Egrit-Ond-Kladi

"I live in admiration of her, and I work to keep her voice alive."

- Haali-Ola-Edi

Egrit-Ond-Kladi was the first and oldest wife of Ki-Adi-Mundi, the mother of three of his daughters, and the author of a famous volume of poems, published posthumously.

Beginnings as Wife and Poet
Egrit-Ond-Kladi first met Ki-Adi-Mundi in 77 BBY, when her father, one of Cerea's governors at the time, hosted him and his Master, Yoda, while they were tracking a highly wanted criminal who had fled to the planet. During this time her father expressed his concerns to Master Yoda about the impact of there being an unmarried Cerean in the galaxy on other Cereans, who were firmly taught, not without base, that all Cereans must marry and have children, and practice polygyny, for the species to survive. Master Yoda conceded the point, and on her father's suggestion, and her own consent, gave his authorization to the marriage between her and the Jedi padawan. After he and Yoda departed, however, he was not permitted to see her again until he had been knighted, and trained himself into a mental state where he could avoid attachment to her.

Egrit-Ond by this time had already taken to the writing of poetry, but her early work displeased her, and she destroyed most of it before anyone else read it. Her earliest surviving poem dates from 74 BBY, by which time she had developed a loose style, in which she used spare lines and understatement to capture sometimes intense emotion. She at first attempted to publish her poems herself, and a few of them made it into magazines and anthologies.

Senior Wife
After Ki-Adi-Mundi was knighted, he became the Jedi Watchman of Cerea in 72 BBY, and for some years he and his wife were able to live together in an almost normal fashion; she bore two of their three daughters during this time. He was as kind to her as he could be, and during one particularly difficult time in his life decided to take her into his confidence.

By 64 BBY, Egrit-Ond had fallen in love with the husband who was literally forbidden to love her in return, though she often could not help but wonder about how he avoided attachment when he behaved the way he did towards her. This confusion expressed itself in her poems, which was why in that year she officially stopped trying to attempt to publish them to preserve his reputation, and her own. Convinced that she would outlive him, she instead started compiling them with the hopes that one of his younger wives could publish all her poems immediately after her own death.

It ultimately fell to her to find and arrange things with his other wives, and she oversaw his subsequent three marriages to Myra-Min-Shala, Rona-Tarn-Dali, and Fan-Lip-Kamas. Aware of her feelings towards him, Ki-Adi did his best to talk her towards compassion. To some extent he succeeded, if her poems are any indication; with the exception of a few poems where she acknowledges her own jealousy the attitude towards all three of her sister wives was warm and affectionate. She wrote multiple poems towards all three, and all seven of their collective daughters.

As the final years of the Republic approached, however, and the Jedi Order stretched thinner and thinner, Ki-Adi-Mundi was forced to go offworld more and more,, and in 33 BBY was appointed to the Jedi Council, causing him to be absent even more often. His wives banded together, and it became something of a mission of the younger three to console Egrit-Ond-Kladi, who in response to missing him wrote poems that have been known to reduce readers to tears. Rona-Tarn-Dali and Fan-Lip-Kamas both urged her on multiple occasions to publish, insisting such beautiful writing should be read by everyone, and she assured them they could publish them when she was dead, but refused to break her resolve to keep them unpublished until then.

Post-Mortem
In 21 BBY, all four wives saw their husband for the last time, and he advised them that he had experienced a premonition of his own death during the war. All four braced themselves for mourning which in the end did not come to pass, as they and their seven daughters were all killed first, in the Battle of Cerea.

Egrit-Ond-Kladi's poems were given to Ki-Adi-Mundi's fifth wife, Haali-Ola-Edi, whom after his death at the very end of the war published them under the title Egrit-Ond herself had given them: Confessions of a Jedi's Wife: The Poetry of Egrit-Ond-Kladi. Unfortunately, they were banned by the Empire, and while Cerea did not immediately joined the Empire, they also banned them under Imperial pressure. However, they were preserved by Haali-Ola and passed about underground, and while some of them were lost, the majority of them were preserved and eventually resurfaced. Since then they have found sucess as popular reading in some ages, and in classrooms in others, and most literary scholars have considered Egrit-Ond-Kladi to be Cerea's greatest surviving poet, and amoung the best surviving authors of the 1st Century BBY.