Chapter 1: Birthday Wish
The final candle flame guttered, sighed, and died in a thin curl of smoke that twisted toward the ceiling. The kitchen was plunged into a deeper gloom, the only light now the sickly yellow glow from a single bulb over the sink. The faded Happy Birthday streamers tapped a listless rhythm against the cabinet door. Jacob Miller, eighteen years old as of today, kept his eyes squeezed shut.His wish wasn’t for college acceptance letters or a new car. It was simpler, purer, born from a lifetime spent in the glow of a screen and the pages of comic books.I wish I had a real lightsaber.A hum entered the room.
It wasn’t a sound from the refrigerator or the old house settling. It was a low, solid thrum that vibrated in his molars, a feeling more than a noise. The air tightened, charged with a static that lifted the hairs on his arms.He opened his eyes.
On the scarred wooden table, where only a moment before there had been nothing but melted wax and crumbs, lay a metallic hilt. It was about eleven inches long, made of a brushed, gunmetal-gray alloy, banded with concentric rings for grip.It was elegantly simple, ominously real. It looked like it weighed a thousand pounds.His breath caught. His heart hammered a frantic beat against his ribs. This wasn’t a prop, wasn’t some fancy flashlight his dad had hidden as a gag.The hum was coming from it. He reached out, his fingers trembling, and his hand closed around the grip.It was cool.Perfectly balanced. It fit his palm as if it had been waiting for him.
His thumb found a raised plate on the side, smooth under his touch.Almost without thought, as if the motion was encoded in his DNA, he pressed it.
A blinding, electric crackle filled the kitchen. A beam of pure, plasma-blue light, thick as his wrist and dazzlingly bright, erupted from the emitter with a sound like a frozen tear ripping.It snapped to its full length, humming with a contained, ferocious energy. The air around it wavered with heat.
He yelled, a short, sharp cry of pure shock, and jolted backward. The tip of the blade, arcing through the air, kissed the edge of his birthday cake’s plastic tablecloth. It didn’t cut; it erased. A blackened, smoldering line appeared, the synthetic material curling away with a foul, acrid smell.
His mother’s prized vintage Star Wars plate, the one with the chipped X-Wing fighter, sat just beyond the cloth. The heat radiating from the blade’s proximity was intense. The plate, a ceramic survivor of thirty Christmases, gave a tiny, audible ping.Then a spiderweb of cracks raced across its surface. It held for a suspended second before shattering into a dozen pieces, skittering across the table and onto the linoleum floor.The noise was like a gunshot in the quiet house.
“Jacob?” His mom’s voice, sharp with concern, came from the living room.“What was that? Did you drop something?”
He couldn’t answer.He was transfixed, staring at the weapon in his hand. The light it cast was unforgiving, bleaching the color from the walls, turning his skin a ghostly white. The hum was a living thing in the room, a pulse that matched the frantic tempo of his own blood. He could feel the power in it, a torrent of energy barely contained by the glowing blade.It was the most beautiful, most terrifying thing he had ever seen.
Footsteps pounded down the hall.“Kid?You okay?” His dad’s voice, deeper, closer.
Panic, cold and slick, doused Jacob’s initial wonder. This wasn’t a secret he could hide under his bed. The evidence was scorched into the table and scattered on the floor.He thumbed the plate again, desperate. The blade vanished with a swift shoomp, the light dying instantly and leaving his eyes struggling to adjust to the mundane yellow bulb. The hum faded to a faint after-echo in his skull.
He dropped the now-innocuous-looking hilt onto the table just as the kitchen door swung open.
His mom, Susan, froze in the doorway, her eyes darting from his stunned face to the blackened tablecloth to the shards of her favorite plate on the floor. “What on earth…”
His dad, Mark, shouldered past her, his engineer’s mind already cataloging the scene. He saw the strange metal cylinder on the table first.His eyebrows lifted.“What’s this? Some new birthday gadget?” He reached for it.“Don’t!” Jacob’s voice was too loud, too strained.
Mark paused, hand hovering.He looked at his son, really looked. Saw the pallor, the wide eyes, the slight tremble in his shoulders. This wasn’t the excitement of a new video game.This was shock.
“Jacob,” his mom said, her voice softening as she stepped forward, carefully avoiding the ceramic debris.“What happened? How did my plate… and the table…”
Words stuck in Jacob’s throat.He gestured weakly at the hilt. “It… it just appeared.When I blew out the candles.”
