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CHARLES SOULE TRIALS JEDI OF THE

ALSO BY CHARLES SOULE

STAR WARS

The High Republic: Light of the Jedi

The High Republic: Trials of the Jedi

The Oracle Year

Anyone

The Endless Vessel

TRIALS OF THE JEDI

Charles Soule

DEL REY

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First published in the UK by Del Rey 2025 001

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For Mike Siglain, who made it all happen

THE HIGH REPUBLIC

Convergence

The Battle of Jedha

Cataclysm

Light of the Jedi

The Rising Storm

Tempest Runner

The Fallen Star

The Eye of Darkness

Temptation of the Force

Tempest Breaker

Trials of the Jedi

Wayseeker: An Acolyte Novel

Dooku: Jedi Lost

Master and Apprentice

The Living Force

THE PHANTOM MENACE

Mace Windu: The Glass Abyss

ATTACK OF THE CLONES

Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade Brotherhood

The Thrawn Ascendancy Trilogy

Dark Disciple: A Clone Wars Novel

REVENGE OF THE SITH

Reign of the Empire: The Mask of Fear

Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel

Lords of the Sith

Tarkin

Jedi: Battle Scars

ROGUE ONE A NEW HOPE

Battlefront II: Inferno Squad

Heir to the Jedi

Doctor Aphra

Battlefront: Twilight Company

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK RETURN OF THE JEDI

The Princess and the Scoundrel

The Alphabet Squadron Trilogy

The Aftermath Trilogy

Last Shot

Shadow of the Sith Bloodline

Phasma Canto Bight

THE FORCE AWAKENS

THE LAST JEDI

Thrawn

A New Dawn: A Rebels Novel

Thrawn: Alliances

Thrawn: Treason

Resistance Reborn Galaxy’s Edge: Black Spire THE RISE OF SKYWALKER

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. . . .

TRIALS OF THE JEDI

The final confrontation between the Jedi and the Nihil looms. The valiant Jedi are spread thin as they are put to the ultimate test on four separate fronts.

Some rally against the NIHIL MARAUDERS, who plan to punish the planet ERIADU for its resistance to their rule. Others patrol the dangerous border of the OCCLUSION ZONE, protecting planets from vicious Nihil raids. A brave few struggle to stop the mysterious BLIGHT, an infection moving from planet to planet, draining worlds of life. Still others battle the sinister MARCHION RO and his monstrous NAMELESS CREATURES.

To save the Republic, the Jedi will face their fears in their most daunting challenges yet. If they fail on just one of these battlefronts, the wave of darkness will extinguish the light of the Jedi forever. . . .

Hello, searcher. I will guide you on your way.

You may have heard things about the Force. It is an energy field. It touches all things. It is a mystical source of power. It can be used to perform feats that seem impossible, magical.

If you delve deeper, you will see that people have sought to understand the Force for millennia. Belief structures have arisen around its mysteries, factions dedicated to one interpretation or another, each with its own rules for how the Force may be used. Many of these groups organize themselves around the idea that the Force is divided into a dark side and a light. The dark consumes; the light sustains.

Is this true? Think of a river. It is a great source of life in innumerable ways. It can also drown and flood and destroy. Does the river have a light side or a dark?

Endless questions arise the moment one begins to study the Force, but all have the same answer: The Force can be used, but cannot be understood—not fully.

To truly comprehend the Force, you would need to understand everything, everything that exists as well as its relationship to every other thing. The smallest pebble, the mightiest creature, the newborn infant, and the ancient forest. This is beyond us, beyond the reach of even our mightiest thinking machines.

While our limited minds cannot fully know the Force in all its connections and convolutions, we are able to consider the implications raised by its nature. For instance: Everything that happens, happens to everything.

When seen through this light, the choices of any free-willed being become vastly powerful. Our individual decisions affect everything else that exists. Not in an abstract fashion. Literally.

In theory, the decisions of a single individual could affect everything else in drastic, terrible ways. If one person chose to use their free will to bring darkness to every other being . . . it could be done. Everything can die. Everything can be destroyed.

Even, perhaps, the Force. And because the Force is everything, if the Force dies, everything dies.

Some in the galaxy understand this possibility and have chosen to stand against it. Who are these people? Who are those that choose life and light, not just with words but with actions, with sacrifice, with every bit of strength and skill they possess?

Well, many. The list of people who stand and fight when things are at their darkest is long. But one group makes this battle against the dark their sworn duty. When all else is lost, you will find them, fighting until their last breath to save even a single life.

Because a single life, any life, all life . . . is the Force. Connected to all others, connected to all things.

This is what the Jedi believe.

This is why they fight.

For everything and everyone.

For life . . . and the light.

THE

PART ONE

AIR STILLS. THE VORTEX LOOMS.

THE PEOPLE LOOK UP IN TERROR.

Interlude

“Come on, chop chop,” Ryden Colman called. “We need to get on the road.”

