To be read as the tenth and final book in the series.
It all comes down to this.
It's been a year and a half since Ahsoka Tano lost her memories to the girl she once called her Padawan, Kaylira Tramino, and, tragically, lost the girl herself to the...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
She didn't know how long she had been floating, weightless and untethered by any earthly attachments, through the undiscovered country where reality and unreality, Living and Cosmic, came together.
There was no air, no solidity; no light, no darkness. No life and no death.
Nothing.
Just sweet, blissful nothingness.
But somewhere deep down, she knew she that was only allowed to linger in the protective embrace of the grey emptiness for so long – and now that time had elapsed. It was either back or onward now, but she had a sense that which way she went wasn't fully her choice to make.
Then, for the first time in what could have been forever or the length of a single heartbeat, she felt it: the pull of the Light.
It was calling to her just as it had before, guiding her gently back through the emptiness as if her stay there had been nothing more than one long, slow journey downstream, and only now was she finally being towed to shore.
Gradually, however, the pull grew stronger, and, despite her halfhearted attempts to anchor herself to something and stay put, she kept drifting away from the warm, dark river and towards the shores of light and consciousness that, now that she thought about it, had really never been that far away to begin with.
And then, she remembered a name. Hers, perhaps.
Ahsoka.
Yes, that was it – she was Ahsoka Tano.
And she was finally beginning to remember now what it felt like to be alive... even if she wasn't supposed to be.
A feeling of not belonging so intense came over Ahsoka as she finally woke up that her stomach began to pitch and roll with nausea, and she had to curl herself around it and close her eyes for a very long time before it faded away.
When she finally opened them, hoping to keep her mind from wandering back to the more... uncomfortable details, she busied herself with studying her surroundings. She was in an enormous cavern, and the ruined stone carvings on its walls and the pillars that supported the ceiling were intermixed here and there with natural rock. If she was still on Malachor – and she got the sense she was – she guessed she now found herself in another level of catacombs beneath the Temple.
She was sitting on a small rocky ledge decorated with strange symbols – almost like an altar – that rose above an underground river, and the lazy spirals in the current made Ahsoka think of the one that had brought her back here...
And that was all it took for her thoughts to get the better of her again, and she struggled to slow her breathing in hopes of easing the frantic pounding of her heart.
I'm not supposed to be here. I died. I sacrificed myself to save him. How can I be here? How can I be alive?
What little she could recall was quickly fading away, the memories being sequestered off into some tiny, inaccessible part of her psyche. But perhaps that was for the best – no one was meant to know more than their fair share of the mysteries of the Force, not even her.
