Come out of Retirement
LAKE COUNTRY
NABOO
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Michael, Gabriel, Azrael, Sariel, Raphael, Jeremiel, Connel, Raguel
[Any text in brackets signifies comm-link usage and not face to face conversation]
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SURGICAL - CRYBERNETIC IMPLANTS
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Shadow Sanctuary - Enterprise
While he was inwardly disappointed that she was not going with him.
Connel wasn’t surprised.
Efret had built a life for herself here, she was moving forward, and going through a repository for her would be a step back, he understood her decision. That is when he knelt down and faced his best friend.
Hey buddy, if it’s okay with Master Farr… would you mind staying here and I come back soon? He asked loud enough as a roundabout way of asking Efret if she would be okay with Buster being here as well. If she was, then all things were good, if not, that was more than okay as it was her property and her right, Buster would be happy in the ship.
His response was simple, a bow of the head for a minute, then a lick of the face.
Once all was decided, and the ship was taking off, he went into a short and sweet meditation. He needed to prepare for the worst, as well as triangulate through the Force where this place was.
Hidden beneath the pastoral beauty of Naboo, far from Theed and the Gungan swamps, Plagueis’ repository lies in a forgotten limestone cavern system. It was once a Muun banking sanctuary turned into a Sith laboratory.
The Force here did not scream like Exar Kun’s tomb.
It
whispered.
Water trickled. Moss grew on obsidian slabs. Light refracted through crystal veins. It almost felt… peaceful.
Which is the trap.
BRAD, once I’m off the ship, get in the air. I don’t want a chance on anything getting to you.
There was no argument from the droid, there never was, and once Connel took stock of his gear, he was off, and so was the Defender.
The hills of Naboo rolled like a painted memory. Soft grass, pale stone, slow-moving clouds. Somewhere in the distance, water sang against rock. Connel stood at the edge of a limestone ravine that did not appear on any modern chart. To the eye, it was nothing more than a natural hollow. A place shepherds might avoid because the sound carried strangely. A place where birds never quite landed.
To the Force… It was a scar pretending to be a garden.
He didn’t ignite his saber.
That alone was a choice.
Instead, he lowered himself into the ravine with practiced ease, boots touching damp stone. The air cooled instantly. Moss clung to the walls, silver-green and faintly luminous. Crystals threaded through the rock like veins in marble, catching the daylight and bending it into soft prisms.
Beautiful.
That made his skin crawl.
This is how you hid, he murmured to no one.
Not in fire. In peace.
The path descended in a gentle spiral, not carved but grown. Stone smoothed into curves, like the cave had been persuaded rather than forced. Muun design. Plagueis’ hand was everywhere without being obvious.
No statues. No Sith runes. No warnings.
Only balance that felt… edited.
The Force did not resist him. It accommodated him.
That was worse.
He reached a circular chamber half-flooded with clear water. The surface was perfectly still, reflecting the ceiling in a flawless mirror. At the center rose a crystalline structure the size of a meditation dais.
Not a holocron. Not a pedestal.
A living crystal lattice, grown into shape. Pulsing faintly, like a heart remembering how to beat. Connel stopped at the edge of the water. His instincts screamed at him to draw steel. His training told him to listen. The Force here was… quiet. Not Light. Not Dark. Suspended. As if the room itself was holding its breath.
Then the temperature shifted. Not colder. More precise. A presence unfolded from the air like a thought deciding to speak. Tall. Slender. Robed in pale shadows.
Not monstrous. Not decayed.
Darth Plagueis appeared as a scholar, hands folded behind his back, head slightly inclined. A Muun’s long face calm and analytical, eyes like polished glass.
“You found it,” the apparition said gently.
No thunder. No menace. Just acknowledgement.
Connel did not bow. He did not attack. He set one hand against his chest, grounding himself.
I wasn’t meant to, he replied.
Which usually means I had to.
A faint smile touched Plagueis’ face. “Curiosity is the purest form of courage. Or the most elegant form of despair.” The crystal lattice brightened. The water rippled without moving.
Plagueis gestured to the chamber.
“This is not a tomb, Jedi Vanagor. It is a record. A library of solutions.”
Connel’s eyes traced the crystal structure. He felt it now. Not a single consciousness, but layers. Experiments. Meditations. Failures. Possibilities waiting like unopened doors.
You built this under Naboo, Connel said.
Under beauty.
Plagueis’ voice softened. “Where else would one study life… if not where it flourishes?”
