It’s post 400! To celebrate this wonderful milestone, I’m starting a series of short stories once again, something I did a while back and enjoyed, but haven’t done for over a year now. This post is going to serve as something of a prologue, and I hope to develop this character in the coming months, so that’ll be something to look forward to! So without further ado, I present: A New Beginning…
Ty Lorancza sat facing the setting sun of Kintan and began to meditate. Eyes closed, he focused on his breathing, feeling his chest expand with the inward breath and visualising his lungs filling with the warm night air. He held the breath for a count of five before slowly exhaling, feeling some tension leave his body as he did so.
It had been a long time since he had felt truly at peace, and even with the daily routines of meditation to clear his mind, he rarely felt the balance as he once had. While still young for a Borneck, he had nevertheless felt old since the tumultuous events of the Clone Wars and the removal of the Jedi Order from the galaxy. A committed pacifist by nature, Ty had been one of the modest number who had outright refused to lead clonetroopers into battle. As such, he had managed to escape the cull by virtue of the fact he had been stationed in a far-flung Jedi Academy at the time so many of his fellow knights had been killed.
The sun slowly crept lower in the sky, bathing the wasteland in front of him in a burnished copper glow. Despite the lateness of the hour, the frequent breezes that blew across the plains were still warm against his pale yellow skin. He inhaled again, attempting to focus his thoughts on the Force alone, yet the past continued to intrude.
Since the war, he had quietly slipped away into the galactic periphery. His student charges had been taken from him by Loran San, the charismatic Weequay Jedi Master who had often visited the academy to instruct the students in lightsaber defense. Loran San had tried to bring Ty with him, to bring the fight back to the nascent Empire, but Ty had refused, as he always had.
“You’re letting down our sisters and brothers, good women and men who have already given their lives that we might yet live!” he had insisted. “Is their sacrifice to have been in vain?”
Ty could still see the look in Loran San’s eyes before he went to sleep at night. It was a look of anguish, to be sure, but as the years had passed, Ty’s imagination had added in a look of betrayal, too.
He inhaled for five, and slowly let his breath out once again.
The galaxy had been torn apart during those dark times. Good people had been branded as traitors, and a madness seemed to overcome the senate. Paranoia reigned supreme in the heart of the galaxy, and Ty was glad to be away from it. But, at the back of his mind, a nagging doubt had taken root. Had he really betrayed his comrades? Were his own principles and beliefs to be compromised, that he might exact some small sense of justice for their loss?
He inhaled again, filling his lungs with the warm, dry air once more, before slowly exhaling, willing his doubts to follow his breath into the ether.
He had never seen Loran San, or the two apprentices, again. He had abandoned the academy, feeling a profound sense of loss of self in the wake of the news the Weequay Master had brought with him. The Jedi were being hunted like dogs across the stars, and while some were attempting to mount a resistance, Ty knew he could never conscience such a course of action. He had always been a scholar, a seeker of knowledge, not a warrior. In a galaxy torn apart by war, there was no place for Ty Lorancza, and so he had just – disappeared.
He inhaled again, counted to five, and slowly released the breath, willing more of his unease to leave him. But it never did. In the fifteen years since he had left the small academy and wound his way to Kintan, the sense of loss had been with him. Feeling he would not achieve peace this night, he slowly got to his feet, took one last look across the rusty mesa before him, then returned to the modest dwelling he had made in the hope that he would find some measure of peace at least in sleep.
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