The first thing that hit me was air.

  Not Kiffu’s thin, desert-dried air that crackled with static and storm ghosts, but Yavin’s — heavy, wet, and unapologetically alive. It wrapped around us the moment the shuttle ramp hissed open, climbing into my lungs like a living thing.

  I stepped down first.

  The jungle was right there, a wall of green and shadow and sound that hadn’t missed a beat while we were gone. Leaves whispered. Insects hummed. Somewhere in the distance, something with too many teeth called out, long and low.

  Behind me, Toran groaned. “I forgot how humid this place is.”

  Meral inhaled deeply, eyes half-closed. “I didn’t.”

  She smiled. A real one. Not the strained, brittle imitation she’d been wearing on Kessel. Not the exhausted one from the Kiffu outpost. Just… Meral, back in air that didn’t feel like it was judging her.

  The Great Temple rose ahead, all ancient stone and stubborn angles, vines creeping along its flanks like the jungle’s fingers trying to pull it back down. Light glinted off the topmost stones where the praxeum’s towers and antennae clung like an afterthought.

  Home.

  Students moved across the courtyard — sparring, talking, hauling equipment, chasing each other with training sabers set just low enough not to cause permanent damage. A couple of the younger ones stopped to wave at us, eyes widening at the dust still clinging to our clothes.

  “Back already?” one called.

  “Define ‘already,’” Toran called back. “We nearly got turned into lightning sculptures.”

  “That sounds like a you problem!” the kid shouted, grinning.

  Toran clutched his chest theatrically. “No respect.”

  Meral’s eyes flicked over the familiar faces, the stone, the training ring. I could almost see her measuring the volume of the place against the Kiffu temple. Against the House of Echoes. Against the storms.

  The Praxeum felt… quiet. Too quiet for a moment, after the constant hum of charged stone and whispering memories. Even the jungle’s roar seemed distant compared to Kiffu’s red thunder.

  Luke waited near the base of the main stairway.

  He wasn’t in full Master mode — not the solemn, formal version he reserved for Council meetings or delicate political calls. Just robes, boots, a simple belt, hair a little wind-tossed, gaze clear and warm.

  “Welcome back,” he said.

  Tionne stepped down behind us and bowed slightly. “Mission completed,” she said. “And no one’s dead. Not even accidentally.”

  “Always a plus,” Luke said, smile crinkling the corners of his eyes.

  His gaze moved over us one by one. Toran, who tried and failed to look casual. Me, who stood a little straighter automatically. Meral, who hesitated. He didn’t reach out to her. Didn’t press. Just inclined his head slightly, a wordless I see you.

  “You look more at ease,” he said gently.

  Meral’s fingers brushed the pouch on the simple leather necklace at her throat — the one containing the bead from the memory site, tucked away with a ranger bead and a feather. “I feel… quieter,” she said. “Inside, I mean.”

  Luke nodded once. “Good.”

  He turned to Tionne. “We can debrief later tonight, if you’re rested enough. No rush.”

  She smiled tiredly. “There will always be rush somewhere in the galaxy. I’d rather not bring it into the debrief.”

  Luke’s mouth twitched. “Fair point.”

  He stepped aside, gesturing toward the temple. “Go get cleaned up. The kitchen droids made something that claims to be stew. I take no responsibility.”

  “Home,” Toran said under his breath. Then louder, stretching his arms above his head like a cat in sunlight: “We’re back, you overgrown rock pile!”

  The temple, predictably, did not answer. But the jungle rustled like it found him mildly amusing.

  We crossed the courtyard, boots scuffing the same stones we’d worn thin over months of training. The weight on my shoulders shifted — Kiffu’s stone memories drifting back into the background, replaced by the steady pulse of Yavin’s living chaos.

  Home. For now.

  ? ? ?

  Our corridor smelled the same.

  Stone. Old dust. A faint trace of someone burning tea last week and trying to hide it. The hum of power conduits just beneath the walls. Far-off voices, muffled through layers of stone.

  Toran opened the door to his dorm room with unnecessary drama. “Behold,” he intoned, “civilization.”

  I quietly slipped into mine. My blanket was still folded at the foot of my bed in the crooked way I always forgot to fix. Heavy drapes hung in the window, shutting the room away from the world. For a short while I allowed myself to slump onto my bed and lean against the wall. Despite the distant voices from the training yards, there was a moment of blissful silence. I drank it in. Exhaled it.

  From the direction of Toran’s room, a muffled groan. “I’m hungry. Do you think the kitchen droids will be able to cook some of that delicious spicy food?”

