*Sorry, I haven't uploaded in a bit. I've been moving around a lot, so I haven't had time to upload chapters as I haven't had internet or time. I'll try to clean up the grammar and flow, etc. Think it's just cause Grammarly had it in Australian English, not American so it seemed off or spelled weird. It should get better over time, as for recurring themes and re-saying stuff. Probably gonna happen some more, but I'll try to avoid it. Anyway, cheers for reading, I appreciate it*
The lift wasn't like the others in the Jedi Temple.
There was no quiet hum of stabilised repulsors. No glass panels. No warm ambient lighting that soothed the nerves. This one descended on a groaning column of ancient gears and manual gravity locks—its vibration trembled up through Kaelen's boots like the bones of the Temple itself were shifting.
He didn't speak.
Neither did Shaak Ti.
The silence between them wasn't awkward. It had become a language of its own. One that Kaelen understood better than words.
The walls of the shaft flickered past in slow spirals. They weren't smooth like the corridors above. Here, the stone was etched, layered with glyphs that no longer glowed. Some were High Galactic. Others, much older. The Jedi tongue was carved not in symmetry, but in urgency. Time had eaten at the edges, eroding intent into ghostly suggestion.
Kaelen tilted his head.
One glyph—half-faded, set beneath a worn spiral—resembled a Mandalorian death chant. Not identical—but close. A warning, maybe. Or a promise.
The lift slowed with a hiss like exhaled steam. The light above flickered once, then extinguished.
The doors opened—not with a slide, but a parting of stone.
Before them stretched a corridor built not for comfort, but for permanence.
The air was still.
Not empty.
Still.
Shaak Ti stepped forward, robes brushing the dust that lined the floor in windless patterns. Kaelen followed, his steps soft, deliberate.
The passage sloped downward, arched and ribbed with reinforced stonework that predated even the Wars. Every few meters, blackened sconces jutted from the walls, long dead. A series of steel insets ran along the left side—shelving now collapsed, or bare.
"What is this place?" Kaelen asked quietly.
Shaak Ti didn't turn.
"A forge. From the time before standardisation."
They passed an old mural, half-erased. Kaelen caught a glimpse of a figure standing between two suns, arms spread wide, a blade forming between their hands—not held, but summoned. Behind the figure, there were no stars. Only smoke.
"Before there were assembly lines," Shaak Ti continued, "before instructors handed down blueprints… the Jedi built their weapons with fire. And failure. They learned from the attempt, not the instruction."
They reached a doorway. A thick, rounded stone arch, partially collapsed on one side, roots hanging from its edges like veins. Shaak Ti raised a hand, fingers spreading wide over a flat glyph embedded in the arch's centre.
A pulse of golden-green light spread outward.
Kaelen felt it in his chest—not as warmth, but as recognition.
The door shuddered. Stone scraped against stone. Then the passage opened.
The forge chamber yawned before them.
It was massive. Dome-shaped, wide enough to hold a gunship, yet low-ceilinged enough to feel like a tomb. The walls were rough, etched in spirals and knife-scratches. On one side sat a long-forgotten workbench, its tools rusted and fused by time and pressure. On the far wall, fragments of training sabres and kyber shards lay scattered in a bowl that resembled an offering basin.
The centre of the room was sunken by half a meter, like a ritual pit. At its heart stood a circular pedestal made of stone and metal, ringed by ancient tongs, clamps, and melted braziers. Atop it sat an anvil carved from a single slab of crystallized volcanic obsidian.
Even Kaelen, who had no fear of myth, felt a chill run along his spine.
"This was never meant for ceremony," Shaak Ti said, voice softer now. "This was meant for truth."
She walked to the edge of the sunken circle and placed both hands behind her back. Her eyes traced the room—not with nostalgia, but with reverence.
"When we moved to standardisation," she continued, "we lost something. We gained efficiency. We lost identity."
Kaelen remained still.
Shaak Ti turned to him now. Not as an instructor. Not even as a mentor.
But as someone who understood.
"You don't need instruction, Kaelen. You don't need a model to copy. That's never worked for you."
She gestured to the forge.
"You need a place that lets you decide who you are."
He didn't answer.
His eyes were fixed on the stone platform, on the rusted remnants of blades half-built and abandoned. Not failures.
Attempts.
Shaak Ti began walking away.
She didn't offer a farewell. No encouragement.
Just one last sentence over her shoulder:
"What you build here will speak louder than anything you say."
Then she was gone.
