Author's Games: Star Wars

Task 6: Jenaara

Jenaara slept. She didn't know for how long. Using the Force to open the holocron had taken a lot out of her, almost more than she could bear. The pain of remembering was still there, but after her rest it had lessened. She was finally able to see the good in the situation. She, Kanan, and Yuurei had escaped the Emperor's games. They were the only three who had.

Laying in one of the ship's back rooms on a pile of cushions, she thought about this fact. If she had knew when she had entered the games that three of the prisoners would make it out alive, she wouldn't have expected herself to be one of them. She would have known that Kanan and Yuurei would because of all their training, but she would have thought that someone more capable would have escaped instead of her. Someone like Adaara. But she was dead.

The door to her room opened, and the woman who had saved them stepped in. She had finally taken off her hood so Jenaara could see her face. Her skin was a light green color, similar to Kanan's. She must be Mirialan, Jenaara thought. Her face didn't look old, but it didn't look particularly young either. Jenaara placed her somewhere in her late thirties, a few years younger than her father had been. "Who are you?" Jenaara asked. "How did you find us in the arena?"

The woman sighed and sat down on the cushions next to her. "My name is Tiyra Halik," she said after a moment. "As to how I found you... Well, that's a more complicated story."

The room fell silent. Jenaara waited for her to continue, but she didn't say a word. After a moment, Jenaara swallowed and voiced the question that had been on her mind since she first entered the ship. "Are... are you my mother?"

Tiyra gave a small, sad laugh. "No. But I knew her."

Jenaara sat up straighter. "How?"

"That's also a complicated story," she answered.

"Tell me," Jenaara said. "I want to hear it."

With a sigh, Tiyra closed her eyes and leaned her head back, as if going back many years in her memory. "When I was a child, my parents sold me off to the highest bidder. For the first few years of my childhood, I bounced around from master to master. One day, when I was about seven, I was bought by a kind, young Jedi woman. Your mother." She gave a small smile at the shocked look on Jenaara's face. "She saw something in me, though to this day I don't know what. I'm not Force-sensitive, and at that age I couldn't even fire a blaster. But she took me in. She trained me to do all sorts of things: fly a ship, aim true with a blaster rifle, even use a lightsaber to some extent. In exchange, I helped her with whatever she needed help with.

"One night, about ten years after she had taken me in, your mother was captured by a young Sith with quite a bit of power. She never told me his name or anything about their encounter. All I know is that she escaped, and that a short time later, she was pregnant. I concluded easily what had happened."

Jenaara put a hand over her mouth in shock. Tiyra continued. "She was afraid of what the child would become. In the rare occasion that Jedi and Sith have children together, their spawn is always very powerful. She feared that she wouldn't be able to contain that power. So we decided to send the child away to live an ordinary life. We hoped that his or her power would never show."

The pieces of the story began to come together in Jenaara's mind.

"We found a man in the city: Talrik Kalor. We saw that he was a good man who was capable of raising a potentially powerful child. We planned to show him the child once he or she was born and give him a choice as to whether he wanted to raise him or her. We would raise him or her for a year and then give him or her over to your father. But when your mother gave birth to twins, we knew we couldn't wait to give you over. We couldn't offer him a choice. Your mother could feel how powerful you were."