  “With your guidance we’ll be lucky if they don’t set the floor on fire,” I replied automatically.

  “I’ll miss Kiffu. I loved it there.” He appeared in the doorway to my room, leaning against the wall.

  “You loved that speeder,” I said.

  “I will be telling stories about that speeder until I die,” he said. “Preferably at an old age, surrounded by admirers.”

  “Of the speeder?” I asked.

  “Of me,” he said. “But the speeder can be there.”

  Meral’s quiet laughter rang from her room and the sound loosened something knotted in my chest. A second silhouette gently entered the door, smaller and quieter.

  Meral stepped in slowly, like she was checking for echoes.

  I watched her shoulders. Waiting for the flinch. The little tightening that had been automatic for her whenever she walked into any place with history.

  It didn’t happen.

  She took a breath, deep and even.

  “It’s… softer here,” she said quietly. “The walls remember things, but they’re not shouting.”

  Toran caught my eye, his lips curving into the same quiet victory I felt warming my chest.

  We were finally back, in all the ways that mattered.

  ? ? ?

  Tionne found us some time later on the shared balcony, resting against rolled-up blankets and pillows.

  She lingered in the doorway for a moment. “You have the rest of the day to breathe,” she said. “Tomorrow, we return to training.”

  Toran made a strangled noise. “Already?”

  “Time didn’t pause here while we chased storms,” she said. “You have catching up to do.”

  He flopped back dramatically. “I regret everything.”

  “No you don’t,” I said.

  “Okay, I regret some of it,” he conceded.

  Tionne’s gaze softened as she looked at us. “You three did well,” she said. “On Kessel. On Kiffu. Not just surviving. Growing.”

  It made my face warm in a way battle praise never did.

  “We had help,” I said.

  “Yes,” she replied. “And you made use of it. That’s a skill too.”

  She left us then, her footsteps fading down the stone hall.

  For a long moment none of us spoke.

  Then Toran rolled onto his side to look at us. “So,” he said. “Group bath or do we take turns?”

  Meral threw a pillow at him. “Take turns.”

  “Cowards,” he muttered, but he was grinning.

  ? ? ?

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  The days slid into each other after that.

  Not in a blur. In a rhythm.

  Training returned, but different.

  Mornings started with meditation on the east terrace, the sun just barely clearing the jungle canopy. Luke or Tionne would guide us through breathing, grounding, listening. I’d always been good at the physical side of training; sitting still used to feel like a punishment. Lately it felt less like being forced to endure silence and more like being invited to listen between heartbeats.

  Meral sat closer to the center of the circle now. She still fidgeted, still rubbed her thumb against her palm when the echoes nudged her. But she had techniques now: a way of choosing one memory, of letting others pass. Sometimes, during meditation, I’d feel the subtle way she anchored herself — Force drawing her inward instead of letting every whisper drag her outward.

  It showed in the way she walked the temple halls.

  She didn’t shrink from doorways anymore.

  In saber drills, Toran… tried.

  That was new.

  He still joked. Still made sound effects under his breath when he thought Kam wasn’t listening. But when it came to the forms themselves—the weight of the practice blades, the flow of movement — he took them seriously in a way he hadn’t before Kessel.

  “I’ve decided I like not being killed,” he said one afternoon as we ran through a paired sequence in the training yard. Sweat plastered his hair to his forehead. “So I’m going to invest in not dying.”

  “Bold choice,” I said, pivoting, blade singing through the air to meet his.

  “Very forward-thinking,” he agreed.

  Kam watched us from the sideline, arms folded, expression mostly stern but with that tiny, betraying curve at the corner of his mouth.

  Meral sat under the shade of a stone arch nearby, practicing a different kind of focus. Tionne had given her a set of small objects: beads, chips, stones, a bent ring. She laid them out in a line, touched one at a time, listened, let go. I could feel the ripples of her attention in the Force — like a hand moving through still water, deliberately.

  Sometimes she would pause, fingers drifting unconsciously to the pouch at her throat. To the bead from Kiffu.

  Whenever she did, something in the air around her tightened. Subtle. Then a faint discordant note beneath the melody of her presence aligned, and a soft smile crossed her lips.

  Evenings were for the mundane parts of being alive.

  The refectory, filled with clatter and chatter. Toran managed to set a cooking unit on fire again on kitchen duty; this time he claimed it was “a controlled experiment in thermal thresholds.”

  “You put a metal pot in the wrong slot,” Meral said, laughing so hard she nearly dropped her tray.

