to them, and you’ve given me all the answers. You’ve filled in the gaps and showed me things I never knew. There were two Skywalkers!” he shouted. “Father and son! How could I have missed that? And Luke’s sister, the princess! Plus the way the Jedi were killed—” He stopped suddenly, remembering the ghastly image of himself he had seen.

“What?” asked Maz. “You don’t look very content, for someone who just saw a bounty of riches. Why are you still perplexed? What else did you see?” she asked him gently. She had climbed down from the desk again and was standing at his side.

When he turned to look at her, she was at his eye level. “I saw everything, except…except for the one thing I didn’t see.”

RZ-7 asked, “What’s that?”

He handed the arm back to Maz. “I didn’t see me.”

She gave him a soft, friendly pat on the arm. “Ahhh. Well, that’s because this isn’t your story, my boy. I’m sorry if that confuses you, but it’s not a bad thing. Your story is yours alone, and you must make of it whatever you will, and whatever you can. Whether or not you ever follow the Jedi path.”

A lump formed in his throat as he processed her statement. It was the ambiguity of “whether or not” that scared him. For the longest time he had convinced himself that becoming a Jedi was his destiny. And that if he could just learn the truth about the Jedi he would become one. But there he was, having learned all he could, all there was to know about them, and yet he was still unclear. He wanted to tell Maz about the vision he’d had where he saw himself killing Jedi, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It was scary enough when she didn’t know the answers. Karr could only imagine how paralyzing it would be if she did.

With that, Karr thanked her for her time and even squeezed her in a hug—then he and RZ-7 left the castle through the dining hall.

Slowly, they made their way back to their borrowed ship. Karr looked around at the castle and its surrounding market. He saw the same things on the way out that he had on the way in—flags, statues, monuments—but now he saw them through different eyes. Through knowing eyes. In fact, he was pretty sure he recognized some of the symbols on those flags from some of the moments in his vision.

“I guess I should get used to this,” he said aloud.

“What’s that, sir?”

“I see things differently now, Arzee. I mean, I guess you can’t expect to learn as much as I did in one afternoon and not have it change the way you view the world, right? In some ways I’m processing a lifetime of information.”

“More than one lifetime, if I’ve understood what you’ve told me so far.”

“True,” he replied. “There’s gotta be a term for that, wouldn’t you say? Crash course, maybe?”


- Force Collector, Chapters 16 and 17