He glanced at the timepiece strapped to his wrist. Unnecessary. He knew what time it was—about one minute since the last time he’d checked.

Ryden knew his anxiety was getting the better of him, and for what? Even if they missed the flight scheduled to leave in a few hours, another would depart a few hours after that. There was no reason to rush. Not really. He was being irrational.

He looked out the window at the clouds of white dust streaming into the air in the far distance. They looked like smoke—but that was not what they were. They were far away . . . but the wind could always shift.

Ryden checked his chrono again.

“Family!” he shouted. “It is time to go! ”

His son, Davet, sixteen and wonderful but also ready and excited to challenge his father’s hard-earned wisdom and directions at every possible opportunity, appeared from his bedroom. A gigantic trunk of all the many things a teenager found essential floated along behind him, lifted from

the ground by built-in repulsorlifts and pushed forward by the household droid, a charming model that had become utterly essential to the family’s operations. They all called it Sixbee, a derivation of its model and unit number.

“I’m ready, Dad,” Davet said. “First one, too, looks like. Mom and Shanna don’t even have their stuff out here yet.”

This was only partially true. Ryden’s wife’s bags were already packed into the speeder waiting on the street below, though she was making the rounds of their small apartment, trying to make sure they hadn’t forgotten to pack anything they might truly need while they were away. But Shanna, their eleven-year-old, was nowhere in sight, and Ryden foresaw a battle getting her out the door.

We can still make the next transport, he thought. But we have to be out of here in ten minutes, no more.

Davet began working with Sixbee to get his huge trunk through the apartment’s front door. Assuming it actually fit, they’d take it into the lift and down to the street. Ryden left them to it, turning back to the window.

He frowned. The streets of Estarvera were nothing but traffic, as packed as he’d ever seen. Personal speeders, larger transports, and buses, some so full of people that the passengers sat on the roof or hung out the windows. All heading in the same direction . . . to the city’s spaceport, out on the edge of town. Coils of dark, oily smoke rose up above the streets here and there.

Just an accident or two, Ryden told himself. This many vehicles, bound to be a few crack-ups.

The faint sound of sirens reached his ears, dampened by the window but clearly audible, and from multiple locations, too.

Something caught his eye on the other side of the street—a pink, small object lying on the stonework pedestrian path. People rushed past it, ignoring the thing, intent on their own destinations. Ryden recognized its outline as a character from one of the holonet kids’ shows Shanna had watched obsessively when she was a little younger (as had Davet, though he’d never admit it now).

Barko the House Mouse, something like that, Ryden thought. Shanna had one of those toys. Wouldn’t go anywhere without it.

Ryden imagined another child, another little son or daughter, who had taken their little Barko with them when their caregiver or caregivers took them from their home and said, Okay, chop chop, time to get to the spaceport, no time to waste, and then rushed them along the street toward their own speeder or bus. He envisioned that child accidentally dropping the toy in all the hubbub, as kids would do, and crying out to stop, to let them pick it up, and the caregiver tugging them along, not willing to take even the five seconds it would require to retrieve their child’s toy to make them happy, to make them feel a bit less afraid.

We don’t have time, the adult would have said as the child burst into tears. We have to go.

Ryden pulled his eyes from the toy and raised them to look across the city. Their home had a wonderful view. Now, the family wasn’t wealthy— far from it. The bakery he and his wife ran together barely covered the bills. Still, they’d somehow happened upon an upper-floor residence that afforded a view of half the city and the great sea-plains beyond. The sheets of clear water teemed with the many living things that sustained the city’s industry and population, including endless kelptree fields. Normally, the languid plants were blue-green, and sunlight shone through them like panes of stained transparisteel. Now huge swaths had turned gray-white. He could see great clouds of an ash-like substance blowing off them in the breeze, as if they were disintegrating before his eyes.

At first, the holonet broadcasts had called it a blight. But now that it had appeared on more and more worlds across the galaxy, it had become the Blight, a specific menace that everyone knew and everyone feared. Clouds of that stuff were slowly, lazily drifting toward the city from the desiccated kelptree fields. Toward his home. Toward his family.

What would happen if you breathed it in? he thought.

He turned away from the window, calling loudly back into the apartment.

“We don’t have time,” Ryden said. “We have to go. ”

Two hours later, the little family of four (five including Sixbee and six including Shanna’s pet scalepig, Florg, whom she had categorically refused to leave behind) sat in their speeder, waiting for their opportunity to enter the spaceport and board the next ship that would take them offworld. Where they would go next almost didn’t matter—anywhere that didn’t have the Blight creeping across its landscape.

The strange white death moved slowly, but it was no less terrifying for its lack of speed. It advanced millimeter by millimeter in all directions, turning living things to a horrible, ashen substance, and not long after that even the stones and soil. Efforts had been made to burn it out, to build energy barriers around patches of the stuff . . . all had failed. There were even reports—unconfirmed but terrifying—that ships that flew over a Blighted zone could find their systems failing, any organic passengers becoming infected.

