#i'm not saying there's going to be abeloth but i'm not NOT saying there's going to be abeloth | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

magnetarbeam · 10 months

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Voices of the Force: An Introduction, I guess

[This post, I've decided, shall be edited to keep up with the latest versions of my constantly evolving ideas on this.]

[Last update: 4-7-24]

This idea has existed in some capacity for more than a year now, originating when I read on Wookieepedia about the connection between Abeloth and Mortis, inserted the Daughter!Ahsoka concept, which is one of my favorite things in fic, and summarily decided I wanted to see Legends Ahsoka be pulled out of stasis and use the Daughter's power and kick Abeloth's ass as a plot progression. As I've actually learned Legends, it has only snowballed from that into something vaguely resembling a full-scale attempt at a next major arc that follows FotJ.

There's a whole prologue that shows what I think the Legends version of the Siege of Mandalore looked like, and the part of that that's relevant going forward is that at the end, she's trying to escape and the ship she's on takes a hit that damages the hyperdrive in such a way that the ship doesn't fully enter hyperspace, and is therefore subject to extreme relativistic time dilation effects, so decades on the outside pass in less than a second for her.

When she finally hits a gravity well, and is pulled completely out of hyperspace, the date is 44.6 ABY. I've gone back and forth about the length of timeskip, but what I'm fairly settled on at this moment is one month (on a ten-month in-universe calendar) after the end of Fate of the Jedi, which I've made several retcons of because I can't stand those last two books.

First of all, Vestara didn't get her character assassinated and showed that she could be a Jedi, and is now training under Luke.

Second, Jaina and Jag and Zekk are all married to each other.

Third, some edits to Abeloth's backstory. I'm keeping her relationship to the rest of the Ones, but the part where Denning's bugs tried to retcon the entire plot of her release by saying it was actually the result of an extended period of war or whatever is going straight to hell. The same is true of the part where apparently Luke is aware of what happened on Mortis in the arc of the show because Yoda told him in metaphor or whatever. That is so stupid.

As I'm defining the backstory now, it turns out that the Celestials were physical beings that achieved such a deep understanding of the Force that they were able to partially merge themselves into it. They thought they controlled its flow, but they were proven incorrect when they were completely blindsided and caught off guard by the Rakata developing technology that drew upon use of the Force as a power source. The Celestials' power became their weakness, and they were so closely intertwined with the Force that they were unable to adapt, and so they died.

As annoying as the retcon of the entire plot of her release is, the idea that Abeloth can escape when there's an extended period of war in the galaxy is consistent enough with the rule of her feeding on pain and fear. I've chosen, for this AU, the times Abeloth escaped before, instead of just being from too much war, were also the result of other cages being eventually proven insufficient to hold her under those circumstances, and the Maw is the design that finally worked.

(Depending on how the timing works out, I would very much like to keep Luke having the whole origin story explained to him in front of two GA military branch heads and the Chief of Staff, because that's hilarious.)

Fourth, Abeloth's control broke when the Jedi did some Force thing to free the people of Coruscant, and the loss of the connections caused Abeloth to be weakened enough that the Jedi were able to destroy her final bodies, kind of like how when she was turning Taalon into her tentacle cleaner and Vestara killed him, it fucked with Abeloth so much as to swing the balance of that fight and save Luke and stuff.

Fifth, Tahiri also didn't get her character assassinated. I haven't quite figured out what role I want her to have instead through LotF and FotJ, but she uses both the names Tahiri and Riina, and I have come up with several other headcanons about how she applies both the Jedi and Yuuzhan Vong parts of her identity together.

Sixth, Kenth Hamner didn't die stupidly and effectively led the Jedi throughout Luke's exile. He's supposed to be a guy who can make those kinds of decisions, like the Jedi openly opposing, and later deposing, Daala.

As an explanation to the common citizens of the galaxy as to what the fuck just happened on Coruscant, the Alliance and the Jedi put out a press release that explains a basic summary of Abeloth's nature, but omits her origins, and it's all phrased very strategically so people are led to believe the Sith were the architects of the takeover, not just as much of a pawn as everyone else. It's political, but it's what most people will probably believe, and it directs the will of the people toward decisive military action against the Lost Tribe, which is something they can immediately do, and do successfully, at least in the realm of space combat. In terms of fleet strength, the Lost Tribe is a moderately successful pirate gang with delusional aspirations of becoming a force of galactic conquest and stuff.

