━━━━━━ 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐔𝐄

the end of an era ━━━

━━━━━▼━━━━━

𝑨  𝑻𝑹𝑰𝑨𝑳  𝑶𝑭  𝑭𝑳𝑬𝑺𝑯.

That was all that was left to be completed. Skill, Courage, Spirit, Flesh, and Insight. Those five words had been dancing through Wynn's mind for the last six months ever since she had boldly asked her Master if she was ready to face the Trials of Knighthood. The hardest one would be the Trial of Spirit. It was a journey of the deepest meditation, a task that had always plagued Wynn. Meditation combined with visions of the future was a dangerous spiral. If her Master hadn't been supervising her, Wynn worried that she might become stuck within the confines of her own thoughts for eternity.

So after that day, Wynn thought that her trials would be passed with graceful ease. Surely, there was nothing that she had not already experienced in her twenty-three years of life.  She had come out on the top of her padawan clan as the best duelist. Her Echani roots gave her an advantage in acrobatic fighting and climbing, and she had already been forced to spend a full day in the archives sorting through the High Riddles of Dwartii as a punishment for somewhat reckless behavior in a speeder. Anything that came her way would be dealt with in due course. Mind or body, she was prepared for it all.

But the Trial of Flesh was something that Wynn had foolishly disregarded in her mental list of tasks. In the old days of the Order, it often involved dismemberment or bloodshed. Thankfully, the Jedi had grown out of that dark age. The Trial of Flesh was simply the separation of Master and Padawan, a relationship that even the council admitted blurred the lines of attachment. Master Amersu was her most trusted friend and mentor. She made Wynn feel purpose, and she had taught her everything and more. Even though she was on the high council, her Twi'lek master never made her feel like she was vying for attention. Her master challenged her padawan, but she also made Wynn feel safe and loved and whole. Wynn knew it would be hard not to see her master day in and day out, but she also knew that Master Vena Amersu would never be far if Wynn ever needed her.

The Trial of Flesh was also used to refer to battle scars. Wynn had gained one of those. From just below her right eye to the hollow of her cheek, a red and raw gash still stung. It had been sliced from the shrapnel of a bomb, an untimely blast that had changed everything.  But that pain was numbness compared to the hole in her chest. The desperate ache that had filled her bones and reminded her just how fragile her life was. She was not an immortal being. She was a girl again, all alone without anyone to guide her.

Because Master Amersu had died.

Their mission to Ryloth was supposed to be routine. Nothing out of the ordinary, just another small blockade that could be solved without much force. Master Amersu, being a Twi'lek herself, had been more than willing to volunteer her time to lead a mission to the treacherous terrain of her homeworld. Wynn wondered if it would be her last mission as a padawan. Now, in her eyes, that fleeting thought felt so selfish and abhorrent.

Wynn hadn't been worried. If there was going to be a disaster, she would have felt it. She would have woken up in the morning with a weight of premonition on her chest, and she would have warned her Master of the impending doom. But there had been nothing like that. Just ease and strength as they left Coruscant on a transport.

It had taken only fifteen minutes for them to realize they had walked into a trap.

Twi'lek soldiers fought for their lives against the Banking Clan's idiotic insistence of delaying inevitable defeat. Battalions of droids were sent down to the surface to destroy them all. Wynn had fought and swung her sabers until her arms started to grow fatigued and her brow was coated in dirt and sweat.

But even so, It was just another small-scale droid attack. They were supposed to be off Ryloth and back to Coruscant within the day.

How wrong they had been.

Master Vena Amersu--for the first time ever--had looked at her padawan with fear in her eyes. Her face had been stricken with panic, worry for the safety of others rather than herself. It was a selfless death, but it never should have happened. Both of the Jedi should have been able to sense it, but neither of them did. A bomb had exploded near them, and Wynn had felt the fiery heat of shrapnel before she even realized what was going on. And now, Wynnetka Adairi would alone have to pay the price.

Wynn had failed her master utterly and completely. Her gifts, her Third Sight, were supposed to be used to protect people from disaster. In her time of need, all her training had not done one thing to help her save Master Amersu. Even though she had scrubbed her hands red and raw, she could still feel the blue blood of her Master. Wynn had held her in those final moments, willing someone to come help her. Anyone at all. To let it not be true.

But no one came, and Wynnetka Adairi had passed her Trial of Flesh.

And her knighting ceremony had come, whether she wanted it to or not.

"Even in adversity, you still took command of the battle. The Council has decided your actions on Ryloth are more than enough to gain the rank of Jedi Knight."