  “It was a brave pot,” Toran insisted.

  Streen walked by at that moment, sniffed the air, and said mildly, “At least it smells better than the last time.”

  “Thank you, oh Master,” Toran said.

  “That wasn’t a compliment,” Streen added, and kept walking.

  We had late-night study sessions in the small annex off the library, datapads and flimsi scattered across the table, Tionne’s notes on obscure Jedi history competing for space with Luke’s meditations on balance and Kam’s scribbled diagrams of saber vectors.

  We traded gossip about other trainees. Who’d been caught sneaking into the hangar after hours. Who’d managed to levitate three training remotes at once before sneezing and dropping them on their own head. Life. Small and messy and loud and precious.

  Two weeks after Kiffu, Serrin Or’nel arrived.

  I met him in the refectory. Fuzzy, short, taking up way more space than his small form suggested.

  He was standing in line with an empty tray, talking so fast the serving droid’s logic processors were probably overheating.

  “…and then my uncle said ‘if you think they’re not spying on their own people you’re an idiot,’ which isn’t technically allowed to be said in front of children, but he thought I wasn’t listening, which is ridiculous because I’m always listening, and—hey, are those rootcakes? Are they fresh? Do you have a schedule of freshness—?”

  “Kid,” the droid said, “please move forward.”

  He had sandy-brown Bothan fur, a little too fluffy still in that way young Bothans had before they grew into their angles. His ears twitched constantly, tracking every sound. His eyes were bright, quick, and absolutely convinced the galaxy would find him as interesting as he found it.

  The name tag clipped to his tunic read: SERRIN O.

  He turned, nearly colliding with my tray.

  “Whoa — sorry,” he said. “Didn’t see you there. Or I did, but not consciously. I was prioritizing food.”

  “Understandable,” I said.

  “You’re Kae’rin Solen,” he blurted.

  I blinked. “…yes?”

  “And you’re Toran Vennar,” he said, pointing over my shoulder, “and that’s Meral Tesska, you’re from Kiffu and you went away and came back different, which is good, I think.”

  Meral froze mid-bite.

  Toran leaned around me to stare. “Did Luke hand out fact sheets?”

  Serrin grinned. “No. People talk. I listen. Pattern recognition.”

  “Espionage family,” I guessed.

  His chest puffed a little. “Counter-intelligence. Mostly. Bothawui. My mother says lying is just telling the truth in a direction.”

  “That’s horrifying,” Toran said. “I like him.”

  Meral finally swallowed. “Who told you I came back different?” she asked carefully.

  Serrin tilted his head. “Everyone. You walk quieter now. Closer to yourself.”

  She stared at him.

  He shifted his weight, suddenly self-conscious. “If that was rude I apologize. I’m supposed to work on tact but it keeps slipping.”

  Meral’s lips twitched. “It wasn’t rude.”

  He relaxed. “Good. Because I’m probably going to say worse things by accident.”

  He ended up sitting with us that meal. Talked through half of it, inhaled food through the other half. He asked more questions than Toran and I combined, which was an achievement. His attention bounced between topics like a training remote with faulty programming, but under it there was a sharpness—a way he was constantly mapping, assessing, filing.

  Later, much later, he’d weave himself into our little orbit like a younger brother who thought we were all too slow. For now, he was just a fast-talking Bothan kid who latched onto Meral like she was a particularly intriguing mystery.

  “You can touch memories?” he whispered to her that same evening, eyes wide, as we walked down the corridor.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Do you ever use it on people you like?”

  “No.”

  “On people you don’t like?”

  “No.”

  “On people who annoy you?”

  “…tempting,” she admitted.

  He laughed, delighted.

  “Don’t encourage him,” Toran muttered.

  “It’s too late,” I said. “He’s already here.”

  And just like that, the Praxeum shifted around us — not in some huge, catastrophic way. Just a small, new gravity added to the system.

  A kid with quick ears.

  A future problem.

  A future ally.

  We had no idea yet which.

  Maybe both.

  ? ? ?

  Evening at the Praxeum meant shadows stretching long across the courtyard, the jungle breathing louder, and the heat sinking down into the stones where it stayed for hours after sunset.

  It was the kind of night where the air tasted like dew before it formed, sweet and metallic at the same time.

  Toran, Meral, and I climbed the stairwell that spiraled to the temple roof, our boots echoing against the narrow walls. Serrin tried to follow us up until Toran leaned out over the railing and shouted:

  “Not tonight! Bedtime! Go to sleep!”

  “I don’t HAVE a bedtime!” Serrin yelled back from halfway up.

