The first days after the assault felt wrong in their quiet. As if the whole moon were holding its breath, waiting for the next scream, the next explosion. Smoke clung to Wetyin’s Colony long after the fires were out, drifting in thin gray threads that crawled into hair and clothes and memory. The jungle moved faster than we did—vines already creeping over collapsed walls, green life trying to swallow up what war had spit out.

  I didn’t expect Luke to let us rest.

  But I did expect him to sit us down and meditate it all away.

  Instead, at sunrise, he marched us across the solemn plateau down into the town, and handed us tools.

  “A Jedi never stops learning,” he said, wiping dust from a scorched support beam. “Not even from this. Especially not from this.”

  And so we learned. And worked.

  A circle of temporary shelters and tents rose just outside the broken walls and became our home for a while. There was no time to return to Praxeum. Nor any strength left.

  The first week slid into a blur of sweat and ache. From dawn until nightfall, we hauled debris, moved rubble, reinforced stone with durasteel braces, salvaged whatever the colony could keep. Jedi training suddenly meant learning how to lift collapsed roof panels with leverage, not telekinesis — not unless you wanted Luke’s eyebrows to climb to orbit.

  I learned that Toran has a personal war with gravity.

  “I’m checking its loyalty,” he said while lifting a beam that absolutely required three people.

  Meral rolled her eyes so dramatically I thought she’d sprain something.

  “You two are insufferable,” she muttered, but she helped anyway.

  The colonists worked beside us — old men with sun-beaten skin, teenagers swinging hammers with stubborn determination, children carrying water buckets half their size. Every gesture felt like stitching a torn piece of the world back into something like whole cloth.

  For me, the work kept my mind from unraveling. When my hands were busy, the memories stayed quiet: the screams, the smoke, the sight of ships burning against the sky. At night, exhaustion sank into my bones so deeply my dreams couldn’t get a foothold.

  But some wounds refused to go quiet.

  Meral’s humor — the thing that had wrapped itself around me like a warm scarf since the first day we met — began to fade. She still smiled, but her eyes didn’t. She still moved like a dart of sunlight, but her shadows clung too tightly. I recognized the look: the moment after the first time you kill someone. I knew that weight, the way it tries to hollow a person out.

  On the third evening, at the riverbank where the sunset turned the water into molten copper, she finally spoke.

  “What if they had families.”

  Her voice barely stirred the surface of the water.

  Toran didn’t push back. He just dipped his boot into the river, letting the current work around him. “They were trying to take other people’s families away,” he said quietly.

  “That doesn’t make it…” She swallowed. “…less anything.”

  The wind picked up. Her eyes were shiny but she didn’t let the tears fall.

  I stepped closer until our shoulders almost touched. Not quite. Not forcing it. “You should be glad for the pain. It means your heart’s still working,” I whispered. “That you didn’t lose yourself in it. Didn’t become numb.”

  She didn’t lean into me.

  But she didn’t step away, either.

  At least I didn’t have to say that I wasn’t falling apart because I’ve seen it before.

  Later, Toran found me sitting alone on a half-collapsed roof beam while the colony settled into its night sounds.

  “You okay?” he asked, even though he looked like he needed the question more than I did.

  “I should be asking you that,” I said.

  “You should,” he admitted, lowering himself beside me. “But if you do, I might actually answer, and that sounds… messy.”

  I laughed. It felt good to laugh. It felt like a piece of me had been waiting for permission.

  The days began to form a rhythm: rebuild, repair, reinforce. The colony rose from the ashes one plank, one bolt, one shared breath at a time.

  ? ? ?

  My private training began almost by accident.

  Luke had learned about our previous research into ancient combat forms. There’s not much anyone could —or would want to— keep away from the Grand Master, anyway. He had someone bring Tionne’s notes from the Praxeum, spent hours pouring over the sheets and sketches, and then more hours trying to replicate the motions behind the kitchen tent.

  I could guess how well that went, because the next day he asked me —gently, cautiously— to show him. Somehow the word got out, and soon we added a little practice circle behind the tents, just where the jungle’s canopy began making a bright day into perpetual shade.

  When I demonstrated, he watched my footwork with honest curiosity. By fourth repetition he joined to follow the patterns.

  We started slow. Basic cuts. Transitions. Breath. Center. Luke saw the patterns immediately.

  “I never imagined I’d be the one teaching the Grandmaster, “ I muttered. “You’re making me look like I know what I’m doing.”