Plagueis does not show him horror. He showed him home. Caltin standing whole and smiling, arms folded the way he always did when Connel overthought things. Chrysothemis without shadow. Michael laughing, unburdened. The Order alive, not hiding.
Plagueis’ voice, calm and reasonable:“You fight ghosts. I offer you the living.”
The Force shifted again. Not violently. Gently.
The air thickened with presence.
Connel felt it before he saw it. A warmth. A familiarity. Footsteps behind him. Not echoes. Real. His breath caught before his mind could stop it.
Connel.
The voice was his father’s. Not Force-ghost. Not memory. Standing at the far edge of the chamber, whole and solid, arms folded in that old patient way.
And beyond him… Others. Light. Home.
Plagueis did not gloat. He simply said: “Come closer. See what can be understood.”
Connel’s heart thundered. His hand twitched toward his saber. His first reaction was instinct. A step forward. A tightening in his chest. The Force surged.
Hope was indeed ready to triumph over experience.
Until He felt the wrongness in it. Not because it was dark, but because it is
empty of consequence.
You say that I fight “ghosts”, yet If they come back like this… then nothing they gave matters. Not their choices. Not their sacrifices. Not what they taught me.
The entity did not change “Admirable, but circular. You are only thinking of yourself.”
Another image followed. Omega Squad. Faces he had watched fall. Soldiers who trusted him. The lattice brightened again. Not suddenly. Deliberately.
The water at Connel’s feet rippled, though nothing touched it. The crystal veins in the walls pulsed in slow synchrony, like a breathing organism. Plagueis’ voice deepened, not in volume but in weight. “You speak of meaning as though it belongs only to the dead.”
Another image formed.
Not Caltin this time.
Ala Quin
, standing in quiet light, her hand resting on the shoulder of a child who was laughing. A family she had only just begun to build. Peace she had only just tasted.
“You would deny her the chance to say goodbye?” Plagueis asked gently.
“Deny them the chance to grow old?”
The image shifted again.
Katarine Ryiah
. Not fallen. Not missing. Not scarred. Whole. Her expression exactly as Connel remembered it when she had still believed the galaxy could be saved without cost.
“And her?” Plagueis continued. “She believed in you. In what you could become. Would you not return that faith?” The chamber tightened.
Not physically. Mentally.
Connel felt the pull now. Not toward the images, but inward. The lattice was no longer just projecting. It was
listening. Measuring his responses. Learning the shape of his pain. This was not persuasion.
It was infiltration. He stepped back from the water’s edge. Slowly. Carefully.
This isn’t memory, he said.
It’s architecture.
Plagueis tilted his head. Curious. “You mistake refinement for corruption.”
No, Connel replied.
I recognize a cage when I see one. You’re not trying to win an argument. You’re trying to move in.
The Force around him thickened. The images grew sharper, more detailed. Ala’s eyes met his. Katarine’s voice almost formed words. Plagueis’ tone hardened just slightly. “You carry the suffering of many. Why should you alone bear it?”
Connel’s jaw tightened.
Because it’s mine.
The lattice flared.
For an instant, Connel felt something press against his thoughts. Not violently. Intimately. Like fingers searching for a door that wasn’t there. That was when Plagueis said the thing he had been building toward all along:
“Then you choose loss.”
Silence fell. Not imposed. Chosen.
Connel straightened. His voice was steady when he answered.
Growth is the result of loss.
The chamber stilled. The images wavered.
If nothing can be lost, Connel continued,
then nothing can be learned. Nothing can be chosen. You don’t preserve life. You preserve fear of change.
Plagueis’ expression shifted for the first time. Not anger. Something closer to… fracture.
You would enshrine suffering? I would honor truth.
Connel reached out, not with his saber, but with the Force. Not to dominate the lattice. To
unbind it. He did not attack its power. He withdrew its anchor.
The crystal lattice dimmed. Not shattered. Not destroyed. Its pulse slowed. The whispering pressure vanished. The projections collapsed inward like reflections falling into still water.
Ala faded. Katarine faded. Caltin’s shape never returned.
Plagueis stood alone for a moment longer.
“Then you walk the long way,” he said.
Connel met his gaze.
That’s what makes it mine.
The apparition unraveled like thought released from memory.
The chamber exhaled. For the first time since he had entered, the Force felt… natural.
Not edited. Not curated. Alive.
Connel stood in silence for several breaths. No father’s voice came. No rescue. Only himself… And the quiet certainty that he had not won a battle.