The voice of Master Windu pulled her back to the council room. The late afternoon sun was dragging across the floor, painting everything in a golden light. It was picture perfect with not a thing out of place except for one glaring technicality that Wynn wished she could ignore.  Only one of the twelve seats was empty. The Council had yet to find a replacement for Master Amersu.  

She didn't know what she had expected them to tell her. The assignment of a new Master seemed unnecessary, but it was what she had hoped for, wasn't it? To at least have someone to talk to instead of feeling so desperately alone.  The disaster of Ryloth was deemed more than enough to warrant her promotion to Knighthood, though.  Master Amersu had spoken very highly of her padawan, and the Council knew it well.

From the center of the room, she could feel more than just eyes on her. They were searching her emotions, looking for something. A last attempt to make sure they had made the correct decision. They wouldn't find anything, she knew they wouldn't. Keeping her emotions to herself was one of her greatest talents. She imagined herself as an impasse, a wall. A vessel in a wide ocean, isolated and alone.

Master Yoda descended from his seat. He looked at her with a sympathetic pride. The loss of Master Amersu was not easy for the high council, either. Still, Wynn couldn't forget how not one of the council members in front of her had done anything more than giving her a fleeting, pitiful apology.

"Wynnetka Adairi," he said evenly. The sound seemed to echo in the chamber as he picked up one of the sabers, leaving the shoto blade on the ground.

The air seemed to grow even more still and solemn if it were possible. The only sound was the noise of the saber igniting. The green glow drew all the light in the room, reflecting in the eyes of Master Yoda.

"By the right of the Council, by the will of the Force, Jedi Knight of the Republic, I dub thee."

She bowed her head in reverence. The blade was moved to hover over her left shoulder. She could barely feel the heat of it. The pure energy of the Force was far more potent as it flowed through her. As he brought the blade over her right shoulder, she could smell the singed hair of her severed braid. She saw it on the floor. It was pure white, the only color to it was the green and yellow bands woven at the bottom of the long braid.

Master Yoda extinguished her saber, placing it back on the ground next to the other blade. She bowed deeper this time, taking one last look at the braid on the ground. As was expected, she replaced the sabers on her belt and walked out of the room in silence.

She had never understood why Jedi ceremonies involved so much solitude, until then. Everything they did was a sacrifice. To gain something, something else must be lost in its place. The silence was respect and acknowledgment of the change that had occurred. It had never weighed heavier on her shoulders than it did then.

As she walked down the corridor, she moved her hand to touch the piece of hair. It curled in her grasp, barely long enough to hold. It felt strange to not have it there after so many years.

Her youth was gone, and not because of the ceremony. It had dissipated when she watched Master Amersu die in her arms, desperately trying to speak but no sound passing through her lips. The fire was burning everywhere. Almost nothing remained unscared from the bomb, including Wynn herself.

She would not let herself cry. The Echani people of her homeworld saw crying as a weakness. Tears were not tolerated. But Wynn knew that later, in the silence of her quarters, she would sit on the edge of her bed and weep for long hours into the night. Until then, she would keep on the facade of false calm.

There was one person--and one person only--who she might have had the strength to talk to at that moment. She hadn't seen Obi-Wan in five years, not since the night before their Masters had left for separate missions. After that, they were never at the Temple at the same time. They had been inseparable for as long as they could be during their training as younglings, and then as much as they could as padawans. For some reason, Wynn had the sinking feeling that just like everything, that too was only a part of the past.

She sniffed a little, blinking away the heat of her tears as she walked under the arches of the Great Hall. She had refused, stubbornly, to do anything about the scar on her cheek. Master Fitso had insisted kindly enough that she be attended to, but she didn't want to be. It felt wrong in so many indescribable ways to be taken care of when her Master was dead on the ground.

Master Amersu was dead.

Dead.

Rumors would swirl around her, especially since she was now a Knight. Even though Jedi were supposed to follow the code, it did nothing to stop the gossip among the younger members of the Order.  

There had been times when Wynn had considered leaving the Order.  Escaping the life that she led for a chance at the galaxy beyond the starless sky of Coruscant had always been an option in the back of her mind.  But it was her responsibility to press onward.  She was a Jedi Knight.  She would not run astray, and she would honor the lessons she had been given.

Wynn picked her head up a little, feeling the weight of her long white ponytail drag across her bare bicep. She would do what she had always done.

 She would make her Master proud.

━━━━━▲━━━━━