Now the Blight had come to Estarvera. It moved slowly but never stopped, either. New patches could appear without warning. Tiny at first, but they grew. They always grew.

Everyone who could leave the planet was leaving.

“We’re almost there, Ry,” his wife said, placing a reassuring hand on his arm. Ryden looked at her, looked at Calina, his partner of over twenty years. He gave her a confident nod, and she put her hand back on the speeder’s control sticks, returning her focus to the road. They’d already seen a number of accidents on the road to the spaceport. The last thing they needed was another delay.

Ryden flicked his eyes toward the speeder’s rear compartment. Davet was listening to music on his headphones, his eyes focused on the tense scenes outside. Shanna was busy playing with Florg, focused on trying to get the little creature to flutter into the air a centimeter or two on its stubby little wings. The family’s elderly droid had folded itself up at the children’s feet and gone into low-power mode to save its increasingly unreliable power cell.

“You know we probably won’t be able to bring Sixbee,” Ryden said to Calina, his voice quiet. “We might not even be able to bring Florg. I heard

on the ’net that they’re prioritizing passengers. No cargo . . . of any kind. We’ll be lucky to get out with our bags.”

Calina didn’t answer, but he saw the little flicker at her jawline that meant she’d heard and was internalizing. The quick translation was, Yeah, I get it, but I don’t much like it.

A quick wave of guilt washed across Ryden. The impetus to leave Estarvera—at least for the time being—had been his. Calina focused on the next day’s bread; he focused on the next year’s bread and their ability to keep making it. He’d been tracking reports of the Blight at the few spots in the galaxy where it had appeared, and once it showed up on their world, he put plans to be ready to leave in motion immediately.

They had enough in savings for four transport tickets offworld, with enough for living expenses in case they couldn’t come back for a while. Or—and he hesitated to even consider the option—if they couldn’t come back at all. They were flying to Felucia, where Calina’s brother lived. It wouldn’t be the most comfortable arrangement, but they’d make do, and—

A rumbling noise from ahead of them, in the direction of the spaceport. It sounded like the crashing of a wave on a beach, but deeper. And . . .

“Why are we shaking?” Shanna called from the back seat, her voice mostly just curious.

Ryden exchanged a glance with Calina.

Groundquake? was what that glance said.

He turned his head, looked back. Speeders were crammed in behind them, everyone on their way to their own trips offworld. Ahead and to either side . . . no better. The city was old, and the speeder lanes in this part of the city were narrow, not built for so much traffic.

The rumble grew louder. Now, with it, shrieks of bending metal, a great collapse, the sound becoming a roar.

“Look at that,” Calina said, her voice uncharacteristically small.

The wide bowl of the spaceport dominated the view through the speeder’s windshield, a beautiful silvery curve that always made Ryden think of launch trajectories and orbits and flight. He hadn’t left the

planet since before he and Calina got together, but he’d always admired the structure.

Now it was . . . changing. Bending, the two upturned ends of the round building curving toward each other, as if they were reaching out across the open space between, like two lovers’ hands straining to touch.

It was difficult to comprehend, fast and slow all at once . . . and then it was very fast. The spaceport—what they could see of it above the intervening rows of buildings—fell. It shot downward with astonishing speed, replaced by a billowing white-gray cloudy plume that Ryden recognized. He’d seen it out the window of his home barely two hours before, wafting toward the city.

That’s the blasted Blight.

“Get out,” he said, his voice sharp, tighter than he wanted it to be. “Everyone. Right now. Out of the speeder.”

“Ryden, how are we supposed to—”

He spun toward her, fixed her with a look that carried with it twenty years of trusted judgment that had, by and large, usually been right.

“Now, Calina. All of us. Leave everything.”

At hearing the conversation, Sixbee woke up from its dormant state, the droid’s sky-blue eyes lighting up.

“May I be of assistance?” the machine asked.

“Get the kids out of the speeder,” Ryden said, levering his own door open.

Panic had begun to set in, not just in the family but among everyone trapped in that narrow lane approaching what had once been the Offworld Transport Terminal. Ryden could see the whole scenario in his head. He knew exactly what had happened. The Blight had appeared at the spaceport—but not at the surface. Below the enormous structure, eating away at its foundations, until it just . . . collapsed, into a yawning pit of gray-white ashen death.

Ryden took stock. His family was out of the speeder and on the street, along with many other families, people, droids, even some animals. People were beginning to understand what was happening. They were beginning

to run. Someone knocked into Davet, hard, and the boy stumbled. Ryden stepped forward, grabbing his arm, steadying him.

“You okay?” he asked.

His son nodded, looking younger than he had in ages.

“You need to keep your sister safe,” Ryden said. “You have to run now. Go, that way, right now. Your mother and I will be right behind you.”

Davet looked for Shanna and grabbed her hand. In her other, she held the little sack containing her scalepig. And if Davet looked like a child, well, Ryden’s daughter looked like a baby. Off they went, weaving between the abandoned speeders, trying to make headway within the rush of other travelers seeking safety.