Mark picked it up. He turned it over in his hands, hefting it, squinting at the seamless construction.“Heavy.Solid. This is some machining.Where’d you get this? Not from the comic shop.” He found the activation plate.“This a button?”
“Dad, no, wait—”
Mark pressed it.Nothing happened.
He pressed it again, fiddled with the rings, shook it gently by his ear. “Weird.Looks like it should do something. Battery must be dead.”
A dizzying wave of relief washed over Jacob, followed immediately by a confusing tide of disappointment.Had he imagined it? The heat, the light, the sound… but the tablecloth.The plate. He crouched, picking up a piece of the X-Wing’s wing.It was still warm.
“I don’t understand,” Susan said, bending to help him.“It just shattered. And the cloth is burnt.Were you playing with matches?”
“No, Mom, I swear. I made my wish and… there it was.And then…” How could he explain? He took the hilt from his dad.It felt different now.Dormant.Just a piece of metal. His thumb found the plate almost instinctively.He pressed it.Silence.Cool, unfeeling metal.
“See?” Mark said, a faint smile on his face. “Probably just a fancy bottle opener or something.A cool prop. Must’ve been a short circuit in the wiring for the bulb or something, sparked, scared you, plate got thermally shocked. Makes sense.” He ruffled Jacob’s messy hair.“You’ve been deep in the Jedi archives too long, kiddo. Seeing things.”
Jacob’s knuckles were white around the hilt. It didn’t make sense.It had been real.He felt it.
“Well, happy birthday, honey,” his mom said, sighing as she dumped the plate fragments into the trash. “I’m just glad you’re okay.Clean this up, will you? And that… thing.” She eyed the hilt with mild distrust. “Don’t leave it on the good table.”
They left him alone in the kitchen, the mystery dismissed, rationalized away. But the smell of ozone and burnt plastic still hung in the air.Jacob looked down at the object in his hand. He ran his thumb over the activation plate once more, applying pressure.
A faint, almost imperceptible click.A tiny, internal vibration, like a watch spring coiling tight.His breath hitched. He pointed the emitter away from the house, toward the dark rectangle of the kitchen window, and pressed again.Shoomp-crackle.
The blue blade re-ignited with a ferocious snarl, its light flooding the backyard, casting the stark, long shadows of the apple trees against the fence.The hum returned, deeper and more resonant without the confines of the kitchen walls. He could feel the power thrumming up his arm, a latent potential that was both thrilling and utterly daunting.
It worked.It only worked for him.
A laugh bubbled up from his chest, half hysterical, half euphoric.He swung the blade in a slow, careful arc. It moved with negligible weight, a line of pure energy cutting through the night air. It left a gentle, azure afterimage on his retinas. He tried a basic form one maneuver, the wrist movement familiar from hours with PVC pipes.The blade sang as it moved, a crisp, electric whisper.
This was it.The dream.The fantasy given weight and light and sound. He deactivated it, plunging the yard back into darkness.The silence felt heavier now, charged with what he knew.
He spent the next hour in his bedroom, the door locked. He clicked the blade on and off, testing its consistency.It never faltered. He held it close to his physics textbook; the pages nearest the blade curled and browned from the radiant heat without touching. He experimented with cutting—a discarded sock sheared in two with a faint hiss, the edges melted and sealed. A piece of steel shelving he tapped gently resisted, but with a steady pressure, the molten metal yielded like soft butter, dripping glowing drops onto an old tile he’d placed underneath.
It was infinitely sharp, impossibly hot. A tool of pure destruction that felt like an extension of his own nervous system.The wonder began to curdle into something else.A low-grade anxiety. This wasn’t a toy.It was a weapon. A hugely dangerous, completely undocumented piece of technology that defied every law of physics he’d learned in Mr.Henderson’s class.Where did it come from? Why him?Why now?His phone buzzed on the nightstand. A text from his friend Leo: u alive?Heard u got old today. Party at Grizzly’s?The normalcy of it was jarring. Grizzly’s was the repurposed warehouse where kids went to skateboard and drink cheap soda. Parties there were about loud music and awkward flirting and complaining about school.Not about harboring universe-altering artifacts.
He typed back, his fingers clumsy: Nah.Family stuff.Tired.He couldn’t go out there. Not with this in his desk drawer, humming softly even when deactivated, a presence he could feel in his bones. He lay back on his bed, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling—stuck there when he was nine.They seemed childish now. The real cosmos, vast and unknowable, had just delivered a piece of itself onto his birthday cake.His mind raced. Was there some order out there, some galactic republic that had misdelivered a package? Was it a test?An accident? He thought of the comics he loved, the hidden destinies, the chosen ones.It always seemed heroic on the page. Here, in the dark, with the smell of burnt polyester still in his nose, it felt like a weight.A responsibility he hadn’t asked for.
