I woke before the dawn and lay still and listened to the ocean and felt the Force move through the island the way it had been moving through it since the night of the Choice, closer and more willing, like a current that had found a wider channel.

  I had not told anyone what I had noticed. That the Force responded to me differently now. That the door which had been standing ajar my whole life was simply open, all the way, all the time, and the light coming through it was stronger than anything I had trained toward or earned or asked for. I had not told anyone because I did not have the words for it yet that would not sound like boasting, and because some part of me wanted to hold it quietly for a while longer, the way you hold something warm in both hands before you set it down.

  I dressed and went out into the mist.

  The training shelf was barely visible, the horizon swallowed entirely by a thick gray fog that tasted of salt and cold and the particular stillness of very early mornings on the island. I moved through the warm-up katas alone for a while, feeling the Force flow through each movement with a fluency that still surprised me, and I thought about Warren, the weight of his hands and the orange glow of the crystal and the way the Force had responded in that room, reaching outward past the walls and into the stone of the island itself, and I felt the current in my hands strengthen in response to the memory.

  It was love. That was what Thorne had told us and that was what I felt in my own body as evidence. The Force moved through me most freely when I was most fully in it, most connected, most anchored, and my anchor was Warren. The logic of it was so clean and so complete that I did not see any reason to question it. The Force had directed me toward him from the beginning. The Force was rewarding the Choice. These were not separate things.

  The others arrived gradually through the mist. Kit caught my eye as he came through the archway and gave me a nod, small and genuine, the kind that costs something from a person who has not been generous with you before. He had seen me on the hangar floor with Warren's spine in my hands. He had stood in that circle of silence with everyone else and watched what the Force did when it moved through me without restriction. Something had shifted in him since then and I was grateful for it without making anything of it.

  Mobe-Joan arrived and did not look at me, which was its own kind of information. She moved through the warm-up with a heavy, grinding energy, each swing of her practice blade carrying a frustration that I could feel in the Force like copper on the back of the tongue. When our paths crossed in the kata rotation she stepped deliberately on the hem of my white tunic, not enough to trip me, enough to make the point.

  "Careful, Princess," she said, low and flat, her bark-textured skin flushing darker at the jaw. "Do not let your daydreams about the scavenger get your feet tangled. Some of us are here to work."

  I felt the flare of heat in my chest, sharp and immediate, and the Force moved with it, a crackle of energy that ran briefly through my fingers before I closed my hand and pressed it down. I held the orange crystal through my tunic and breathed and reminded myself that Mobe-Joan's frustration belonged to Mobe-Joan and did not require my participation.

  But I noticed that it was getting harder to press down. That the heat came faster now and moved further before I caught it. I filed that away and did not look at it too directly and moved to the next kata.

  Thorne arrived midmorning with the Lanai carrying a heavy wooden crate between them, moving with the careful deliberateness of people transporting something fragile and important. He set the crate on the stone and opened it and inside, nested in cloth, were the Protosabers. We had seen them demonstrated in the library. Holding one was different.

  The hilt was heavier than I expected, cold metal with the particular density of something engineered rather than grown, the thick insulated cable connecting it to the power cell on the hip unfamiliar and slightly awkward. I turned mine in my hands while the others went first and felt the Kyber crystal inside it respond to my proximity, a faint warmth through the casing, a recognition.

  Mobe-Joan ignited hers and a beam of blue light hissed into existence, unstable and flickering, sputtering when she swung it as the cable pulled against her massive arms. She fought the weight of it rather than moving with it and the blade showed the argument in every stroke. It was not her tool yet. It might become one with time.

  Kit ignited his and the difference was immediate. A vibrant, steady blue that did not flicker, the hum of it settling into a clean, resonant frequency within the first second. He moved through the opening kata with the blade as though he had been carrying it for years, his lekku swaying with each turn, and the sound it made cutting through the mist was the sound of something finding its purpose.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Then Thorne held out a hilt to me.

  I took it and felt the crystal inside it pulse once, slowly, the way a heart pulses when something it has been waiting for finally arrives. I strapped the power cell to my waist and stood for a moment with the unlit weapon in my hand and thought about Warren. Not deliberately. He was simply there, the way the Force was simply there, a presence woven through everything, and thinking about him was as natural now as breathing.

  I flipped the switch.