Sixbee was out of the speeder, too, awaiting instructions. Ryden rapped the droid on its tarnished head and pointed in the direction his children had gone.

“With them!” he shouted over the rumbling, louder now. “Keep them safe!”

The droid beeped softly in acknowledgment, and then it, too, was gone.

Ryden turned back to the speeder, running to the driver’s side, where Calina waited. She was sitting in the speeder, waiting for him, her eyes calm.

“You should go,” she said.

“Forget it,” he said.

Ryden bent, slung an arm around his wife’s waist, and lifted her. He was practiced in the maneuver—he did it every night, moving her gently from her hoverchair to their shared bed.

He put her over his shoulder and began to run, moving as quickly as he could, immediately feeling a deep ache settle into his back, ignoring it.

Behind them, an unending dull roar, screams, bursts of noise and wind.

Is that stuff under the entire city? Ryden thought.

He couldn’t run much faster. He couldn’t run much farther. He did both, until he couldn’t do either.

Ryden fell to the ground, Calina falling with him, her arms braced to protect her head, rolling. The roar behind them grew louder, closer, until there was nothing but the sound and the fear. Ryden crawled to his wife and held her and closed his eyes and waited for the end—they both did.

The end came.

But not the one they expected.

The roar faded away, leaving a clouded, gray silence punctuated with strange sounds—running water from ruptured pipes, sparking energy conduits, wails from the injured.

Ryden opened his eyes. He looked at his wife—she was alive, she was safe. Then he looked in the direction of what was once the Terminal District. There was nothing left. The buildings, the spaceport, any people or vehicles caught in the collapse—it was all just a deep, jumbled pit, the closest edge of which terminated not more than two meters from Ryden’s left foot.

He looked into the yawning maw and saw that its edges were ashen gray. Dead, ruined, gone.

Blighted.

“Ryden,” Calina said, her voice wrung out, as if the Blight itself were speaking. “Where are we going to go?”

Chapter One

THE JEDI TEMPLE

Bree went down into the dark, to a place she was not supposed to be, as she had been told to do.

She was only nine years old, a member of the Jedi Order, on the older side of the youngest group of students being trained in the Jedi’s great temple on Coruscant—appropriately called younglings.

Bree descended another step, then paused to look back. Behind her, an arch of light awaited—the path back to the main levels of the Temple. She wanted to go back—to her friends, to her studies, to the sun, to the light.

But Bree had a job to do. She sighed, turned her eyes back to the stairs, and continued on her way.

The stairs were old. Everything in the Jedi Temple was old, but it didn’t look like it. Maintenance droids kept everything shining and clean. These steps were different. They were crumbled at their edges, with wisps of dust and dirt, even little dead bugs. Bree didn’t mind bugs. Her friend Toko was a different story, but Bree didn’t care so much. Creatures were creatures, big or small.

The staircase wound down, down, down, light provided by illumination globes strung along the walls. Most of the time, Jedi didn’t need

lights for something like this—they carried light with them—but the globes had been installed here when it became clear that this route would need to be used more frequently.

Is it getting hotter? Bree wondered.

She put her hand against the wall. Yes. She wasn’t imagining it. The wall wasn’t hot, not like a flame—more like a sun-warmed patch of stone in one of the Temple’s many terraces high above her. But there was no sun, not down here.

Bree pulled her hand away, frowning.

She continued down, moving faster, wanting to be done with this task. They shouldn’t have made me do this, she thought. They’re all so much stronger and older than I am. I’m just a kid. They could have found another way.

But there was no other way. Bree was just a kid, that was true, but she had eyes, and she had ears. The grown Jedi were too busy with all the terrible crises that had landed upon their Order, one after the other. Jedi Knights were . . .

Dead, she thought. They’re dead, killed and eaten by the monsters. The Nameless.

Not a good thought while deep beneath the Temple, descending a rapidly narrowing staircase that seemed to be closing in on her, the walls changing now from rough-cut stone blocks to a different kind of surface that looked like the rock had been melted and frozen again, like it had been hurt.

Bree had an important message to deliver, and she had to do it in person. This far down, the communications devices didn’t work to call up to the surface. Droids were too slow, and the Order didn’t have very many. The ones they did have were busy with other important tasks, too.

So who did they send? The Jedi who weren’t good enough yet for anything else—the younglings.

Bree was not afraid. She was brave. The Order had taught her how to be brave. But she saw no harm in hurrying. She saw no harm, in fact, in running.

The young Jedi rushed down the stairs, leaping down two at a time,

becoming increasingly certain that something was chasing her, its sharp claws clacking behind her at exactly the same moments as her own footsteps. She would reach the bottom of the stairs and there would be no one to help her—the monster would have gotten there first—nothing but chalky stone statues that used to be Jedi, and then it would get her and . . .

Bree’s foot landed hard on the ground below the last step. She stumbled, fell, skidded along the ground, feeling the skin on her palms and knees scrape.

