EPILOGUE

Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master, stood atop the Great Temple on the fourth moon of Yavin.

Below his feet lay the empty throne room and grand audience chamber with skylights open to the sun. Garbed in a new Jedi cloak, wearing his lightsaber at his side, Luke felt warmth bathing him. Spicy, lingering scents rose as steam from the lush rain forest below.

The ancient ruins left behind by the vanished Massassi race sprawled out in great geometrical edifices, now overgrown by voracious jungles. Luke stood on top of the ziggurat that had once been a towering lookout station when the Rebel base had been housed on Yavin 4.

In the sky a swollen sphere of pale orange filled most of his view, the looming planet Yavin. The bloated gas giant had been a shield for the Rebel base as the first Death Star orbited into position to fire with its planet-destroying superlaser. The Yavin base had been abandoned by the Rebels years before. But many of the broken stone structures were still serviceable.

With the unleashed might of the Maw fleet, and the expected depredations of Admiral Daala, the New Republic desperately needed a strong force beyond pure military might, a group of guardians to maintain order in the galaxy.

Luke intended to bring together everyone he could, immediately—not just Gantoris and Streen, but also Kyp Durron, Mara Jade, several of the witches of Dathomir, Kam Solusar, and others he had encountered since the Battle of Endor. And the search for new people with Jedi potential would have to be intensified. He needed candidates, as many as possible.

The top levels of some of the flat-roofed Massassi structures had been clear enough for Luke to land his ship. On the broad courtyard once used as a launching pad by the Alliance, Luke’s old X-wing fighter lay cooling in the rising mists from the Yavin jungles.

When Mon Mothma and Leia had offered Luke the abandoned Rebel base, he had jumped at the chance.

To begin his actual training, Luke tried to recreate all the exercises Yoda had taught him on Dagobah, as well as the practice sessions Obi-Wan Kenobi had begun. Luke also had the ancient Jedi Holocron, the visual historical database Leia had taken from the resurrected Emperor’s stronghold. He had studied the information from the hidden repository of Jedi knowledge on Dathomir. He had many tools, and his students carried inside themselves doorways to great power.

But again Luke worried. If one of his trainees—or more than one!—fell to the dark side, would he himself have the power to bring him back? And who was this “dark man” who haunted Gantoris’s dreams with prophesies of destruction?

As Luke looked across the sweeping vista of dense wilderness, he saw wide burned scars where fires had ravaged the rain forests. But the ecology of the moon struck back with a vengeance, healing itself. Dense clusters of sharp-smelling blueleaf shrubs, Massassi trees, and climbing ferns clogged the ground in an impenetrable mesh that stretched as far as he could see, broken only by scattered temple ruins poking through the greensward.

The alien constructions left behind by the Massassi seemed filled with secrets and knowledge of their own. Luke blinked his eyes and felt the power of the place around him, the wonder, the mystery of it all. He could not wait to begin bringing his students here.

It was the perfect place to train a new order of Jedi Knights.