Legends of the Jedi: Burning Bright/Part II

Dad had sort of trailed off and now just stared bitterly at the wall, occasionally drinking from his flask but saying nothing. I waited very patiently for several minutes, but when his storytelling spirit failed to appear, I took it upon myself to summon it.

"So what happened then?" I asked innocently.

Dad sneezed and wiped his nose on his sleeve, muttering to himself. Then, as if broken out of a trance, he continued the story with a good portion of his former vigor as though nothing had happened.

"Well, Mandalore the Visionary's failure to crush the rebel army – and his failure to kill their leader – shook the Mandalorian empire on Malachor V. Confidence in him wavered, but he still stayed in control. But he didn't talk much about his dreams after the battle with the rebels at Crescent.

"Sure enough, after the rebels escaped there, things began to unravel. A few more ransacked cities later, and the enemy got some real military hardware – speeders, tanks and the like – not to mention large enough numbers that they could split up into multiple armies. They moved in waves through the countryside, and when Mandalorian units met them, the rebels fought with immense desperation – and usually escaped mostly intact.

"The rebels were untrained, just peasants, really, but somehow they avoided taking any major defeats. Mandalore's followers were awe-struck, but he insisted that the only reason the enemy was staying together was their leader. There was just something about him that made sure he knew what to do, how to motivate his ragtag army of amateurs, where to move and where to attack.

"Mandalore retreated into seclusion for some time as the war dragged on, only seeing his advisors and top generals, no longer giving his grand speeches to the public. He focused himself entirely on plans and strategies, launching incredibly grandoise schemes to kill the rebel leader. Mandalore sent his most trusted assassins and spies to into the rebellion, bribed rebel commanders to betray their leader; all of them failed. He sent armies to flank and entrap the unit that the man traveled with; he always escaped.

"This went on and on. Mandalore the Visionary dedicated everything to finding and killing his enemy, but the mysterious rebel leader was always one step ahead of him. And all this time, the revolutionaries were growing only stronger and more organized. A few Mandalorian commanders actually defected to their side, having lost all of their faith in Mandalore, and sold their training and knowledge to the rebels."

As Dad went on and on, his voice became lower and drier, more desolate and morose. I sat barely beathing, drawn further and further into the story, even though I knew that it would not have, as they are called, a happy ending.

"It took only few years for the rebel army to grow so much that with each major victory they weren't just ransacking towns – they were capturing them. Actually taking and holding territory against retaliation. You see, by this time the rebels had managed to score enough victories and wear down the Mandalorian armies enough that most of them were tied up defending cities and bases, not to mention putting down smaller revolts in our own territory. There were only a few key units which could be spared to attack with.

"So city by city, the rebels grew and the Mandalorians shrank. They came in a great advance toward Trayus City, where Mandalore waited. They gutted our territories, and it soon became apparent that there was no winning the war now... but Mandalorians don't surrender. In that last campaign of the war, we killed as many of the rebels as we lost to them.

"The day before the rebels came to the gates of Trayus, Mandalore appeared and gave orders to the troops in the city, and organized their defenses, and then disappeared back into the palace. He had no inspiring words to share, and there was nothing to say. The rebels arrived, personally led by the man from nowhere, and the battle was terrible..."

Mandalore the Visionary stood at the edge of a balcony carved out of smooth gray stone, ignoring the hateful rain that beat upon him and the wind that roared at him. Behind a black-visored mask, he leaned against the ridge of stone that protected him from a fatal fall from his towering citadel and let his eyes wander. Above him, he saw a darkened sky that seemed to almost shatter apart with every burst of lightning as though his empire was up there in the clouds, shrieking its last breaths.

Below was Trayus City – his city, his crown – being torn asunder and ruined by the army of insurrectionists, its wealth plundered and its monuments desecrated, just as his people had done more than a decade before. Great writhing masses of golden fire set off by precision artillery strikes persisted against the downpour.

He gripped the edges of the platform and stared down into the largest of the infernos, which obscured and eclipsed the area where the Courtyard of Establishment had once stood. Built during the Decade of Prosperity, it had been a great plaza built to accommodate the skillfully-crafted bronzium sculptures of three hundred and fifty Mandalorian warriors who had fought in the first battle of Trayus City. In the very center of the courtyard, there had been a statue of a Mandalorian dueling sword, pointed upward toward the stars where their future waited.

Now that monument was in ruins, smashed to oblivion by bombardment and the fragments left to hungry flames.