  “You look like you do,” he replied, “you just don’t know where it’s coming from. Yet.”

  More often than not a few others joined or just decided to hang out. Toran started lingering even after sessions — ostensibly to “maintain the practice blades,” though he somehow always waited until my blade needed checking. Meral teased him relentlessly.

  “Oh look, Toran’s polishing again,” she sang out once, leaning against a pillar. “He must really care about that blade’s emotional well-being.”

  Toran turned a heroic shade of red.

  I pretended not to notice my own cheeks warming.

  Kirana Ti absolutely noticed and smirked.

  Luke, mercifully, pretended he did not.

  ? ? ?

  By the end of the sixth week, Wetyin’s Colony was a skeleton with muscle beginning to regrow. Walls rose straighter. New shelters dotted the central square. The scars across the land softened with fresh vines.

  And underneath everything —rebuilding, healing, teaching— something else was growing.

  Between me and Toran.

  Quiet. Gentle. Fraught.

  Like a vine curling toward sunlight it didn’t dare reach for yet.

  Shared glances that felt heavier than words.

  Touches that lingered a fraction too long.

  Silences that said more than anything spoken aloud.

  We both felt it.

  Neither said it.

  Not yet.

  Meral, of course, saw it instantly.

  And found our mutual, awkward obliviousness absolutely hysterical.

  ? ? ?

  The second half of those months settled into a rhythm, though calling it “routine” would be dishonest. Life after an invasion never becomes routine. It becomes managed. Contained. Packed neatly into hours so it doesn’t spill everywhere at once.

  Every morning, the colony hummed with the sound of rebuilding. Hammers, repulsor lifts, people arguing gently about how high a wall should be. The Jedi blended into that chorus now. Soil under nails. Sweat instead of ceremony. I liked it better that way.

  And in the afternoons, once the sun retreated enough that the heat no longer felt like a personal insult, we trained.

  Not normal lessons.

  Not the things Luke could simply hand us from some half-burnt holocron.

  This was… exploration.

  “Let’s begin,” Luke said one day as we gathered in the training yard. “And let’s admit none of us know what we’re doing.”

  He delivered it with a dry smile, and the students laughed — but not unkindly. There’s something freeing about a teacher who doesn’t pretend to be all-knowing.

  Kam stepped beside him, rubbing the back of his neck. “I can offer structure,” he said. “Maybe. Sort of. If we squint.”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Tionne stifled a laugh behind her datapad.

  And so we began trying to shape something ancient from memory that did not belong to me alone, from instincts that rose like bubbles from deep water, from the spark of the Continuum that had stitched itself through me since birth.

  At first, the sessions focused on refining Tari-Ashla and Kal-Vath — clean lines and rooted power. The more I practiced, the more the motions settled in my bones like things returned, not learned. Luke watched each drill, correcting only when necessary. Kam helped refine my footing. Kirana Ti adjusted my weight until every cut felt as though gravity itself had chosen it.

  And then we did it all over again, together — teachers and students discovering something new.

  Tionne documented everything. Sometimes she drew diagrams so detailed I felt like a creature being catalogued in a museum.

  Then, in the seventh week, something changed.

  During a paired drill with Kirana Ti, I felt a shift, a turning in my breath, a pull in my center. The blade in my hand wanted to arc in a tight circle rather than a line. My feet wanted to step sideways, weight light, hips rotating as if following a breeze.

  I stopped dead.

  “Kae’rin?” Kirana asked, lowering her guard.

  “I… think I remember another one.”

  Luke leaned in, attentive. “Show us.”

  I did.

  The movements came fluidly... a spiraling step, a borrowed momentum, a deflection that curved instead of blocked. A style of circles. Of wind. Of yielding.

  Voras-Nheh — The Wind Coil.

  ? ? ?

  At first, the air around me felt too still, as if the world were waiting for me to decide where the wind should go. Then the shift came —a subtle lean, a turn of my hips, a loosening of my spine— and suddenly every motion carried a quiet, natural inevitability. The Force didn’t push; it leaned, like a breeze nudging a curtain. I followed that lean, letting my blade arc along a curve that felt older than my bones. In my mind’s eye, an opponent struck at my shoulder —direct, forceful, confident— and instead of meeting the strike, I guided it in a soft spiral past my hip. Not resistance. Not denial. Just… redirection. The feeling of becoming a doorway the enemy accidentally stepped through.