Bravery, he was discovering, wasn’t about wielding the blade. It was about deciding not to.
Sleep eventually came, fitful and filled with dreams of endless corridors and a hum that was both a sound and a color. He woke just after dawn, the gray light filtering through his blinds.The first thing he did was reach into the drawer. The hilt was still there, cool and silent.
He dressed quietly, shoved the hilt into the depths of his backpack, and slipped out of the house.The morning was crisp, the neighborhood still asleep. He needed space, air, somewhere he could think without the walls of his house pressing in.
He walked to the edge of town, to the abandoned gravel quarry. It was a wide, desolate bowl of stone and weeds, a place where kids came to drink but was empty now in the early light. He climbed down to the floor, the crunch of gravel loud in the stillness.Here, he was alone.
He took out the hilt.The morning sun glinted off its metal.He ignited the blade.
The blue light was paler in the dawn, but no less potent. The hum echoed off the quarry walls, multiplying, becoming a chorus.He moved. Not the practiced choreography from his backyard, but something raw, instinctive. He lunged, swept, parried imaginary blows, the blade a blur of light. He carved lines in the sheer rock face, not deeply, but enough to leave glowing, molten scars that cooled into blackened glassy streaks. He shouted, a wordless cry that was part joy, part fear, part release.
He was so engrossed, so attuned to the weapon’s feedback, that he didn’t hear the car until it was almost on top of him.The sound of tires on gravel was a harsh intrusion. He deactivated the blade with a panicked flick of his thumb and spun around.
A black sedan, sleek and utterly out of place in the quarry, had pulled to a stop about fifty yards away. Its windows were tinted opaque.No one got out.Jacob stood frozen, his heart a trapped bird in his chest. The backpack with the hilt was at his feet.He was exposed.
The driver’s side door opened.A man in a dark suit stepped out. He was tall, clean-shaven, his expression unreadable.He didn’t start toward Jacob immediately. He just looked, assessing the situation, his gaze lingering on the scorch marks on the rock face behind Jacob.
Then, he reached inside his jacket.Jacob’s instincts screamed.This wasn’t a cop. This wasn’t a curious local.The man’s motion was smooth, practiced.He was reaching for something.
Without thinking, driven by a surge of adrenaline, Jacob snatched up his backpack, turned, and ran. Not toward the entrance, but deeper into the quarry, toward a gap in the far wall he knew from exploring—a narrow cut that led into the woods beyond.
A voice, calm and authoritative, cut across the distance.“Jacob Miller!We need to talk!”
He didn’t stop. He plunged into the rocky gap, the walls narrowing around him. He heard the car door slam, an engine rev, but no pursuit on foot.They’d have to drive around.
He burst into the cover of the trees, breath sawing in his lungs. The weight in his backpack wasn’t just physical anymore.It was a beacon.They had found him.Whoever they were. The fantasy was over. The reality was a black sedan and a man in a suit who knew his name.He ran, not knowing where he was going, only knowing he had to get away. The world hadn’t just given him a lightsaber.It had sent him a bill. And the payment, he realized with a cold clarity, was coming due.
And the payment, he realized with a cold clarity, was coming due.
The trees whipped past, branches clawing at his jacket.His lungs burned, each breath a ragged scrape in his throat. Behind him, the crunch of gravel under tires had ceased, but he could hear the methodical, unhurried sounds of pursuit on foot—a boot dislodging a stone, the rustle of fabric through dry underbrush.The man wasn’t running.He was walking. As if Jacob was a foregone conclusion.Just get to the cut. Get to the cut and through.
He’d explored the old quarry a hundred times, but panic was a funhouse mirror, distorting familiar paths. The narrow fissure in the rock wall, his promised escape, seemed to have vanished. He skidded to a halt, gravel skittering, and stared at a solid face of weathered stone.He’d overshot it.Or misremembered. Heart hammering against his ribs, he turned left, sprinting along the base of the cliff, eyes desperately searching for the opening.“Jacob.”
The voice was closer.Calm.Resonant. It wasn’t a shout; it was a statement. It carried a weird weight, as if the air itself pushed it forward.He didn’t look back. He rounded a jagged outcrop and there it was—the dark, narrow slit, barely wider than his shoulders. Relief, sharp and giddy, flooded him.He dove for it.And stopped dead after three paces.