Two days after the defeat of Abeloth, when Alliance Chief of State Wynn Dorvan appointed General Gavin Darklighter as the Supreme Commander of the Alliance military, his first order was for the entire Ninth Fleet to enter the new gaping hole in the Maw and hit Abeloth's planet with a turbolaser bombardment heavy enough to melt the entire crust, so as to deny anyone else access to the power offered by the planet's weird Force artifacts. Despite his promotion to Supreme Commander, Gavin still has to act as head of the Alliance Marine Corps because they're facing a severe shortage of experienced high-level officers who haven't been implicated in either Caedus' machinations or the Lecersen Conspiracy.

The Galactic Alliance Navy, retaliating in full force, drove the Lost Tribe of the Sith back into hiding in less than a week, in several one-sided battles heavily featured on the holonews. All remaining Sith fleet elements returned to Kesh to try to sort out their command structure after losing their entire Circle on Coruscant. Obviously, competition is fierce. Ultimately, the victor is a Saber that I haven't named yet, who was the mastermind of a Lost Tribe side project that aimed to revive the Black Sun in service of the Sith, through a mind-controlled clone of Xizor. (The Black Sun revival is referenced offhand by Jaden Korr in Backlash, and they speculate that a Xizor clone might be involved, but the rest is my headcanon.) Not only does the architect of this project now have more power than anyone on Kesh on account of it, it's a clear focus for the Sith's efforts going forward. Through these operations, they've also come into contact with the One Sith, and it doesn't happen instantly, but the two factions end up with an alliance, combining their forces and knowledge in the Black Sun project.

One month after Abeloth was defeated for the time being and the Lost Tribe was kicked off Coruscant, the Jedi have finished the process of withdrawing from the Galactic Alliance, and have relocated their base of operations to Shedu Maad, a formerly abandoned mining world hidden deep in the Transitory Mists of the Hapes Cluster. Diplomatic relations with the former Jedi Knight and current Queen Mother of the Hapes Consortium have secured access to all the resources the Jedi would ask for to do their job that they can't get from the planet, a rounding error compared to the economic capacity Tenel Ka must have under her command.

Throughout that month, the Jedi have been collectively experiencing visions. Many are the usual cryptic metaphors, but an formerly unheard-of number are sure they're seeing literal truth. Eventually, they piece together most of the true story about the events on Mortis in the arc of the show. This is how they know of the Dagger in this timeline. The only part that's kept from the commonly understood version is what happened with Ahsoka's death and resurrection, which was shown only to the five remaining blood relatives of Anakin Skywalker, and is known secondhand by Zekk, because of his bond with Jaina, and Tenel Ka, who had to get let in on it so she knows what she has to keep Allana from revealing. They decided there was most likely a reason only they saw it, and decided to keep it between them for the time being.

By the beginning of this, another part of this that the Jedi are starting to discuss is how Mortis impacts their Force philosophy. As far as this AU is concerned, the dominant Jedi philosophy up to this point still reflects the idea that, in its most basic nature, the Force is a unified whole, with no division between Light and Dark, and a self-sustaining balance. Light and dark do exist in the Force, however, because of the existence and actions of sentient beings, and it's the actions of sentient beings that can swing the balance one way or the other. This is a decision made by Luke in the last NJO book, based on a revision of ideas developed by Vergere and Jacen. The deal about Vergere turning out to maybe have actually been a Sith (either way, it's pretty obvious in hindsight that she was setting Jacen on a trajectory to a slow fall) may have raised objections there, but it seems to me that Jacen's fate only supports that interpretation. He had spent five years on a sojourn to learn about the Force from those who viewed and used it in ways that differ from a fundamental Light/Dark binary. He arguably may have a better claim to having transcended that binary than any other Jedi in history, definitely more than any other Jedi around post-Palpatine, but at the most simple, Caedus was Dark because he was evil.

The reason that Mortis results in issues there is that it would seem to be an objective confirmation of a fundamental split binary between Light and Dark, but as the Jedi have been seeing more and more lately, there is no lack of groups who view, and use, the Force in ways that don't fit into that, and it works fine for them. The methods of the Aing-Tii, for example, wouldn't be possible if the Force was only light and dark. This dichotomy is going to hopefully be a pretty important part, and its eventual resolution.

Another issue is that the stories they've heard from the Killiks have some logical inconsistencies between them. The last time Abeloth escaped, the Celestials had to still have been around, because that supposed level of galactic devastation would not have been forgotten in forty thousand years. What were the Celestials actually doing then, if they were that powerful, that the Son and Daughter had to put Abeloth in a new cage every time? Should the Celestials have been able to stop her? These questions are raised, but no answers will present themselves for a long time.