He had passed a trial.
The chamber did not collapse. That troubled Connel more than if it had. The crystal lattice stood dark now, no longer pulsing, no longer whispering. The water lay still at his boots. The air felt… ordinary.
Too ordinary.
He reached out with the Force again. Carefully. Not probing the lattice, but the stone around it. And felt it. Not a presence. A pattern.
Threads.
Faint resonances running outward through the bedrock of Naboo like roots beneath a forest. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Old. Patient. Dormant. His breath slowed.
This wasn’t a repository, he murmured.
It was a seed.
Plagueis had not hidden knowledge in one place. He had
tuned the land itself. Caverns. Springs. Forgotten shrines. Places of meditation and life. Each carried a trace of the same resonance he had felt in the lattice. Not strong enough to dominate a mind… but strong enough to listen.
A planetary-scale echo chamber.
A Sith experiment in environmental memory. Naboo, beautiful Naboo, had been turned into a living archive of Plagueis’ philosophy. Not active. Not yet. But waiting.
Connel closed his eyes.
For a terrible moment, he wondered how many had walked these hills over centuries. How many Jedi, pilgrims, children, artists, lovers, had unknowingly passed through places that studied them in return.
He straightened.
This ends with me knowing, he said quietly.
Not with me burning it.
He activated his recorder.
Not as a warrior. As a witness.
The holorecorder projected a soft blue shimmer over his face. The dark chamber reflected faintly in his visor. He went through the process of documenting everything, including his experience.
Connel stood in the chamber a moment longer. The Force felt clean now. But not healed. Plagueis was gone. His question remained. He looked once more at the darkened lattice.
You tried to become immortal by refusing to let the galaxy change, he said softly.
That’s why you failed.
He turned and began the long ascent back toward daylight. Above him, Naboo’s hills waited. Green. Serene. Innocent. And beneath them, a Sith’s philosophy slept in stone.
Not defeated.
Contained.
For now.
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Boarding the Defender, his next stop was Shiraya’s Sanctuary. He had forwarded a message that he was on approach, do this right. Expecting no one to take a meeting, he landed. The walk was short, and, for once, things seemed
different about the place. More welcoming. The planet itself seemed… different…
Perhaps I was affected.
There was a page once he reached the Council Approach. One who did not recognize him, but sensed he was a Jedi. “Welcome.”
Welcome. I won’t be here long, I have a datadisk for the Council. He offered it to the Page.
“I will see that they receive it.” The Page offered.
When the recording was opened. They would see.
Master Quin, Council of the Republic he began. His voice was calm, but weighted.
I have located what remains of Darth Plagueis’ work. It was not a single vault. It was a lattice. A network of Force-attuned sites beneath Naboo’s surface.
He turned slightly, letting the camera catch the crystal structure behind him.
The central chamber is inert. I unbound its core from the Force. But the echoes remain throughout the planet. Not weapons. Not guardians. Sensors. Philosophical instruments.
A pause.
He was not trying to conquer Naboo. He was trying to understand life by embedding himself within it.
His jaw tightened.
These sites project visions. Possibilities. Comfort without consequence. They adapt to the observer. This is not corruption by fear. It is corruption by hope.
Another breath.
He used family. He used futures. He used the idea that loss could be undone.
He lowered his gaze briefly.
It nearly worked.
Then his eyes rose again, steady.
Your call on how you treat these locations whether as sanctuaries under watch, or destroyed. If they are to be Studied. Please ensure that they are Shielded, and above all else… Marked.
A faint echo of Caltin’s teaching in his posture now.
Knowledge isn’t the enemy. Dominion is.
He ended the message with a final note:
If any Jedi feels drawn to places on Naboo that feel peaceful but hollow… do not enter alone. And do not listen without remembering who you are.
The recorder clicked off.
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He soon found himself among more and more Jedi. Young ones approaching, some looking in fear, some looking in wonder. He wanted to leave, but then something else spoke to him.
His sense of duty.
These were a peaceful people, he was not, but maybe they could help each other in some way? Maybe. It was worth trying. Or he could walk away.
Father wouldn't. He would would find a better way. Ignore his pride and look to the greater good.
This was the greater good
Hopefully.
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Long after his trip to the Jedi Temple, he stopped by...
Finally returning to the homestead of Master Farr, Connel was clearly exhausted. Physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Be glad you did not go with me. A faint chuckle as he went to retell the story.