  Toran replied, “You do now!”

  Serrin made a face, muttered something Bothan under his breath, and stomped back down. Probably to follow someone else around until they threatened him too.

  Meral made a soft, fond sound. “He’s going to be trouble.”

  “Oh yeah,” Toran said. “But the fun kind.”

  We reached the top. The night sky opened above us like someone had lifted a lid off the galaxy. Stars poured across the blackness in thick, bright rivers — the kind of stars Yavin kept hidden under its daytime humidity. The moon hung low, a pale scar barely peeking over the treetops. The rooftop stones still radiated heat through my boots. I sat on the low wall and let it soak through me.

  Meral lowered herself beside me, cross-legged, wrist resting lightly on her knee. She closed her eyes. Just breathing. Quiet.

  Toran flopped down on his back in the middle of the roof like he owned it, arms spread wide, staring at the sky as if daring it to give him something new to complain about.

  For a while, none of us talked. We didn’t need to.

  The quiet wasn’t the fragile quiet of the Kiffu temple, or the dangerous quiet before a storm.

  It was just… quiet. Earned.

  After a while Toran said, “You know… we might actually be getting good at this.”

  “At what?” I asked.

  He gestured vaguely at the sky, the temple, himself. “All of it.”

  Meral huffed a small laugh. “Speak for yourself.”

  “I speak for the group,” Toran said solemnly. “I’m the morale officer.”

  “You’re the chaos officer,” I corrected.

  “That too.”

  Meral leaned back, bracing her hands behind her. Her hair caught the moonlight, the weave of her clan beads glinting. She tilted her head. “Do you think things will stay calm for a while?”

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

  She snorted. “Fair.”

  Toran rolled onto his side. “But maybe calmer than Kessel. And calmer than Kiffu’s storm-kissing nonsense.”

  “And calmer than the smugglers’ lanes,” I added.

  “And calmer than Serrin at breakfast,” Meral said.

  We all laughed.

  The jungle’s night chorus swelled — creatures calling, leaves shifting, the distant crash of water against stone. I felt the weight of everything settle around us—Kessel, Kiffu, memory beads, lightning storms, the terror of losing a friend to her own mind, the relief of watching her come back.

  A soft wind brushed across my shoulders. Warm. Humid. Familiar.

  Meral spoke first, voice small but steady. “I didn’t think I’d ever feel… normal again.”

  I looked at her. “Do you?”

  She considered. “Not normal. Just… here. Present.”

  “That’s better than normal,” Toran said.

  She nodded. “Yeah. I think so too.”

  I leaned back on my palms, feeling the stone beneath me — a stone that held thousands of years of whispers, but none of them clawed at me the way Kiffu’s memories clawed at Meral.

  Maybe that was the Praxeum’s blessing.

  Maybe that was Luke’s design.

  Maybe that was just the nature of a moon too alive to hold onto any one memory too tightly.

  Above us, a streak of light crossed the sky — a shooting meteor burning quick and bright. Toran gasped dramatically.

  “A sign,” he said. “Of what?”

  “That you should shut up for two minutes,” Meral said, nudging him with her foot.

  “Rude,” he whispered loudly, but he obeyed.

  The meteor disappeared behind the treeline.

  A moment passed.

  Then another.

  It felt… quiet after the storm.

  Like stepping out of static and into breath.

  Like someone had lifted a heavy hand off the galaxy’s shoulder.

  I touched the training saber at my belt — not activated, not threatening, just there. A reminder of the lives we were choosing to live and the ones we were choosing to protect. Meral fiddled with her necklace — the bead inside the pouch thumping softly as she shifted. I felt a tiny ripple in the Force—there and gone, too soft to chase.

  Toran stretched and groaned. “We are definitely doing nothing tomorrow morning.”

  “We have training,” I reminded him.

  “We can pretend to be sick,” he suggested.

  “We’re Jedi,” Meral said. “We can’t pretend anything.”

  Toran sighed. “Fine. We’ll train.”

  “Then we’ll nap,” I said.

  “Now that,” he said, “is the Jedi way.”

  We fell into easy silence again. The kind only possible after you’ve all almost died together at least twice and still come back laughing. Underneath that silence was something gentler, something warm, something that tugged at the corner of possibilities not yet spoken.

  Meral, whole and steady.

  Toran, louder but wiser.

  Me, quiet but finally listening to my own heartbeat.

  The storm had passed.

  Not forever. Storms always come back.

  But for tonight, for this one peaceful moment, the sky was clear.