“Agh!” she cried.

She lay flat on the dirty stone, which was now most definitely not warm but hot. She breathed in and out, in and out, using the techniques she’d been taught to push back the pain, push back the shock and fear. Bree found the Force, which she thought of as a friend that could help her do amazing things if she could only find the right way to ask. Just then, she didn’t think she could find the focus to ask the Force for much of anything, but even knowing it was there helped her feel better.

You are a Jedi, she thought. Get up, girl.

Bree pushed herself up, brushed grit from her palms and knees, and stood. She looked ahead down the dim corridor the stairs opened to and saw that the lights got brighter in the distance.

That’s it. Almost there.

Bree found her way through the corridor, all but running by the time she reached its end. The corridor opened into a larger room carved out of the same raw stone as the rest of the area, now almost seeming to glisten or glow.

The Force was here, too. Bree could sense it strongly. It still felt like a friend, but the kind of friend who always had bad ideas, the kind that was always trying to get you to go along with adventures that would get you in trouble. She didn’t like it.

At the far end of this new room was an open door, tall and wide, the door itself made of rusted metal, as heavy as a starship panel. That was her destination—just what she’d been told to expect.

Through the door would be, at last, other people. Bree realized how alone

she had felt on that long, slow descent. She’d hated it, even though she had been taught over and over that she wasn’t supposed to hate anything.

The chamber beyond the door was good-sized. Mostly empty except for Jedi, a lot of Jedi. Most were seated in a circle on the floor, eyes closed, focused-seeming. A sort of hum arose from them, although it wasn’t an actual sound. It was something you could just feel. Bree thought it was her friend that was humming.

Bree couldn’t see what was inside the circle, but she knew. She’d been warned about it. All the younglings were talking about it, though none had seen it. It was called the Blight, and it was a monster, too, as bad as the Nameless but scarier.

Not all the Jedi were meditating in the circle. Others were seated against the wall or stretched out on the ground, asleep, using parts of their white-and-gold temple robes as pillows. It made Bree a little sad to see how dirty the white parts of the robes had gotten down here. Up above, everything was always nice and clean.

She looked down at herself, realizing her own robes were no better. Worse, maybe, after her fall.

A few of the resting Jedi were sitting on supply crates, drinking from bulbs of water or eating nutristicks, chatting quietly to one another. Bree didn’t know their names. Ever since the Council implemented the Guardian Protocols and brought everyone back to the Temple from the Jedi outposts in the Outer Rim, there were too many to keep track of.

They were a human woman with long brown hair and pale skin and a Twi’lek man, the lekku hanging from his head a beautiful blue.

The woman noticed her. “Youngling,” she said, her voice weary but not unwelcoming, “you’re not supposed to be here. This is a dangerous place.”

“I was sent,” Bree said. “They sent me. From . . . upstairs.”

Bree turned and pointed back the way she had come, immediately feeling silly.

“I see,” said the Twi’lek. “You come with a message from the surface world for us underground dwellers, young one?”

“Please, Stalwick, can’t you see the poor girl’s in no mood?” said the lady Jedi.

“Apologies, Master Byre,” the other Jedi said. “Was just trying to, ah, lighten things up a bit down here.”

Oh, Bree told herself. I guess he was making a joke.

“I’m supposed to fetch Master Yoda,” she said. “There’s something he needs to see.”

The Twi’lek’s expression hardened slightly. Not a frown, more like the look her teachers would get on their faces before they demonstrated how to do something really difficult with the Force. Like a getting ready look.

The Jedi glanced at each other. They both stood, and each tapped another resting Jedi on the shoulder. These two nodded as well, seeming tired, so tired.

“Yoda’s needed above,” Master Byre said. “We need to pull him out.”

Neither of the other Jedi answered, just accepted the reality of the situation, and all four moved toward the circle of meditating Jedi. They found places among them, sat down, closed their eyes, and that strange hum Bree was hearing with her sense of the Force grew louder.

But that was not all. When the Jedi had moved to make room for the new arrivals, the circle had opened up enough for Bree to see what was inside.

Despite herself, she gasped. Despite all the training, all the work her teachers had done to help her set fear aside, Bree was only nine years old, and when she saw death not five meters away, separated from her only by Jedi who seemed to be using all their strength to hold it back, yes, she was afraid.

That’s the Blight, she thought. The Blight is here. Right here, under the Temple!

It was a patch of gray-white rot, dusty and dead. The opposite of a flower or a butterfly or any living thing or a friend.

They said nothing could stop it. That it just ate and ate and ate, killing everything it touched, turning it into more of itself. And it was here, just a staircase away from everything and everyone she knew, everything she loved. The Jedi were here holding it back, but they all looked so tired.

How long can they keep it back? Not forever.

They said nothing could stop the Blight.

