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This is Kast Fulier: dark-eyed, handsome, young. A hero of the Jedi Order. But the Order has many heroes. It’s easy to overlook such a small one.
This is Kast Fulier, sweat-stained, flickering, strong.
His Master laughs, and calls him a visionary, a rueful note sinking half-hidden in her voice. He has many visions, this Jedi, and he is still young enough to try and fight them all.
This is Kast Fulier, defiant, his lightsaber ablaze, who thinks of home and does not see Anaxes, the world of his birth. Does not see the Jedi Temple’s splendored halls. This is Kast Fulier, who sees his fellow Padawan instead, pale, stirring, cradled in the ruins of the Coruscanti undercity, blood mixing in the shifting dust.
This is Kast Fulier, stupidly brave. This is Kast Fulier, who saves people because once he did not.
----
He reads the words of a woman, a survivor who had left the Order, or had been left by it, years before. Her words echo, lingering like smoke, though her name is lost to the memory of war, dead with the ghosts of Malachor V.
A Jedi’s life is sacrifice.
Kast will tell this to Etain, and she will not understand.
The Jedi name the woman Exile, and forget.
Kast remembers. Or he tries to.
---
“You can’t stand,” he tells Etain, “Until you know what you’re willing to stand for.”
(He who stands and invites ruin, over and over again. Thinking, unthinking, of familiar faces. When the ruin comes, it will not be all his own.)
She doesn’t get it then; she’s still too young. She frowns and looks up into the eyes of a statue of Nomi Sunrider, hero of Jedi heroes, and sees only a woman of power, blessed by the Force. She cannot yet see the woman who first raised her blade- her dead husband’s blade- in defense of her child.
“I’m not as strong as her,” Etain observes, and she isn’t, yet.
(Kast Fulier, who stands in ruin, will not live long enough to see her strength. He will not see her learn his lessons, or see her live them, in the shadow of a gunship on Qiilura, or in those last moments beneath Coruscant’s smoke-filled sky. He will be dead before he ever knows.)
She turns away from the statue, to examine him in turn. “What about you, Master?”
“What about me?”
“What do you stand for then?”
There’s a proper answer to that question. More than one. Simple answers, of the kind they’ve both heard for all their lives, based on years of interpretation of the Jedi Code. Kast doesn’t give them.
“People,” he tells his Padawan, only half-lying, and watches as her brow furrows in confusion.
(And the ghosts he sees written in their faces. But she doesn’t need to know that.)
A Jedi’s life is worth nothing, except for the lives it touches. He is not a good teacher, but she learns anyway.