led back to Light
Regret clung to Rix like a second tunic. With every step, it tightened, until it hugged his torso so tightly that he realized he had forgotten to breathe. He inhaled sharply, jabbing air into his lungs, then let it rattle his chest as it expelled.
He stopped a few meters from the threshold into the Sanctuary's Jedi museum, an island in the middle of the hall but which allowed others to flow by every which way easily. Part of the entry exhibit was visible from here. It didn't surprise Rix in the least that the museum had chosen the most iconic bit of Nabooian ancient culture to be the first one it presented visitors, but it was troubling in its own right as well. The last time he had met the sculpted eyes of an Elder had been in the front of a museum too, although there had only been one gaze to meet there. And it hadn't seemed nearly as judgmental as these figures of various sizes and shapes from hanging masks to figurines to statues, even as he brewed his nefarious plot.
He swallowed thickly.
Maybe it was how these were either original limestone or molded, fired clay. The mask that had hung in the Taris enclave museum's reception hall had been a replica. Most of the artifacts that Master
Efret Farr
had collected before her time on the New Jedi Order's Council had been. She hadn't believed in taking any physical thing out of its cultural context and away from its people—its creators, its rightful stewards—unless she had express permission, no matter how small or much it might not be missed.That was why she perfected a methodology for digital preservation of archeological and anthropological artifacts. High definition and true-to-color holographic scans gave such an accurate impression of whatever they captured that, if a viewer didn't see the holoprojector or try to interact with the artifact, they wouldn't know the difference between what they saw and what they didn't.
To her, every culture was worth sharing and studying, but neither decision was to be made by the outsider. So, she attained permission wherever she could—whenever there was someone, either alive or dead, to ask, no matter how inconvenient—to preserve something with her original method too.
He imagined for a moment that she was in there somewhere, cataloguing something just out of sight, working just as she must have been in the Grand Temple's museum. She earned the tile of Chief Curator some months after he had gone to prison, and by the time he had been released, she had resigned, and the Temple was soon to belong to the Empire, so he had not gotten the chance to visit her there. That swirled amongst his regrets. They seemed to be bottomless. But even though he had not been able to see her at work, and they did not talk about it much during her visitations, he knew that she must have struggled.
It was an honor to be a councilperson, certainly, but the station of Chief Curator also weighed heavily on her. He could see that here, now, looking into another private temple museum. Service must have killed little parts of her: tending to artifacts displaced from home, unable to repatriate them; gatekeeping knowledge for Jedi, not allowed to extend admission to the public as she had on Taris.
Perhaps that was whatever she was struggling with now.
The presence he had conjured in his mind faded.
He sighed again, the movement a bit more controlled as walked towards the museum's open door.