The “cut” wasn’t a passage.It was a scar. It ended in a smooth, vertical wall of poured concrete, old and stained with mineral runoff, blocking the way completely.A dead end. Someone, decades ago, had sealed it shut.Despair tasted like copper in his mouth. He turned, back pressed against the cold concrete, facing the sliver of daylight that was the entrance. A silhouette appeared in it, blocking the light. The man stepped into the fissure, his form filling the narrow space. The ambient sounds of the morning—the distant birds, the wind—seemed to mute, absorbed by the stone and the presence of this man.He was even more imposing up close. Late thirties, maybe.Hair cropped short. His suit wasn’t just dark; it was a matte black that seemed to drink the little light available.No tie. His hands were empty, held loosely at his sides, but the echo of that motion—the reach inside his jacket—haunted Jacob.“You shouldn’t run,” the man said.His voice was neutral, almost bored. “It only confirms the signatures were correct.”
“Signatures?” Jacob’s voice cracked. He clutched his backpack to his chest like a shield.“Energy discharge.Thermal bloom. A very specific harmonic frequency.” The man took a slow step forward. The space was so tight he only needed two or three more to be within arm’s reach.“You activated an unregistered Artifact. Class Five, at least. Where is it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The cylinder.In your bag.It’s not a toy, Jacob. It’s a contraband energy conduit.Incredibly dangerous in untrained hands.” Another step. The man’s eyes were a pale, washed-out gray.They didn’t blink often. “You’ve caused a significant jurisdictional anomaly.My job is to contain it. And you.”
Jacob’s mind raced.Contraband.Jurisdictional anomaly.None of it made sense. This wasn’t a cop.This was something else.Some corporate security, some private black-ops guy. The government?Fear coiled into a spring in his legs.He had one option. He’d have to fight his way past.The thought was ludicrous. This guy looked like he could break him in half without sweating.But the alternative…
His hand crept towards the zipper of his backpack.
The man’s head tilted slightly.“Don’t. You have no idea what you’re holding.Or what it makes you.”
“What it makes me?” Jacob whispered.
“A target.”
In one fluid motion, the man closed the remaining distance. His hand came up, not in a fist, but open, fingers poised for a precise strike at Jacob’s neck. There was no anger in his face.It was just procedure.
Jacob yanked the zipper down and lunged, not away, but forward, ducking under the reaching arm. He fumbled inside the bag, his fingers closing around the cool, familiar hilt. As he pulled it free, his backpack fell, spitting out textbooks and a granola bar onto the quarry floor.
The man pivoted, surprisingly fast for the confined space. His expression flickered—a microsecond of impatience.“Foolish.”
Jacob’s thumb found the plate.He ignited the blade.
The electric snap-hiss was deafening in the stone corridor. The brilliant blue plasma flooded the space, casting the man’s face in stark, skeletal shadows. The hum vibrated in Jacob’s teeth.He held the weapon between them, a crackling barrier of light.
For the first time, the man’s neutral mask slipped. His pale eyes widened, not with fear, but with a profound, unsettling intensity.He didn’t retreat. He leaned into the light, studying the blade, then Jacob’s face.
“Fascinating,” he murmured, almost to himself.“The kyber is truly active. It’s singing for you.”
Kyber? The word was from his fantasies, not from this man in a black suit in an Oregon quarry.“Stay back!” Jacob yelled, swinging the blade in a warning arc. The plasma tip sizzled as it grazed the rock wall, leaving a smoking gouge.
“You can’t control it,” the man said, his voice low and focused.“You’re all noise. All raw, screaming potential.You’ll burn out in a week. Or burn down your city.Give it to me.”
He stepped forward again, directly toward the blade. He wasn’t afraid of it. He was reaching for the hilt, his hand moving as if to simply take it, the searing plasma between them be damned.
Jacob stumbled back, his shoulders hitting the rough concrete of the dead end.Nowhere to go. The man’s intent was clear, cold, and inevitable. The lightsaber felt suddenly heavy, its power a burdensome, glowing secret he was about to have stolen away.The man’s outstretched hand was inches from the shimmering energy.
Then, the world broke.It wasn’t a sound.It was a tearing. A visceral, wrong sensation in the pit of Jacob’s stomach, as if the fabric of everything—the air, the light, the stone itself—was being ripped apart at the seams.
Directly beneath his feet, the gravel and dirt and ancient bedrock didn’t collapse.It unfolded.