  The sound the blade made was not the sound Kit's blade had made. It was not a hiss. It was a crack, sharp and immediate, like something releasing that had been held under pressure, and the light that erupted from the hilt was not blue and not green. It was white, absolute and brilliant, with a core of deep violet that pulsed in the same slow rhythm as the crystal's heartbeat, and the moment it ignited the Force came through the cable and through my arm and through me in a current so strong and so clear that I felt it in my jaw and my sternum and the soles of my feet.

  I began the kata.

  I was faster than I had ever been. Not marginally, not in the way that practice produces incremental improvement, but categorically, as though the version of me that had stood on this shelf yesterday had been moving through water and I was moving through air. The blade went where I intended it before I had fully formed the intention. The Force was not responding to my movements. It was anticipating them.

  The static started in my fingertips first. Small arcs of blue-white electricity dancing between my skin and the metal of the hilt, jumping the gap without effort, without my asking for them. The hum of the blade deepened as they appeared, dropping to a register I felt more in my bones than my ears, and the violet core brightened.

  I loved it.

  That was the simple truth of it. I loved the way it felt. The force of the current moving through me, the speed and precision of the blade, the electricity alive in my hands, all of it felt like the natural extension of something that had always been in me and was only now finding its full expression. Like the door standing open. Like the anchor holding. Like the Force and the love and the power all running in the same direction at once and nothing in the way.

  I felt like I was made for this.

  I finished the kata with a final movement that sent a brief arc of static light crackling along the blade's length, and the white light of it threw sharp shadows across the dark obsidian of the cliff face, and I held the last position and breathed and felt the Force settle back to its new normal, which was still more than it had been a month ago, still that open door, still Warren's steady presence at the center of it.

  The shelf was quiet.

  "She is not wielding it," Vane said, from somewhere to my left. Her voice had lost its usual edge. What was in it instead was something more complicated, not admiration, not quite, but the reluctant acknowledgment of someone who has run out of ways to dismiss what they are seeing. "She is powering it."

  I lowered the blade and looked at Thorne.

  He was looking back at me over the rims of his spectacles with an expression I had seen on his face only once before, in the Circle of Whispers after the vision of the red dagger. Not fear exactly. The thing that lives next door to fear, in the house where you go when something is too large to be afraid of and too important to ignore.

  "The Kyber responds to the intensity of the wielder," he said carefully. "It amplifies what is already present." He paused. "A flame that burns too bright can consume the hearth, Velara."

  I heard him. I held his gaze and I heard the warning in it and I understood that he meant it with the full weight of everything he knew about the Force and the long careful record he had kept of it.

  And then I thought about Warren and the orange crystal and the door standing open and the current running clean and strong through everything, and the warning and the feeling sat side by side in me for a moment, and I chose the feeling.

  Not carelessly. I knew I was choosing. I made the choice with full awareness of what Thorne's face looked like when he said it and I chose the feeling anyway, because the feeling was the truest thing I had ever been inside of and I was not ready to step back from it, not for a warning that was theoretical when the power in my hands was real.

  I deactivated the blade and the white light died and the shelf returned to its usual gray mist and ordinary morning sounds and I unstrapped the power cell and handed the hilt back to Thorne with both hands and a respectful nod.

  "I will be careful," I said.

  He held my gaze for a moment longer. Then he took the hilt and wrote something in his scroll and said nothing more.

  That night I did not pace. I did not lie awake cataloguing the ways I did not belong here or counting the people who resented me or turning over the day's frustrations looking for what I had done wrong. I lay on my pallet with my fingers laced over the orange crystal and I let the warmth of it move through me and I thought about Warren, on a mission in the Outer Rim, coming back tomorrow, and the life that was going to begin properly when he did.

  I dreamed of Misith. The palace balcony, the quiet sea below, the stars very bright and very close. Warren was beside me in the robes of a Jedi Master and I was his and he was mine and the Force moved around us both like weather around a mountain, present and enormous and completely at peace with what it had found.

  The dream was so clear I could feel the texture of his jacket under my hand. I could smell the salt and the woodsmoke of him.

  I woke with the first gray light under my door and the crystal warm against my chest and a certainty so complete it had no edges.

  He will be back today, I thought, and the Force hummed in agreement, open and bright and full of the particular confidence of something that does not yet know what is coming.

  And then the rest of our lives begins.