He was the leader of his people, the superior of any other Mandalorian in the galaxy. He was the greatest among them in battle – as he should have been, for he was Mandalore. And he was their leader, the one who had led them here after his dreams, his grand promises; those dreams had enthralled them, as they should have, for he was called a visionary. But as grand as their victory over Malachor had been, so far more terrible would their defeat be. His people had trusted him, and now he had lost the war to a man with no name.

This war had been absolute torture. His dreams... they had never changed. They had all been alike, always showing great conquests. Mandalore had seen himself leading his people, as always, to strange and exotic new worlds against ferocious opponents on land, at sea, and in the stars. But the torture was not quite so much the dreams themselves as knowing that they were a lie, that while Malachor had been only the first of those great victories, even as far back as his defeat at Crescent he had known somewhere deep down that it would also be the last.

Every day after a dream meant waking up from a false paradise to the real world, which was being pounded to dust around him. It meant waking up to face an opponent who was too strong for him, a force of war from nowhere, a specter with no true face, no name, no honor, and no rules. He was absolutely nothing except a personification of Mandalore's ultimate defeat.

Mandalore had never hated anyone in his life like he hated that man. Still, there was some hope, because his most recent dream – likely to be the final dream of his life – had been different.

The dream had been of this day, of this exact hour. Of him staring down into his city as it was devoured by the rebels in the pouring rain, the fires burning in exactly this manner and the soldiers moving in precisely that way. He had seen this battle, but not all of it. The last thing the dream had shown him was the man with no name, in combat with him in the rain.

It was the first dream Mandalore had had in years that showed any shred of accuracy. Perhaps it would be like the ones he had used to have, the ones which led him to the first victory against Malachor V's natives. It was a fragile hope, but it was all he needed.

In the past few years, Mandalore had been accused of being single-minded, pouring everything into pursuing the rebel leader and killing him, rather than fortifying his nation and defending against the rebel armies elsewhere. They had said that he had no other goals, no other direction, but that was false.

In truth, Mandalore had taken to one other aim, namely honing his skill with the blade. When not sleeping or directing his armies, he had kept to his personal chambers, studying and practicing every technique and style of swordplay that he could find information on. There was one reason for this, and that was the same reason that Mandalore was standing there in the rain on that balcony instead of being down in the street, fighting the rebels.

Kill him, whoever he is.

Mandalore had absolute confidence that he would appear in this very building at any moment. That moment would be his chance for personal redemption: to put every ounce of himself toward that one end, to kill that man who had no name. Mandalore knew that he had a chance, and he was ready to die this day, even if it only meant getting a chance to slay his nemesis. So he would wait for that chance to present itself, patiently and respectfully. He knew that his enemy was coming. He could almost feel it.

The cloud cover thickened and grew darker, and the hungering, angry fires below in the streets of Trayus city spread.

''Mandalorians aren't cowards today, son, and they weren't cowards back then, either. Just like they had in the battlefields elsewhere, they stood their ground and fought to the last man, not giving in for anything as long as they were still alive. Mandalore the Visionary made his last stand just like his men did. When the leader of the rebellion confronted him, he gave it all he had.''

A shrill hiss of metal went through the chamber as Deyrus' sword left its scabbard, but Mandalore didn't seem to hear it, instead continuing to stare down from the edge of the balcony, hardly moving a muscle.

Located at the top of one of several observation spires jutting upward from the citadel, the chamber that Deyrus stood in was hectagonal and sported little decoration. The only notable feature of the room was a large, sort of squashed prism made of a glass-like material that hung from the ceiling by a single thick chain. Tinted a dull maroon, it somehow cast the room in a faint blood-red light. To Deyrus' left, one of the walls opened to a long stone bridge which led off toward another spire.

Deyrus approached silently, half-crouching, and drew on the Force. He had fought very hard to get this far, and he had to admit that it wouldn't be easy to not enjoy this last battle.

Mandalore suddenly spun to face him, his black cape whipping around him. In enough time it would take to blink, a small blaster pistol appeared in his hand, and he took aim. Deyrus halted and raised his sword as a crimson bolt of energy lit up the chamber and soared for his neck. His blade caught the bolt, sending it ricocheting into one of the walls and leaving a black burn.

Several more blasts followed. Deyrus fell back, letting the Force guide his blade and strengthen his defense. While his sword had been rendered highly resistent to damage from laser fire, among many other things, the imbuements it had been given during its Forging were not the best for deflection of these attacks. Some of the bolts bounced off of the blade, having hit at glancing angles, but most simply burst into showers of sparks that left Deyrus seeing spots.

Mandalore slowly moved into the room as he leveled shot after shot at Deyrus, but it was only a few more seconds before the barrage ceased. Deyrus was not surprised; blaster pistols, especially ones of that size, only held the capacity for a few shots. Derisively, Mandalore tossed the weapon aside, drew his blade, and lunged.