Kaelen stood alone in the quiet forge.
The dust didn't stir. The room didn't hum with the Force.
It waited.
He stepped toward the center. Slowly. Feet silent.
One step.
Then another.
Then another.
He reached the pedestal.
Ran his hand across its edge.
The stone was scarred—deep scratches, burned in patterns. Like those who had come before him had left pieces of themselves behind here.
He looked at the workbench. The scattered parts. The remnants.
And for the first time, he whispered aloud—not to the Force.
Not to Shaak Ti.
To the room.
"Let's see who I am."
Kaelen didn't speak for hours.
The forge chamber had long since quieted into its natural state—no wind, no hum of circulating air, just the whisper of ash that clung to the edges of the stone floor. Time didn't pass here the way it did elsewhere in the Temple. It felt older. Slower. Like each breath carried weight.
The workbench in front of him was a relic. Its edges were chipped, grooves burned into the surface where hundreds of failed experiments had left their marks. There were no blueprints on the wall, no glowing holos of saber schematics floating in front of him. Just broken tools. Forgotten parts. And silence.
Kaelen laid them out with ritual precision.
One by one, he touched the fragments. Not as a craftsman. As an archaeologist. As someone trying to understand the people who came before him through the wreckage they left behind.
He picked up an old emitter shroud—fractured down the middle. Jagged. The metal felt thin, too light. It reminded him of the Temple's training hilts—designed to teach safety before strength.
He remembered holding one during his first day in the sparring halls.
A weapon that hummed like it didn't want to be touched.
A teacher had told him then, "You will earn a real saber when the Force trusts you."
But the Force didn't speak to Kaelen like that.
The Force had never been his teacher.
Only his mirror.
He set the emitter aside.
Next, he picked up a grip sleeve wrapped in patterned leather. Elegant. Ornamental. Worn soft by the hands of someone who had likely died with honor.
He closed his fingers around it.
Too soft. Too gentle.
Kaelen let it drop with a dull clatter.
He moved faster now, sorting through scorched phrik rings, shorted power cells, and trigger plates fused with carbon scoring. Each rejected piece taught him more than any instructor had.
Not because they were broken.
Because they'd been built with the wrong question.
They asked: "What does a Jedi need?"
Kaelen asked: "What do I refuse to leave behind?"
Then, he found it.
Buried beneath layers of cracked focusing lenses and a melted coupler frame was a forgotten hilt casing. Heavy. Asymmetrical. The metal was scorched black near the emitter end, and the pommel was fitted with a blunt, flanged cap—clearly meant to serve as a secondary striking surface.
He lifted it from the debris and felt it thrum faintly in his palm.
Not through the Force.
Through memory.
The shape of it was wrong by Temple standards. The balance uneven. No Jedi instructor would've approved its ergonomics. But Kaelen didn't need approval.
He turned the casing over and caught his breath.
Inside the grip, etched beneath layers of time and grime, was a single glyph—Mandalorian in style, but altered. Split. Not perfectly. Jagged, as if cut by a blade.
A flame, divided down the center.
Balance through fracture.
Kaelen froze.
The mark didn't feel like a signature.
It felt like a question someone else had once asked—and left behind for whoever came next.
He ran his thumb across it.
The edge cut him. Just a hairline break. Enough to draw blood.
He didn't flinch.
He smiled.
It was the smile he'd learned from Death Watch—not joy, not victory.
Recognition.
He placed the casing in the center of the bench and stepped back. Cleared space. Brushed aside the standard pieces. The Temple's symmetry. The ornamental beauty. He didn't need it.
This wasn't a blade for approval.
This was a blade to outlive shame.
He found an old stylus among the wreckage. Its tip was cracked. He snapped it shorter and began sketching directly onto the dust-covered surface of the bench.
Not careful lines.
Purposeful ones.
The outline took shape slowly:
The emitter curved slightly downward, not for elegance, but to guide his hand in reverse grip or close quarters.
The activation switch was recessed far back near the pommel—a defensive measure to prevent loss in a grapple.
The grip: ridged, uneven, wrapped in hardened texture that would hold in blood, rain, snow.
The end cap: flanged for striking. Not ceremonial. Brutal.
Every angle was chosen. Every asymmetry had a reason.
This wasn't art.
It was memory made metal.
At the base of the design, he began carving symbols.
Not sigils.
Moments.
One for his mother — a spiral with an open core.
One for the Garden — a vertical slash through a horizontal line.
One for Shaak Ti — a curve wrapped around a point.