  I stepped lightly into the next motion, breath syncing to the rhythm; inhale through expansion, exhale through contraction. Voras-Nheh taught that motion never truly stops, that every defense is a coil waiting to unwind into offense. So when my imaginary foe tried to recover, pivoting for a sweep at my legs, I let my weight shift to the ball of my back foot, turning with the attack rather than away from it. His momentum became mine. My blade traced a looping figure-eight before tapping the opening he had created. It wasn’t about hitting him. It was about returning what he had given me — an echo of his own force, shaped into something gentle but undeniable.

  As the sequence deepened, the world blurred at the edges. My feet glided instead of stepping. My shoulders loosened until they felt like drifting clouds. I understood, in a distant but certain way, that Voras-Nheh wasn’t meant to conquer. It was meant to remind. Remind the universe that everything moves in cycles — attack and return, pressure and release, breath and stillness. You don’t stop the storm. You walk with it, guide its edges, turn its force back toward emptiness. The blade, in this form, was just a finger tracing the pattern of wind.

  When I finished the last spiral, the yard felt strangely quiet, as if even the jungle had paused to watch the path of the cut.

  ? ? ?

  Luke’s eyebrows lifted.

  Kam’s mouth fell slightly open.

  Kyle muttered, “This is getting unfair.”

  Meral cheered like I’d scored in a shockball match.

  From then on, our sessions expanded. We tested how the circular motions blended with my breath, how they transitioned from Tari-Ashla’s precision into something looser, more adaptive. Toran joined the drills sometimes, and seeing him try to match the spirals nearly made me laugh myself breathless.

  “We’re improving,” he insisted one afternoon, spinning too far and falling into the moss.

  “Are you?” I asked, offering a hand.

  “Absolutely,” he said, taking it. “Improving at falling.”

  Meral clapped dramatically. “He’s the best faller we have.”

  When she laughed like that —unrestrained, sharp as sunlight through leaves— I felt relieved. As if every sound was proof she was finding herself again.

  ? ? ?

  By the ninth week, the colony’s central square finally had walls again. Real ones. Clean. Unburned. Strengthened with durasteel braces we’d installed ourselves. Children ran through the half-finished streets, weaving around workers who pretended to scold them.

  Healing was happening. Not all at once. Not evenly. But steadily.

  Toran and I were steady, too.

  In that… utterly confusing, heartbreakingly delicate way young feelings bloom.

  We shared water rations. We patched wounds on each other’s arms. We argued quietly about technique, then ended up laughing. On lunch breaks, sometimes he sat next to me without speaking, and the silence felt like an entire language.

  We weren’t ready to name it.

  Words might ruin it.

  Or expose it to the whole damn Praxeum, which was somehow worse.

  Everyone noticed anyway — except Toran, who noticed too much and panicked, and me, who noticed too much and pretended not to.

  Meral gave us a look so knowing I nearly pushed her into a tool crate.

  “You two are adorable,” she said. “And tragic. Like an unfinished romance holovid.”

  “We’re not—” Toran began.

  “Oh, you are,” she said with a grin sharp enough to cut durasteel.

  Kyle, walking by, added without stopping, “We’ve been taking bets.”

  Toran nearly died.

  I wished for Force lightning.

  ? ? ?

  Around the tenth week, something new surfaced in me again — neither light, air, nor stone. Water.

  A wave.

  It happened while training with Kam. He swung at my shoulder. I stepped back, exhaled, and something inside me surged. The counterstrike rolled through my whole body — a rising-and-falling rhythm, breath and motion merging into a single beat.

  Luke saw it immediately.

  “Again,” he said, tone clipped with excitement.

  I obeyed.

  Rai-Tor —the Breaking Wave— poured out of me.

  Not practiced. Not intentional. But there.

  Circular sweeps that rose like surf, then crashed down with controlled ferocity. Strikes fueled by breath, not anger. Follow-through that didn’t stop but softened, retreating like undertow.

  ? ? ?

  The next motion rose in me not as thought but as pressure—a swelling, rhythmic force that gathered low in my spine and rolled upward in a slow tidal heave. Rai-Tor didn’t feel like air or stone or light. It felt like the sea building up to a tsunami. Heavy. Rhythmic. Alive with patience and fury in equal measure.

  When I stepped forward, the ground itself seemed to shift beneath me, as though the invisible surf had carried me into the next beat of a song I didn’t know I remembered. My imaginary opponent rushed in with the certainty of someone trying to take the centerline. Instead of meeting him, I rose with his advance, sweeping my blade upward in a vertical arc that felt like lifting a cresting wave. His guard broke as naturally as a sandbar dissolving under surf.