The first blow shook Deyrus' arms and forced him back a step, but he soon regained his composure, allowing him to deflect a flurry of sweeping slashes from his shoulders and head. Mandalore followed up by switching from a right-handed grip to a left-handed one, thrusting at Deyrus' right shoulder. Deyrus parried and stabbed at his enemy's gut; Mandalore sidestepped and, switching his grip again, made a slash at Deyrus' throat with so much speed that his arm nearly blurred in the darkness. Frustrated, Deyrus ducked under the sweep and fell back a few steps.

Mandalore tried to press the attack, alternatingly slicing at Deyrus' sides and arms. Each of the attacks met a solid defense, his blade being halted as surely as by a stone wall. Deyrus' physical strength and distinct style of defense, of deflecting the incoming strikes as early as they were launched, forced the masked warrior into relying almost exclusively on speed. Indeed, Mandalore's agility and precision had increased dramatically, even from the impressive levels they were at when they had first fought. He would make lightning-quick attacks at one area and then switch his sword-hand and stab at a different part of the body, his blade spinning and whirling like a whip. All he needed was to outpace his enemy, to slip a quick thrust or slice in before it could be intercepted.

Deyrus, meanwhile, fought as he always had on a fundamental level: with the Force as his guide. He gave himself over to it, sought its advice without words between every block, slash, cut, and parry. Withstanding Mandalore's frenzied, unpredictable mode of attack was taxing, so much so that Deyrus thought Mandalore might have been able to out-duel him if not for the fact that he himself had grown more dangerous as well. He, too, had learned to open his mind to different methods of attack, new ways of thinking.

Deyrus had learned the power of his own feelings.

Throughout much of his life, he had often felt a prisoner to them. As an apprentice, he'd been frustrated by a peculiar sensation of being alone, having no one to relate to; Deyrus' Master had been a complete stranger to him when his training began, and it would take years for him to grow comfortable enough around the lofty-minded old woman to regard her as a true boon to his growth toward enlightenment.

Later, during the final year of his apprenticeship, anxiety over whether he would be up to the challenge of facing the Trials of Jedi Knighthood had taken up the position of Deyrus' internal adversary. Following his successful passage of them, a long line of other emotions would alternatingly hold him hostage for anything between a week and a few months. Apparent lack of purpose, fear of death, frustration over difficulty with his studies of the Force, it was almost always different. Bur fear of falling victim to the lure of the dark side, of being led onto the path of the heretics and murderers who stalked the far corners of the galaxy – that was the only demon that came back to him more than once.

Deyrus' sister had always told him he was a worrier, and he'd never really understood why he was built that way; it didn't seem consistent with the things that had actually happened in his life. Had he not eventually built a bridge of trust to his Master? Had he not passed the Trials? Had he not been a proper Jedi, grown strong in the Force, and saved many people? Had he not played the part of a warrior, a protector, a seeker? Why did his own mind assail him at nearly every turn, with his only solace the familiar, meditative burning of a candle?

The truth was that Deyrus had been going about it wrong. All his life, there was one strength, one trait that was core to being a Jedi which he had never truly mastered, despite his teacher's praise and the approval of his peers: control of emotion. Jedi were not supposed to be ruled by their emotions, suppressing and running from them as he had, fleeing to meditation and to action, desperately telling themselves that if they just make it around the corner, then everything will fall into place.

Jedi were supposed to confront their feelings, to know what they are and why they were present. They were supposed to take hold of those feelings and grip them tight, bring them into submission. Emotions were among the hardest things in existence to control or rely upon, and anything that fell into neither category was a threat. He'd never truly grasped that.

Until now.

Now, when he had learned to look at his greatest, most omnipresent demon, the ultimate opponent – his fear of the dark side, fear of losing his mind to it, as so many before him had. Suddenly it didn't look so insurmountable after all. He had looked it in the eye and siezed it with his will, and its power over him crumbled. He was a Jedi. Jedi did not let themselves be conquered. They looked within for what had to be removed, for what had to be purged. And Deyrus did purge – with fire.

He took all of his fears and doubts, lifting them high up to the great inferno that was the Force and set them ablaze, letting them be fuel for the power he wielded, rather than a stumbling block for it. He let the Force brighten him, strengthen him and raise him to new heights. He began to see a new galaxy, a new life, one without ignorance or chaos, without borders or boundaries – a galaxy without fear.

And in a galaxy where fear was nothing to Deyrus, where even the darkness that had claimed Jedi before him was now only his strength, what did Mandalore's skill with a blade mean to him? His years of experience in fighting and killing, his discipline and training, his military proficiency, his unparalleled charisma, his code of honor – all were futile.