Bree felt tears brimming in her eyes. This was all too much, too much. One of the other Jedi who had been resting moved toward the circle, toward a small figure, smaller than any of the others. Pale-green skin, head bald but for a few shocks of white hair, big pointy ears. Bree knew him— every Jedi did. This was Yoda. Like every youngling in the Order, Bree had learned important lessons from the ancient Grand Master. Hundreds of years old yet he made time for every child brought into the Order’s care.

Yoda was smiling. His eyes were closed, and his face radiated peace. As the other Jedi touched him lightly on the shoulder, the smile faded away like smoke from a blown-out candle. Yoda got slowly to his feet, assisted by the other Jedi, and Bree heard a groan wash across the other Knights and masters in the circle. Their bodies shifted, they sat more heavily, and Bree understood what had happened.

It took four of them to replace Yoda, she thought.

Yoda shook his head slightly, as if clearing it after waking from a dream. He looked up toward Bree and began making his slow way over to her, favoring one leg, moving with a limp. She didn’t want to get any closer to the Blight, but she walked toward him, and so when he stumbled, she was there to catch him.

Yoda weighed almost nothing. He was like a baby. She steadied the great master. He smiled at her.

“Thank you, Bree,” Yoda said.

He glanced around the cavern, his gaze alighting on a short, gnarled length of wood, bent at one end to make a sort of handle. He raised one tiny green hand, and the stick whipped across the chamber to land in his outstretched palm. He set one end on the ground and leaned forward, putting his weight upon the cane.

Yoda made a slight sound of dissatisfaction, a grumbling chortle.

“An injury from times past, it is,” Yoda said. “Aggravated by these exertions. Fine, I will be. Worry not.”

Bree didn’t know if Yoda was talking to her or to himself.

He looks old, she thought, suddenly sad. I know he is old, but he’s never looked old.

“Sent for me, you were?” Yoda asked, his large dark eyes focused on her. “A reason, did the Council give? The climb is long, and my work here is important.”

“I’m sorry, Grand Master Yoda,” Bree said. “They didn’t tell me much. Only that the selection of the Nine is set to begin soon. If you can be spared here, they thought—”

Yoda’s eyes widened. He made a hrrmph sound deep in his throat, then headed for the cavern’s exit, his cane clacking on the stone with every step.

“Yes, be there, I should,” Yoda said. “Let us go, young Bree. This is no place for a youngling.”

Bree could not agree more.

The Song of the Force sang of dread, and Avar Kriss could not sleep. She sat in her chamber in the Jedi Temple, her back against the smooth stone wall, her bare legs drawn up to her chest.

Beside her, Elzar Mann lay asleep in her bed, his chest rising and falling smoothly. She listened to him breathe, and she listened to the Song.

Avar thought about what she was hearing. The Force came to her as music, and she had learned to interpret it as a source of information, but it could also be misleading. Because the Force was part of everything, its melodies chimed through the smallest insect with as much complexity as the galaxy itself. She had studied at the Jedi Temple for more than three decades. In that time, she had found ways to calibrate her perceptions, to understand what she was hearing and what it was telling her. Most of the time. Sometimes, she became wrapped up, all but lost, barely herself, and had to regain focus as best as she could.

It was this way for all Jedi who used the Force. They each experienced it their own way, but its power, its depth and breadth, its majesty . . . that was universal.

What am I hearing, then? she thought. These notes of doom woven through the Song . . . is it the other Jedi in the Temple? We can tamp down our fears while we are awake, but when we’re asleep . . . our dreams are beyond our control.

Although Elzar might disagree, Avar considered, watching his calm, peaceful face in the dim light filtering in through her chamber’s window.

Lately, they’d been spending every night together that they could. They had an unspoken acknowledgment that their obligations to the Order came before anything else. The many tasks and missions they were each assigned meant it was rare for them to be in the same place for any significant length of time. Any moments the Force gave them to be together, they tried to use well.

Dawn was coming. Avar could sense it. She sighed. No more sleep tonight.

A soft chime sounded from the datapad resting on the small, simple desk not far from her bed. Avar reached for the device. A message had come in, set at the highest priority level. She read it and froze, a chill running through her body.

“What is it?” Elzar said, his voice low, grainy with sleep.

“I’m sorry,” Avar said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t,” he said, turning toward her, pushing himself up on one elbow, scratching lightly at the edge of his dark beard. “Whatever you read on that datapad did. It felt like your soul was dunked in ice water.”

Avar sighed. Her link with Elzar was unique. Friendship, love, attraction, amplified and underscored through their power in the Force. They couldn’t read each other’s minds. It was nothing like telepathy—more that the normal Jedi sensitivity to emotional states was amplified between them. What one felt, they both felt. That bond had become stronger since they had finally allowed themselves to just . . . be what they were to each other.

Avar Kriss loved Elzar Mann, and Elzar loved her back—simple enough, and yet endlessly complicated.

“I received a message from the Jedi Council,” Avar said, holding up her datapad. “They’ve asked me to be part of a mission designed to

WARS: TRIALS

JEDI address both the Blight and the Nameless—but it’s not an assignment. It’s a request. If I say no, they’ll move on to other Jedi.”