This is where we get to the actual plot: Ahsoka comes out of her time jump because the jump's trajectory intersects the gravity well of a planet called Vriaal II, which i pulled out of my ass because I needed a planet sixty-four light-years from Mandalore, and which happens to be the target of an attack by a random pack of merciless slavers working for Black Sun. Vriaal II is the kind of planet too far on the fringe for any centralized government to care about it, so Ahsoka is very surprised to see the Jedi showing up to put an end to the operation.

The first person Ahsoka actually meets in this era is Vestara, who has to repeat her entire introduction because Ahsoka's so distracted by being a disaster lesbian. Vestara is the one who tells Ahsoka how much time she's missed.

Ahsoka's more than willing to participate in that effort, and it's not until after the fight ends that she talks to the commander of the Jedi strike team, Master Jaina Solo, and starts to process the fact that she's missed two generations of history. How shocked Ahsoka is by that still mostly nebulous knowledge strikes a chord for Jaina, because Ahsoka just had everyone and everything she cared about ripped away in the blink of an eye.

As Jaina herself once put it: "I'm not afraid of dying. I'm afraid of surviving... and getting to the end of the war and discovering that I'm all alone, that everyone I knew and cared for is gone." Jaina understands that kind of loss, but even she hasn't lost that much.

The backstory I've decided on for the modern Jedi's knowledge of Ahsoka is that they found all the old Jedi's records of her in 31 ABY. At that point, the Jedi were in the process of being more fully integrated under the authority of the Alliance, and hearing about Ahsoka's trial really strengthened the opposition to that, especially since Fey'lya was still fresh in people's minds.

Motivated by empathy, Jaina explains to Ahsoka about how the Jedi have withdrawn from the Galactic Alliance. Considering that, and how there's no place for her anywhere else, and that it must be the will of the Force for her to have wound up in exactly the place at exactly the right time to see exactly the best thing to convince her to rejoin the Jedi, she decides to do so.

However, she continues to insist that she's not ready to be a Knight.

Ahsoka is taken back to Shedu Maad, and is assigned a room and gets the sixteen hours of sleep she desperately needs. The next day, she wakes up to find that Vestara and Ben, the latter of whom she's meeting for the first time, are now her roommates. (Junior Knights and apprentices sharing rooms is canon according to FotJ: Outcast.) They get to be very good friends, very quickly. The reason Ves realizes she's bi is that she reciprocates Ahsoka's massive crush. There's no actual romance, because they both have too many other things to deal with at the moment, and they both need some solid platonic connections, but they kiss a lot.

The day after she arrives, Ahsoka does some research about the fate of the people she knew in the Clone Wars, and shortly thereafter is taken on as Jaina's first apprentice. Jaina offers that because she sees a lot of herself in this woman. Specifically herself when she was, like, 20 years old. I really think their arcs in TCW and NJO have some pretty important points in common in terms of self-discovery and coming of age on the frontlines of some of the bloodiest wars in history (the bloodiest, in Jaina's case), and I feel like even though it's been over a decade since the end of NJO, Jaina's still in a particular position to connect and relate to Ahsoka here. Also, Jaina really feels a need to give Ahsoka somebody to know and care for. And she got the vision. She knows that this woman has a destiny that's of huge importance to the Jedi and the galaxy, even if they don't have any idea what it is.

Ahsoka's reasoning for taking the offer is that the Clone Wars forced her to grow up to have a mostly military skillset, and even though she rationally knew Jedi weren't supposed to be soldiers, that doesn't bother her too much since she never got much of a chance to be anything else, especially since she's good at it anyway. In this period, the role of warriors is not mutually exclusive with the role of the Jedi, as it was thought to be in the Ruusan period, but there are still fundamental differences being Jedi acting militaristically and actual soldiers, and Ahsoka hopes that maybe Jaina, the Sword of the Jedi(tm), can show her how to express her natural talent and learned skill at fighting in ways that line up with Jedi ideals and doctrine. It's her first answer to one of the first questions she's asked: How can she best serve the Force?

After that decision is made, Jaina takes her new apprentice to see Cilghal and is instantly like, "She needs a few months of rest and recovery." Because they know what wars like hers do to a person, and Jaina has actually started to develop a noticeable amount of mental health by FotJ, which I think goes back to the scene in LotF: Fury where Jag has her take a day off, after he puts himself in a position for her to almost kill him to make it obvious how much of herself she's losing to her constant training, and then orders her to take a day off.