Even the tiny flicker of real power that Mandalore possessed was worth less than nothing.

Deciding to see how long his opponent could last in a real duel, Deyrus battered at Mandalore with his full strength and drank in the sounds of metal shrieking and ringing. Mandalore couldn't meet the blows head-on, resorting instead to try to sidestep or parry. With every block, his wrist bent and he took a step back, completely denied the luxury of counter-attack. Circling him, Deyrus caught Mandalore's blade with his own, forced his guard down, and slammed an open palm into his torso. A shout of alarm and pain sounded from behind Mandalore's mask as an unseen Force blasted air from his lungs and bodily threw him through the archway onto the rain-drenched bridge.

Deyrus stepped into the torrent as Mandalore scrambled to his feet. Stubbornly, the latter man tried to turn the tables with a long stab toward Deyrus' chest, but he batted it aside and resumed the offensive. A frigid wind blew at his cloak and Mandalore's cape, making them ripple like fire, and the roar of thunder and rain all but drowned out the clashing of steel.

The weather was absolutely horrible, but Deyrus took a sort of perverse pleasure in experiencing it. However ferocious it was, however much the cold made him shiver and the wind made him stumble and the rain made him nearly slip and fall, it was nothing to him. It all was nothing, because every single thing he felt – pain as well as pleasure – was something more that could be drawn on for strength, more fuel to burn.

And to burn was now a pleasure in itself.

Farther and farther Mandalore fell back, his counter-attacks rapidly decreasing in frequency, his dodging and strafing more frantic and less coordinated. The wind picked up even further, and it and the rain roared, howled, even seeming to scream Deyrus' name, he could almost swear, and he basked in it.

Switching to an unexpected two-handed grip, Mandalore swung at Deyrus' right side. He stopped the blade with his own, the sudden impact rattling his bones. Rather than pulling back, Mandalore pressed hard, metal grinding and muscles aching. They held that stance for some odd seconds, face-to-mask. For a very brief second, Deyrus thought he might actually lose, for he suddenly realized how terribly exhausted he felt; how his limbs felt distant and numbed by the rain and how his breath seemed to actually cut the inside of his lungs...

But he had the Force, and it possessed his whole being, tied him to the powers and farthest corners of the universe. He could go on forever with the Force.

So it was no real trouble for Deyrus to force Mandalore's blade upward and to the left. As he tried to pull back, Deyrus spun and his sword found its mark, its Force-imbued blade biting through thick chest armor and cutting deep. He drew the blade out and struck again, slicing into Mandalore's left arm, nearly severing the limb. A scream joined the chorus of rain and thunder, and Mandalore fell to his knees.

Deyrus took a step back. Noticing that Mandalore's right hand – which, he noticed for the first time, was missing its smallest finger – still clutched his sword hilt with blind defiance. With a twisting of his will, Deyrus ripped the weapon out of Mandalore's grip and hurled it over the side of the bridge.

Mandalore wordlessly stared up at Deyrus, feebly clutching at his torso wound with one hand.

Deyrus didn't hesitate this time. He was here to finish what he started.

A sword flashed in the rain, and a masked head rolled onto the bridge, followed by the rest of its body.

Deyrus walked off a short distance, almost as if in a trance, and came to the middle point of the bridge. He looked out into the city. He had ordered most of it to be razed.

He'd done it.

Spying a great, swimming carpet of flame somewhere in the city, Deyrus knelt in the rain and began to meditate. Many things had changed and he needed to sort out what it all meant. He took a deep breath and beckoned the Force.

"But it wasn't enough. Mandalore died at the hands of the rebel leader, and the last of his warriors were defeated. Almost every single Mandalorian on Malachor V had been killed by the end of the war, except for a small band of survivors that hadn't been at Trayus City. They found Mandalore's mask and eventually took it back to our homeworld, where the next leader would be chosen."

Dad emptied his flask at this point and paused, looking intently at me. Clearly, he wanted a response.

"That's it?"

"Looks like the end of the story, doesn't it?" He asked.

"How does it explain why no one can go back to Malachor?"

"Now, that's the most important part of this story. Not the best part, though. You see, at the end of the war, the unknown leader of the rebel armies had a lot of power. By the time of Mandalore's defeat, he had an actual nation, sort of. It had territory, cities, and resources. The only thing it didn't have, though, was organization. All they knew was the absolute authority of their leader. Wouldn't be good if that leader was lost, would it?"

"Well, no. Why, what happened to him?"