  The wave crashed before he could recover. Momentum became weight; weight became direction. My shoulders rotated, hips following, and the blade descended — not with brute force but with cadence, like the sea returning to shore. In my mind’s eye I saw him reel backward, feet scrambling for purchase. But Rai-Tor never pushed without preparing the retreat, never struck without already falling back into rhythm. So I stepped with the rhythm too, sinking briefly into my stance, letting the imagined counterattack pass just above my shoulder. A breath. A pause. A moment of stillness that hummed with the pull of receding tide.

  The retreat became the next surge. I inhaled and let my body rise again, hips turning, shoulders drawing another wide arc. The blade swept across my front, low to high, knocking aside the imaginary blow aimed at my ribs. The motion was big, almost theatrical —more dance than duel— but it carried a density behind it, a weight that felt like the sea pressing inward from all sides. The Force coiled in my core, then uncoiled in a shuddering crash of motion. I could almost hear the beat: rise—fall—rise—fall, each strike echoing the previous one, each withdrawal hiding the next attack.

  By the time I stepped back into stillness, my breath was hot in my chest, and my skin tingled with something fierce but strangely gentle. Rai-Tor was power, yes, but not a wild one. It was emotion shaped into rhythm. Fury wrapped in mercy. A storm teaching itself restraint. And somewhere in the middle of that imagined duel, in the crash and retreat of motion, I felt the truth of its philosophy: power doesn’t destroy when it’s allowed to flow; it destroys when it is trapped.

  Kirana Ti whispered, “This one has teeth.”

  Tionne’s stylus nearly snapped from writing too quickly.

  Kam shook his head, half laughing. “The Force is giving us homework.”

  Luke only said, very quietly, “Good. Let it surface.”

  ? ? ?

  And then the one moment I’ve told no one about.

  It was the eleventh week. I had slept poorly the night before — dreams of fire, dreams of screaming black butterflies coming from the clouds, of people dying farther away than I could reach. My emotions were frayed. Brittle.

  We were practicing transitions —trying, anyway— when something else bled into the movements. A chill. A narrowing of focus. A precision devoid of warmth. The blade felt lighter than it should. My pulse sharpened. The world thinned around the edges.

  I saw a motion in my mind — silent, final, meant to end a life before that life even knew it was threatened.

  Shael-Nyrr.

  The Veil of Shadows.

  The proto-style that was never meant to be reclaimed.

  A killer’s art.

  Cold as vacuum.

  Dark as a black hole.

  I recoiled so hard my heel skidded on the stone. The world snapped back like a rubber band. Kam barked my name. Luke was already stepping toward me.

  “I’m fine,” I lied.

  Maybe Luke didn’t believe it. But he trusted my “no.” He has always trusted consent, even when he didn’t understand the reason.

  And I kept the moment buried.

  Deep.

  Locked.

  The way you hide something dangerous from children—including the child in yourself.

  ? ? ?

  By the twelfth week, the colony felt like itself again. A different self, marked by loss, strengthened by shared survival, but alive. People smiled without flinching. Laughter returned to the market stalls. Children played under the shade of rebuilt roofs. Some of the scars would never heal, but the colony had decided not to be defined by them.

  We rebuilt their world. They rebuilt ours.

  And so we’ve returned to Praxeum as if we’d never left.

  On one quiet afternoon, with sunlight slanting through half-grown vines, Toran and I ended up alone in the shade of the temple’s edge, repairing a cracked training stick.

  He held one end. I held the other. Our fingers brushed.

  For a moment, neither of us pulled away.

  “We’re okay, right?” he asked softly — not about us, not really. About everything. About the things we saw. About the people we couldn’t save.

  “Yes,” I whispered. “Or we will be.”

  His hand stayed on mine a breath longer. Then Meral spotted us and yelled, “OH LOOK, THEY’RE TOUCHING,” loud enough to echo through three hallways.

  I nearly threw the stick at her head. She dodged. Toran turned the color of a dying sun. Luke, passing behind us, coughed into his sleeve. Kirana Ti smirked like she’d won a bet. Tionne said something about “psychological benefits of embarrassment as a training tool.”

  And just like that, the heaviness of the past months eased — just a little. Not erased. Not forgotten. But carried together.

  And the Force —ancient, living, strange— continued to whisper in my bones.