Chapter 120: 120. Chapter

-From the perspective of Nizzal-

A few minutes passed since the unexpected encounter with that assassin droid. Luckily, that time was enough for me to calm down, mostly. I checked the droid’s destroyed remains once more, with a clearer-calmer mind. I have managed to notice a few things which only increased my confusion.

The destroyed droid was clearly not one of the newest models of HK killer droids. In fact, it was quite an old type. These have gone out of the Grey Order’s military service for more than five hundred years, if I remember correctly. It was both good news and bad at the same time.

On one part, it made me further doubt my initial assumption of actually being betrayed by one of the apostles. The only reason I came to that realization to begin with was that, that only apostles could have enough influence and freedom in the order to do something like this. 

Still... it was impossible... but I couldn’t find any other explanation... Using force teleportation techniques is one of the rarest aspects of the force. A lot rarer than battle meditation, which you generally could learn on a basic level without any talent at all, you only had to be stubborn enough to do it with ceaseless practice.

However, that was not the case with force teleportation. It needed a unique talent. It is a technique even I can’t understand. In our entire order, only one person could use it proficiently, and a few others who had some miniscule talent but nothing that could teleport four people from Courscant to Korriban. That person was none other than Eqomu, the mirialan boy I got to know in the Zyggerian palace, who later turned out to be a fellow apostle of the Gray. He was the one who inherited the ability, and his memory line’s originator was Darth Jadus, a master of force based teleportation techniques. 

That is why my first thoughts came to this after being teleported here and subsequently assaulted by a droid of our own making. That, and the Sith who was lurking around, but would the Sith truly have managed to get their hands on such a dangerous ability? I can only hope that it is not the case... This entire situation was stinking from its core...

Alas, an apostle turning against its order is unheard of.

It is not a coincidence that the apostles have the absolute trust of the order. They could not betray it... at least I thought it to be impossible. The only actual chance for such a thing to happen was before the apostle had at least once given away his or her archive to another candidate, but at that time, they were not even considered apostles.

The first chosen person, who handles the archive with the expected care and respect, is a special case. They are deeply ingrained with various types of conditioning since their childhood to eventually become an ideal host and foundation to the memory line.

Those people are the ones who create the archive with their entire existence, but it only truly starts to solidify and become an actual holocron when they begin the first ritual of inheritance.

Their personality is what serves as a stable foundation for the following successors. As a constant power of conditioning, from its mere presence, a deeply ingrained sense of guilt would gnaw at any person who would try to turn against the order… That is why we officially call the first holders as “The pure ones”.

They are raised with utmost care, rarely, if ever, allowed to leave the confines of temples and the most well defended and sheltered temple cities whose locations are hidden even from the lesser elders of the Order. They have a safe and enjoyable life of learning and later teaching, while completely hidden from the eyes of the public.

When they are older, they groom their own apprentices and teach them from a young age until the day comes, when they have to give their memories to the next generation. After the ritual, a new memory line is officially created with all its rights and duties handed to them. With that, the intricate and time-consuming process of creating a new apostle is done.

Beyond that moment, the force will be the one who chooses the next successors of the individual archives, but before the ritual is done, for the first time, anybody could succeed it.

This means that basically anyone could take it over from the originator, who has a sufficient connection to the force. No, to be honest, literally anybody could take it, even those who have no talent with the force, but such a person would never be chosen, as he or she would lack the ability to give it away when his or her time came. Which would inevitably lead to a dead end.

With the aging of any memory line, the current holder will slowly grow wiser and more accustomed to the force itself. The holder will learn of its nuances just as the force will grow accustomed to his or her’s.

However, familiarity is nothing but a lie, an illusion. A way for the force to make you grow personally attached to it. In my case, it even created avatars to my own likeliness. It would never cease to try to take control of me, to put me under either one of its wings and turn me into a piece of its eternal puppet-show.

It would not stop at any length in acquiring a powerful piece in its game. Most would never truly understand what that means. An eternally existing entity with all the time in the universe, trying to involve you in a conflict that you do not wish to participate in.

Allow me to phrase it otherwise: you are fucked.

The force has an unlikely stubbornness. It would influence you to unconsciously do certain actions, making it all look like plain coincidence. Small singularly unimportant actions that you never even noticed or thought about.

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Innocent actions that only scrutinized in the length of thousands of years would draw a specific pattern, but even that would only appear in specific conditions and only when observed from a certain point of view.

All those small meaningless actions would eventually accumulate into an unbelievably intricate trap, one which you would only notice when you are already caught inside it.

The Jedi call this process as becoming much closer to the living force, as it will use our bodies to weave events through time and space, while not even understanding their importance. The Jedi naturally embrace this process with all their hearts.

Even as most of the time, you would never know what was the result of such an action. Other times, you will realize the importance many-many years later, or in our case after several generations of archive holders have passed away. Flowing away in the sea of endless time, but not dispersing in it, as their memories are left behind. No… not just their memories…

That is one of the darkest secrets belonging to the Gray Order.