Dad shrugged. "After Trayus, the stories go that he disappeared. That's it, just up and vanished. Didn't leave any sign, message, or explanation for anybody. He left, and the people he'd led turned on each other. They had no honor by that point – he'd stripped them of any that was left. They were desperate, greedy backstabbers and they started a civil war to see who would lead them now that the Mandalorians were gone. Almost no one survived."

Deyrus' eyes opened, and he saw clearly. He stood and beheld the landscape.

The rain and the thunder was still there, as was the destruction below. Nothing looked different in a physical sense. In the Force, however, the entire universe had changed. Even Deyrus himself had changed during those hours of meditation, of exploring the mysteries of the Force and what he had recently learned about it all meant.

Most importantly, he had learned more about the nature of his power. He had thought of himself as being like a candle before, a vessel through which the Force showed itself. But he now knew that he'd been wrong, because there was no candle. Or if there had, it no longer mattered because he wasn't the candle, and the Force wasn't the fire – he was. He was a towering inferno that stretched high about this world, finding more and more fuel to sustain himself with.

Fire didn't keep itself going, though. Just as it needed fuel to burn, it couldn't exist at all without heat. The heat was everywhere in the universe; it was everything he experienced, both feelings from the inside and sensations from external sources. He drew on it all and it sustained him. It was not merely the Force, but the true nature of the Force, of the life-giving heat.

This heat that gave him such strength, it spoke to him. It had a name.

Bogan.

Bogan made him feel different than before. It made him grow beyond himself, beyond anything. It had set him ablaze with power and knowledge, and he saw his power go flowing out of him and set Malachor V on fire. This heat now permeated the planet, its life, the men and women he had led. It embraced them, it was in them, and it was what they were now. They felt it and would act accordingly, despite being blind to the Force and therefore ignorant of its presence. Deyrus could feel it; this planet was not the same as it had been before him.

He'd brought the truth of the Force to Malachor, and it illuminated even the darkest corners of this planet. He saw it all, saw the rivers turning scarlet with Mandalorian blood and he reveled in it, as he had reveled in the energy of his own fear and in the fury of the storm.

But it wasn't enough.

Of course he knew it wasn't enough. How couldn't he? Bogan told him so. This planet dulled him. It was absolutely boring now that his enemies were slain and his victory over the savage, mindless marauders was complete. It was nothing now. He had climbed his spire of blazing power and realized that Malachor V was too small for him.

True, Bogan told him, he had built a nation. But what good was a nation that stood only on one leg, that had no more enemies to conquer, nothing to build on? Leave them, let whatever will happen to these specks happen.

It was reasonable. The people of this planet had their own place in the galaxy, and he had his. His mission was technically complete; the Mandalorians on Malachor V had been crushed. Furthermore, the mission paled in comparison to Deyrus' discovery. That was the crowning victory of this day. He would have to return to the Order, to share his knowledge with them.

But... not yet. There was still much that Deyrus didn't understand about Bogan. He would need to take some time to himself to wander, to explore. Surely there were other places and people in the galaxy who had some secrets of their own, knowledge that he could add to his own. He would have to return to the Order eventually, but he was free to follow his destiny for now. He knew that Bogan would always be there, to guide him and take him ever higher.

"And that," Dad said finally, "is where the story ends for real. What do you think?"

Wheels turned inside my head as I put things together, using what I knew about what was respected by our culture and what was despised. Still, I needed some help; I was rather young back then. "So the reason we can't go to Malachor is..?"

"The absolute shame that was brought on our people there," Dad said, his voice picking up speed. There was fury in his voice, but it wasn't directed at me. I think he truly believed every word of the legend. "The best of our people were destroyed, crushed by a completely unknown enemy. And that enemy had no honor, no reason for anything he did because after he beat us, he had a planet he could rule and he just left. He let those who had followed him almost completely wipe themselves out. That's the whole reason there: the complete senselessness of what he did. If he had just bested us in warfare, we would only remember him as a worthy past opponent.

"But that isn't at all what happened. So the next Mandalore decreed that no Mandalorian would ever set foot on Malachor V again. Ever."

"I guess that does explain why, then," I muttered. Even at that age, I could tell that the story had struck a nerve with Dad, one way or another, and I was mildly unsettled.

We were silent for a moment. Then I looked at Dad's face and noticed a somewhat comical expression scrawled on it, somewhat strained but still appearing genuine.

"Of course it does," he said. "Now that I explained the whole thing for ya."

With that, he got up to get something else to drink, the conversation likely having dried his mouth terribly. So for a moment I was left alone, staring into the fire in thought. Somehow disappointingly, it had nothing to say.