Elzar nodded. “They’re doing it this way so everyone will feel they have a true chance to refuse, if they want to,” he said. “As little pressure as possible. This mission . . . it’s that bad?”

Avar looked down at the datapad again, reading the words. The mission description was light on detail, but even what was there . . .

“I’m . . . not sure it’s survivable,” she said. “Neither are the Council. They make that clear. They know what they’re asking.”

Elzar reached out, taking a strand of her blond hair and tucking it behind her ear. He let his hand rest on her cheek for a moment, then lifted it and extended it toward the desk. He’d been working before they ended the previous day, researching some esoteric, near-forgotten technique of the Force. His own datapad rose into the air from the desk and moved smoothly to his outstretched hand.

Without a word, he powered it on. A moment’s hesitation, then he looked at her, and she knew what he would say before he spoke.

“I don’t have anything,” Elzar said.

He set the datapad down on the bed, laying his hand flat on its surface. The corner of his mouth twitched upward, an acknowledgment of how little control anyone really had over their fate. Nothing was constant except that nothing was constant.

The two Jedi stared at each other. Here it was, the test they’d both known would come eventually. But so much sooner than either had expected and so much more final. A parting, one Avar knew might be the last.

“You have to go,” Elzar said.

“Not yet,” she replied.

Dawn broke, the sun lifting above the horizon and sending a soft glow into the chamber. She could see Elzar’s face clearly now. Jedi or not, he didn’t want her to leave, didn’t want her to accept the mission, didn’t want to lose what they had, against all odds, found together.

Neither did she. Jedi or not.

Another chime sounded, this time from Elzar’s datapad. His gaze dropped to it.

“Maybe someone else declined the mission,” he said. “Or maybe they’re sending the requests out one at a time.”

“Does it matter?” Avar said.

“Not at all,” Elzar answered.

Without another word, they each tapped a button on their datapads, confirming their acceptance of the Council’s request. In seconds, another message appeared, this time with details of the full briefing—its location and timing, an hour away.

“Not much time,” Elzar said. “We need to get ready.”

“Not yet,” Avar said again, reaching for him.

Elzar Mann took a deep breath. The air smelled of growth, of rich soil and the plants and blooms that filled every centimeter of floor space, other than the walking paths laid down in meandering loops throughout the chamber. The room was built tall, and trees stretched their limbs to its roof, climbing vines dangling from them and from alcoves placed along the walls.

The ceiling was a massive artificial weather system, programmed to display a full day–night cycle for the plants. It was part of a comprehensive internal environment system that could even produce rain, in a steady, gentle bath most conducive to the needs of the vegetation.

The chamber was a great garden built within the Jedi Temple, a hidden refuge within the endless cityscape that was Coruscant, a way to encounter the natural world on a planet that so forcefully rejected it. It was called the Room of a Thousand Fountains, and yes, those too were present, fountains of every size producing a burbling music that reminded Elzar of what Avar heard when she connected with the Force. He’d heard it too, once, the first time they let themselves be together. Avar’s song had never really left him.

All paths through the chamber eventually led to a large open space at its center, floored by gravel raked into intricate patterns every morning by the Temple’s maintenance droids. The swirls and spirals were disrupted throughout the day by the movements of Jedi, a symbolic representation of order falling to chaos, returned again to order before the next dawn.

Elzar did not envy those droids their task that night. The patterns in the gravel had been obliterated, disturbed by the footsteps of about two dozen Jedi assembled here at the request of the High Council.

They had all received the same message. They knew why they were here. The Blight, the Nameless, or both. The end of the Jedi. The end of everything.

Eight members of the Jedi High Council were present, gathered around a short pedestal in the center of the space. This held two objects. The first was a metal rod, about half a meter long, with an ornate disk fused to one end, a single large gem at its center. The second was a large chunk of some metallic ore, crystalline in structure, reflecting the light in odd ways Elzar would have liked to examine more closely.

The eight Council members represented the entirety of that body. In better times, there would have been more. The Council had twelve seats. Four sat empty because the three Jedi Masters and one Grand Master who had held them were dead. Not for centuries had so many losses been suffered at once.

Master Adampo, Master Ada-Li Carro, and Grand Master Pra-Tre Veter were killed by the Nameless, those implacable beasts who seemed evolved precisely to counter all the Jedi’s strengths.

The last empty seat on the Council belonged to Stellan Gios, and he had died a different way.

He held the seat for what . . . a few months? Elzar thought. Until the Nihil murdered him like they murdered so many others.

Elzar allowed himself to remember Stellan for a few moments—his goodness, his strength—then set the past aside and returned to the now. He looked toward Avar—she felt Stellan’s loss as keenly as he did. Once,

it had just been the three of them. The Firebrands, an unbreakable trio— until they were broken.