Another minor character I want to pick up into an important role here is Fala, who shows up as a convenient plot device in FotJ: Conviction. She's a small-time smuggler, who Luke thinks is maybe twenty, and I'm establishing as seventeen, who's Force-sensitive and finds out because Abeloth turns her mind into a dark side nexus. Luke saves her from that, and leaves Fala and her father with advice to talk to the Jedi if any lingering side effects present themselves. My concept for turning that into a premise for a full-scale character is that she still retains some imprints of Abeloth's thoughts and memories and personality, and she does talk to the Jedi about it. A major trait of her character at this point is doing things specifically because Abeloth's impulses would want her not to, or vice versa. To spite Abeloth's creepy possessiveness, Fala leaves alone, not letting her dad come with her, when she goes to the Jedi about it all. What she finds out is that the Jedi can't do much. The scars in her head from what Abeloth inflicted on her are too deep, and the dark side will always be part of her to some extent. Learning that the dark side is what begets such evil, and already having severe mental trauma from it, Fala is terrified of opening herself to the Force again. She is a naturally altruistic person, even though she's not used to expressing that part of herself first and foremost, and when she learns that at some unknown point Abeloth will come back, Fala chooses to join the Jedi because she wants to keep anyone else from having the same shit happen to them. She's taken on as an apprentice by Tahiri, who has also had similar irreversible mental trauma at the hands of the Yuuzhan Vong, and although it's not an exact comparison - the stuff Abeloth left in Fala's head isn't a full personality - Tahiri feels like she might be able to help Fala find a way to use the light side and do actual good in spite of the evil that she'll never completely banish.

This period lasts until about the end of the year 44 ABY. In that time, Ahsoka gets to know Jaina and Ben and Vestara and Luke and Leia and various other people around Shedu Maad. Vestara and Ahsoka figure out what they want to be to each other. Ahsoka learns a lot about modern Jedi operations and ideals and stuff.

At the core of modern Jedi militarism is the doctrine Luke lays out in the first Council meeting in Destiny's Way: "Aggression," as forbidden by the Jedi code, means making an unprovoked attack, or taking something that doesn't belong to you, or helping someone else do either of those things. I think the independent military actions that they engage in later, against Caedus and the Lost Tribe, mostly hold up well enough to that.

Three months or so after her arrival, Ahsoka's pulled to a meeting with Jaina, Ben, Luke, and Leia and finds out about the Daughter's life essence, and the circumstances around it, which she didn't remember, and no memory surfaces because she's told. Knowing this, she thinks that the way she can best serve the Force is to figure out what the Daughter had in mind for her, and then do it.

Finding out about this, and resolving to do that, also helps her deal with the inevitable survivor guilt, because she now knows that the reason she survived when everyone else she knew and loved didn't

By this point, Fala's still barely developed her skills in the Force, but because of Abeloth, she can sense that Ahsoka is the Daughter in some capacity. This also prompts Tahiri to find out about it from Jaina. Fala decides that because Abeloth's thoughts want to be possessive and stuff of her Daughter, Fala's going to make any and every possible effort to not get close or have any kind of positive thoughts whatsoever about Ahsoka.

It's a few weeks later that Ahsoka meets with the entire Council and the fact that she had the essence becomes known to all twelve Masters on the current Council - Luke, Leia, Corran, Kyp, Cilghal, Kam, Tionne, Kyle, Jaina, Saba, Kenth, and Octa.

They discuss some Force philosophy, the parts of which I haven't already mentioned here are a) the idea that an otherwise mortal life form could maybe influence the flow of the Force should be blasphemy to the servants of the Force, b) the Jedi aren't in the habit of committing lesser evils to oppose worse evils, so if Ahsoka can do that (which they still have no actual evidence of) she won't be punished for a power she doesn't want and didn't ask for, and c) the Daughter offered to let Anakin use her essence to resurrect Ahsoka. It was her idea first, which points to Ahsoka being meant to have this.

The choice that's made is to continue the mission to retrace Jacen's sojourn. The effort to expand their understanding of the Force is now relevant to the Order as a whole, and figuring out more about how Jacen fell is also still in their best interest. Jaina really just wanted to move on from that, but since Ahsoka is a) very relevant to the issues, and b) her apprentice, she ends up in charge of this mission.

#star wars legends #voices of the force au #ahsoka tano #abeloth #jaina solo #luke skywalker #ben skywalker #vestara khai #winged goddess ahsoka tano #tahiri veila #riina kwaad

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