One for himself — unfinished, jagged, cut short by design.
Kaelen paused.
Looked down at his work.
It didn't look like a Jedi weapon.
It didn't look like a Death Watch blade.
It looked… like him.
Not what they made.
Not what they feared.
What he chose.
He reached for a clean strip of cloth from his belt. Wiped the blood from his palm.
Then, without thinking, smeared the streak across the bottom edge of the table—just beneath the design.
Not as a signature.
As proof.
He whispered:
"I'm not building a saber. I'm building the first thing they can't take from me."
And the forge was silent.
But it heard him.
............
Kaelen's hands hovered over the anvil. The ancient forge room was breathing now. Not literally—but he could feel it: a thrum beneath the stone, faint and buried, as if the Temple itself remembered this place.
He had brought the parts to the pedestal. Beskar, phrik, scorched durasteel casing. A scorched copper plate from an ancient emitter. The ragged shell of a disused focusing ring. Nothing elegant. Nothing chosen by the Temple.
But it was all real.
All earned.
He knelt at the side of the forge and reached into the braided metal channel beneath the platform. Buried in its core were faded wiring lines—part Force conductor, part reactor vein. He placed his palm on the ignition rune carved into the base.
Nothing happened.
He exhaled—not in frustration.
In memory.
He thought of everything the saber would carry.
The whispers that followed him down every hall.
The sound of a Temple door locking behind him.
The crack of bone when he disarmed a bounty at thirteen.
His mother's voice said goodbye without saying the word.
The heat in his chest began to stir. Not rage. Not sorrow.
Recognition.
The Force moved—but not through him.
With him.
His palm glowed faintly, the light bleeding out onto the floor.
The forge pulsed—slowly, like an old heart rediscovering its rhythm.
Then fire. Not bright. Not loud. But alive.
The brazier bowls lining the perimeter of the chamber flared to life one by one—soft orange, fading to gold, then deepening into a strange, pale white with just the faintest touch of violet.
Kaelen's eyes reflected it dimly. His breath misted in the air despite the growing heat.
He stood.
And began.
The first part to be shaped was the inner chamber—the heart of the hilt. A phrik core, narrow but strong, hollowed and notched to house a crystal that hadn't yet accepted him. He heated the phrik plate against the forge brazier, braced it with pliers, and shaped it using Force-assisted micro-vibration tools, balancing raw strength with delicate pressure.
Every pass of the tool echoed slightly.
The air resisted.
Not because he was unwelcome.
Because he was being watched.
His grip blistered, his knuckles split. He didn't stop.
Next came the power channeling rod, salvaged from a disassembled Temple shock-baton, reinforced by a strip of beskar Kaelen had taken from the pauldron of the armor he once wore as a child. He flattened it, etched it, and fused it into place.
The beskar didn't yield easily.
Neither did he.
The hammer rang once. Twice. Then thirty times.
Each strike echoed in the chamber like a countdown.
To what?
He wasn't sure.
But every piece found its place not by calculation, but by feel.
The emitter came next. He chose not a perfect curve, but a half-broken cone that he reforged at an angle. It pointed slightly down, toward his fingers, built for close combat, for deceptive grip changes, for unpredictability.
He integrated a rare micro-dampener near the activation plate—a stolen idea from Death Watch shock gauntlets. It would silence the saber's ignition if activated. Not always. Just when necessary.
Not Jedi.
Not Sith.
Not Mandalorian.
Kaelen.
He bound the grip last—using composite fiber dipped in resin and wrapped in textured braid. It wasn't beautiful. It wouldn't pass inspection.
But it wouldn't fail him in snow.
In blood.
In silence.
Once bound, he carved three symbols along the top edge—one with each finger, still bleeding:
A curved line broken in the center — for his mother.
A vertical spike encircled once, for the child in the Garden.
A split spiral — for himself. Unfinished.
He sealed them with the edge of his nail.
The Force didn't stir.
But it listened.
The blade was not yet alive.
No crystal had been placed.
But the hilt sat before him now—burnt, blood-streaked, uneven.
And true.
He didn't feel pride.
He didn't feel at peace.
He felt the weight.
This was no longer a tool. It was a sentence—one he hadn't finished writing.
He stared at it for a long time, his breath soft in the quiet.
And he whispered—not in reverence.
In warning.
"A blade shouldn't speak until it knows what it's saying."
The forge behind him dimmed.
Not extinguished. Just… waiting.
Like the weapon in front of him.
Like the man who had built it.