A disc of reality, maybe six feet across, simply winked out of existence. In its place was not darkness, but a swirling, silent vortex of impossible colors—indigos, molten golds, deep arterial crimson—swirling like liquid nebula. There was no gravity, no up or down, just a sudden, gut-wrenching absence of ground.
Jacob didn’t even have time to scream.He dropped.The fall was silent. The roaring hum of the lightsaber, the man’s shout—it was all severed, snipped clean as he plunged into the maelstrom. He saw the man’s face, frozen in an expression of pure, unprofessional shock, receding at impossible speed, a snapshot framed by the jagged edges of the quarry wall. Then, the portal—or whatever it was—snapped shut above him. One instant he saw the cloudy Oregon sky, the next it was replaced by a ceiling of churning, silent color.
He was falling through a kaleidoscope tunnel, sensations blurring.He felt weightless, yet crushed. Icy cold, yet burning.It was a single, terrifying heartbeat that lasted an eternity.
And then it spat him out.The transition was as abrupt as the entry. One moment he was in the chaotic non-space, the next he was staggering forward onto solid, cool flooring, the momentum of his fall almost sending him to his knees.
The lightsaber was still activated in his hand, its blue blade casting a jerking, wild light. The sound of it returned with a vengeance, the hum echoing now in a vast, open space. He gasped, sucking in a lungful of air that tasted utterly foreign—recycled, metallic, tinged with a scent of ozone, fuel, and something indefinably alien.He looked up, and his mind simply broke.
He was standing on a landing platform.But not any landing platform. It was an open deck, suspended impossibly high over a city that stretched to every horizon. A city of towers, not of steel and glass, but of durasteel and transparisteel, climbing like impossible mountains into a lavender-tinged sky where traffic lanes streamed with moving lights—speeders, shuttles, ships—in orderly, stacked rivers of traffic. The buildings were studded with millions of lights, creating a breathtaking tapestry of artificial illumination that shimmered in the dusk.The scale was planetary. The noise was a distant, cosmic hum—the respiration of a trillion lives.He knew this view. He had painted it on his bedroom wall.He had built it from Lego.He had flown over it in a hundred video games.
Coruscant.The Galactic City.The capital of the Republic.From Star Wars.
A wave of nausea so profound it nearly dropped him washed through him. This wasn’t a theme park.The air wasn’t right. The scale was all wrong—too vast, too real, too lived-in. The speeders zipped by with a realistic whine, not a looped sound effect.The details were gritty, worn, stained by exhaust and time. A droid, a simple astromech unit with a scorch mark on its dome, whirred past him on a chore, paying him no mind.His legs gave out. He landed hard on his backside, the lightsaber falling from his limp fingers, deactivating as it clattered on the polished deck.The sudden silence was almost as shocking as the sight.He was here.Actually here. The lightsaber… it wasn’t a prop from a cancelled movie, or stolen tech. It was a real lightsaber. Which meant…
The pieces, insane and impossible, slammed together in his head.The wish.The artifact. The man talking about “kyber” and “signatures.” The portal.He wasn’t in a world where Star Wars was a story. He was in the world where Star Wars was real history.And the weapon had chosen him. It only worked for him. The man in the quarry had said he was “noise… raw potential.”
A hysterical, breathless laugh escaped him.It echoed slightly on the windy platform. He was a joke. An 18-year-old kid from Beaverton who worked part-time at Comic Den, who still had a stuffed Tauntaun on his bed. He couldn’t be a…
Across the platform, a door hissed open.Two figures emerged, talking in low tones. They weren’t wearing robes. One was a human in practical, grey tunics and trousers, a simple utility belt at his waist. The other was a Twi’lek, her blue lekku swaying as she gestured toward the traffic lanes.
They were deep in conversation, but as they passed near where Jacob sat paralyzed on the ground, the human slowed.His head turned. His eyes—calm, observant—scanned Jacob, the deactivated lightsaber on the deck beside him, his obviously out-of-place Earth-style jeans and jacket, his expression of utter, catatonic shock.
The man stopped completely.The Twi’lek took a few steps ahead before noticing.
Jacob stared up, wordless, drowning in the reality of a living, breathing Twi’lek just twenty feet away.
The human man’s gaze was not one of alarm, but of deep, penetrating curiosity. He tilted his head, much like the man in the quarry had, but this felt different.Softer. Seeking.He took a slow step toward Jacob.Then another. He didn’t reach for a weapon.He simply knelt, about ten feet away, keeping a respectful distance. His eyes were kind, weathered.