A strand of Avar’s golden hair had escaped the diadem she wore— a gift from him to replace one lost during her time behind enemy lines in the Nihil Occlusion Zone. He wanted to adjust it but held himself back. Elzar did not particularly care what people thought about him and knew Avar did not, either—but there was a time and a place.

He took in the other Jedi gathered in the chamber, all wearing the bright white-and-gold temple robes. Elzar knew everyone present—a sampling of the very best and brightest in the entire Order. Not just the members of the High Council, extraordinary Jedi almost by definition, but many others. Elzar noted Reath Silas and his former master Cohmac Vitus, Bell Zettifar and the Wookiee Burryaga, the Kotabi bond-twins Terec and Ceret, the blademaster Zaviel Tepp. Even someone who was not a Jedi at all but once had been, the Tholothian monster-hunter Ty Yorrick. She stood alone, apart from the Jedi, giving off an impression of formidability and skill.

Elzar was glad to see her. Ty was a sort of mercenary—she hunted great beasts for a living. She carried a lightsaber, but that was far from the end of her personal armory. They had worked together more than once, and he’d found her reliable, resourceful, and good in a fight. He suspected the Council had asked her here on his own recommendation, though he wasn’t quite certain why Ty had decided to accept. She’d left the Order as a teenager, for reasons that did not seem to have dimmed with time. He resolved to find a moment to ask her.

Vernestra Rwoh was here, too. The young Knight gave Elzar a cool nod, which he returned.

She doesn’t like me very much, he thought.

Vernestra had been the Padawan of Stellan Gios. It saddened Elzar that he had been so close with Stellan but could not find a way to connect with his most promising student.

Ultimately, though, Vern’s dislike of him didn’t matter, any more than the fact that Avar Kriss did like him very much. All of that needed

to fade away. They were all Jedi, nothing more, nothing less. Ties of emotion, history, and duty connected and strengthened everyone in the chamber. They had fought together, studied together, loved and lost together. Strands of obligation and memory and expectation and shared experience swirled through the room.

Grand Master Ry Ki-Sakka, known for his preternatural calm and piercing gaze, clapped his hands together twice. The chamber fell silent but for the fountains.

“We chose this place to meet,” said the Grand Master, gesturing toward the room with one outstretched hand, “because it is filled with life. A reminder of all that will be lost if we fail.”

His eyes roamed across the assembled Jedi before he continued, his voice tinged with sadness, “Every living thing in the galaxy is under threat of death. This is not hyperbole. Our studies, our observation, what we sense through the Force, and reports from across the galaxy all point to the same conclusion. The Blight, if not stopped, will consume the living Force from all life in existence. It might happen slowly, it might speed up, we are uncertain. But if nothing is done, it will happen. Everything— everything—will die.”

A chill ran through the room. Elzar sensed it clearly. The Jedi learned to conquer fear early in their training, so what he sensed could not be fear . . . but it surely felt like it.

“We have prepared a plan,” Master Rosason said from a few steps to the left of Grand Master Ki-Sakka.

Elzar held great admiration for Teri Rosason despite occasional friction between them in the past. Master Rosason had strong opinions and was unafraid to voice them. She was the sort of Jedi Elzar aspired to one day be, when his own hair turned gray and his face became a deeply lined record of a life deeply lived.

“There is no greater enemy for the Jedi Order than the Blight,” Rosason said with great dignity. “Whatever we must do to stop it, whatever cost is paid, that is what we will do. Does everyone in this room understand?”

Again, a pause. No one spoke. Master Rosason looked toward Yarael Poof, the long-necked, slim-headed Quermian.

“With the help of the hard work performed by Jedi Knight Reath Silas and . . . others . . .” Yarael said, “we are now certain that the Blight is directly connected to the creatures we have come to call the Nameless. The Blight is spreading because the Nameless were removed from their homeworld by Marchion Ro and his Nihil.”

A stir in the room. Some of the gathered Jedi were already aware of this fact, but many were not. The idea that any living beings were so connected to the Force that their physical location in the galaxy might affect literally everything else . . . it was quite a bit to take in.

“Through the efforts and sacrifice of a number of your fellow Jedi, we have captured twelve Nameless. They are secured here, within the Temple.”

More than just a stir this time. The idea that those beasts, those Jedi Killers, attuned so specifically to their weaknesses, were somewhere in the same building . . .

“The younglings,” said Bell Zettifar. “You can’t keep them here if there are Nameless.”

“The Nameless are well secured and under constant guard, Knight Zettifar,” said Yarael Poof, his head weaving slowly back and forth on his long, thin neck. “There is no safer place for younglings than the Jedi Temple.

“In any case, the Nameless will not be here for long. We will return them to their homeworld. That is the mission.”

“Will that be enough?” Bell asked, clearly deciding that if he’d questioned the Council once, he might as well do it twice. “We only have twelve Nameless. We know the Nihil must have stolen many more than that. Taking the creatures back to their homeworld is a good deed . . . something we should do—but will returning just a dozen create enough balance to stop the Blight?”

“We have no idea,” said another member of the Council, Oppo