We call those who still live after passing on, as immortals. However, that is not the case. It is little more than a narcistic lie, of which I have only learned after I received the authority of the “Acting Grandmaster”.

In truth, our order has not pierced the true veil of immortality… It is but a fake immortality. An extension of the mind. One that is still bound to very much mortal means. It was meant to be a temporary solution, of course… but we ended up stuck in the process. For over four thousand years now. What a shame… and an irony…

The dark truth is much more disturbing. A secret I would not share with any jedi, no matter how close I ever came to knowing them. The harsh truth is that the souls and minds of the existing immortals are bound to the bodies of the currently living apostles, the specific ones that carry the particular memory line they once also carried.

Yes… if you consider all of this, you will realize that I, as the sixteenth of my line, am directly responsible for fifteen other existences. If I die… all the spirits of my masters, along with Revan, will cease to exist, together with their hope to ever gain true immortality, to truly become one with the force. And this is why the Gray Order’s grasp of the future is still lacking, even when we claim to have the guidings of beings who have become one with the true force. Because in truth, we were only pretending. Yes, those masters have lived long. Our so called immortal councils are wise beyond the years of most, but they are still incredible far from being infallible.

After I realized this… and it certainly took some time… but I managed to understand why Revan acted the way he did… My actions, and my possibly stupid death, would result in his death as well after all. The worst part of it is that no other apostles besides the Grandmaster and the immortals know about this. Because if they did, it would place too much pressure and fear on their shoulders, which would inevitably stop the apostles from getting out into the world. Such a thing could not be allowed.

The reason is simple: the apostles are the greatest tools for learning and understanding the world as a whole. They are the tools that boost the process of recovering ancient knowledge and storing it, at times even sharing it with other persons freely. They are beacons of knowledge. Anchoring down to a safe place would be counterproductive in the long run. With their help, hundreds of years of research could be skipped over, or even thousands. It might be unoriginal at this point, but yes… It seems that our Order is searching for a way to immortality. But not the immortality of the mortal body, but the immortality of the mind, the soul, if you will. We are searching for a way to truly become one with the force.

And to our greatest shame, it seems that the often ignorant Jedi Order managed to beat us to our goal. They have found a way, or at least at one point, they know how to achieve such a pure state of existence. To ascend to the next step of evolution, and because we tended to overlook the Jedi’s existence in general from the very beginning of the Gray Order, we have only realized this fact a few hundred years ago.

Since then… we have made quite a large effort to silently infiltrate the Jedi Order, and try to learn its secrets about this particular matter, endlessly reading through their bottomless archives. Their way of storing knowledge was beyond inefficient… More often than not, they have stored completely meaningless data. It was a torture to get through it, but if anything… we had time, so our agents worked as part of the Jedi Order for years.

Alas, the results were disappointing.

It turns out that the current Jedi have lost the ability and knowledge to replicate what we have been looking for. Their ignorance was overwhelming. To have the most cherished ability that intelligent creatures have wanted to reach since the beginnings of self-aware life, and then have the audacity to lose it, forget it just like that… was beyond our understanding.

And so since then, we have kept agents in the Jedi order, waiting, hoping that one of them might manage to replicate the same achievement which we envied from them so much.

Some people, like Master Qui-Gon, decided to actively participate in the search for the so-called technique while spending his time as a double agent inside the Jedi temple. He was a pretty inexperienced apostle being the third in his memory line, while taking on an immensely risky mission, with little to no hope of actually accomplishing it.

Still, he supposedly managed to find something interesting, based on his notes that other agents gathered from the Jedi temple after his death, but before he could report it or get to the end of his idea, he was killed by a Sith called Darth Maul, yes… the same bastard that just tried to kill us a few hours ago. Master Qui-Gon, being a relatively young apostle, was not specialized in combat. He was a researcher, his memory lines previous holders, were also similar in that regard.

Naturally, he knew how to handle himself. However, he was not a combat type, and likely never expected to actually run into a well trained Sith Warrior in a time of long-lasting peace, all that while having to defend his padawan. A padawan, that was not even one of our orders, but a Jedi through and through. And thanks to the never ending irony of the force, this particular person was appointed as my substitute master, while I was forced to stay in the Jedi temple. Creating ties among the higher echelons of the order, gaining their interest with blatant shows of talent and knowledge, while wearing the innocent face of a cute girl-child belonging to one of the most eye-catching races of the galaxy. An enticing combination, one with the highest success rate that my masters could foresee.

That was why I had been chosen while being a child to take on the duty of an apostle and later a grandmaster. My hesitating master, who was riddened with guilt from the thought of forcing such a burden on me, one he did not agree to but had been forced to do anyway, thanks to his old age, and gradually weakening body. All under the growing and lingering shadow of impending death…

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