“You’re a long way from where you should be,” the man said, his voice quiet, but clear over the hum of Coruscant.Jacob tried to speak. All that came out was a dry croak. He gestured weakly at the city, at the sky, at everything.“I… I know this place,” he finally managed, the words tasting like ashes.
The man smiled, a small, sad thing.“Many do. Few arrive so… abruptly.” His eyes flicked to the lightsaber.“And with so clear a signature. The Force is screaming around you, son.Can you feel it?”
Jacob just shook his head. He couldn’t feel anything but terror and awe so deep it had hollowed him out.
The Twi’lek woman had walked back.She looked down at Jacob, her large eyes assessing. “He’s untrained, Rael.A raw surge.And lost.” She spoke Basic with a soft accent. “The Council felt the disturbance.It’s him.”
The man—Rael—nodded. He kept his eyes on Jacob.“My name is Rael Aveross.This is Master Zin. We’re with the Jedi Order.” He said it so simply, so matter-of-factly, that it bypassed Jacob’s shock and landed directly in his soul.Jedi Order.
The words should have been magical.Instead, they were the final, heavy stones that anchored him to this impossible truth. This was real.He was on Coruscant.And these people… they were Jedi.
He was holding a real lightsaber.It worked for him.
Oh, god, he thought, the panic surging back, clean and sharp.I’m a Jedi.
Before he could process it, before Rael Aveross could say another word, a different sound cut through the Coruscant murmur—a sharp, aggressive repulsor whine. A boxy, angular speeder, not like the flowing civilian models, but tactical and grey, dropped from a higher traffic lane with blatant disregard for regulation. It slewed sideways, coming to a harsh stop hovering just off the edge of the landing platform.
The cockpit canopy was tinted, but as it settled, the passenger-side window slid down.The face that looked out was not kind. It was severe, humanoid, with sharp features and eyes that scanned the platform with predatory efficiency. They locked onto Jacob, still on the ground, and then to the two Jedi.The figure in the speeder wore armor. Not clone armor.Something darker, more brutalist in design. A symbol was painted on the shoulder—angular, authoritative, unknown to Jacob but dripping with implied power.
Rael Aveross was on his feet in an instant, his body moving between Jacob and the new arrival.His posture had changed utterly. The kindness was gone, replaced by a coiled, ready tension. Master Zin’s hand had drifted to her hip, where the hilt of a lightsaber was now visibly clipped.
“CorSec?” Rael called out, his voice loud and commanding, no longer gentle. “You’re outside your jurisdiction.”
The figure in the speeder didn’t answer. His eyes—a cold, calculating blue—fixed on Jacob one last time. Then, with a curt nod to his driver, the window slid shut. The speeder’s engines growled, and it ascended back into the traffic lane in a sharp, jerking motion, disappearing into the flow.
The silence it left behind was heavy, charged.Rael looked down at Jacob, his expression grim. “You have no idea what you’ve stepped into, or how many people felt you arrive.” He bent down and picked up Jacob’s lightsaber from the deck.He held it, not activating it, just feeling its weight. “This is a focus for your power.But right now, it’s a beacon. And it’s drawing every hunter in the galaxy.”
He offered the hilt back to Jacob.
Hand trembling, Jacob took it.The metal was warm.
“Come with us,” Master Zin said, her voice urgent now.“The Temple is the only place you’ll be safe. For now.”
Jedi Temple.The words should have been a dream come true. But all Jacob felt was a deep, resonating dread.The man in the quarry.The portal.The armored figure in the speeder. This wasn’t a hero’s journey starting.It was a target being painted.
He looked from Rael’s grim face to Zin’s concerned one, then out at the infinite, glittering city. He was a lost piece from another world, a boy who’d wished on candles and gotten a universe instead. He got to his feet, the lightsaber a lead weight in his hand.Safe.It was a promise he desperately wanted to believe.
He nodded, a single, shaky dip of his head.Rael gestured toward the door they had come from. “Stay close.And don’t ignite that blade again unless we say so. You’re not just a visitor anymore, Jacob. Whether you like it or not, you’re in the story now.”
They moved toward the doorway, the two Jedi flanking him, their awareness scanning the bustling sky. Jacob took one last look over his shoulder at the landing platform, at the place where he had fallen out of one reality and into another. He half-expected to see a tear, a scar, some proof of the madness.
There was only Coruscant, immense and indifferent, its trillion lights beginning to wink on as true night deepened, ready to swallow him whole.