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Master Vodo looked at the gathered students. Gantoris seemed incredibly eager to hear more, leaning forward and staring with wide, dark eyes. The image of the long-dead Jedi Master turned to face Luke. “You must warn your students to beware of the temptations of conquest. That is all I can tell you for now.”

The image flickered and wavered. With a feeling of deep uneasiness Luke silenced the Holocron. The images returned to swirling pearlescence inside its cubical walls.

“I think that’s enough for this morning,” Luke said. “We all know that other Jedi have followed the wrong path, bringing not only themselves but millions of innocent lives to doom and suffering. But I trust you. A Jedi must trust himself, and a Jedi Master must trust his apprentices.

“Explore yourselves and your surroundings, in teams or alone, whichever makes you comfortable. Go to the jungle. Go to other parts of this temple. Or simply go back to your chambers. The choice is yours.”

Luke sat down on the edge of the raised stage and watched the students file out of the grand hall. The translucent cube of the Holocron stood mute beside him, a vessel filled with valuable but dangerous knowledge.

Obi-Wan Kenobi had been Luke’s teacher. Luke had listened to every word the old man had said, trusting it; yet Luke had later learned how often Obi-Wan had obscured the facts, had distorted information—or as Obi-Wan explained it, simply offered the truth “from a certain point of view.”

Luke watched the robed forms and wondered if his students could handle the knowledge they might discover. What if, like ancient Exar Kun in Master Vodo’s story, they were tempted to uncover the forbidden teachings of the Sith, that so subtly yet crucially differed from the Jedi Code?

Luke feared what might happen should one of his students travel down the wrong path. But he also knew that he had to trust them—or they could never become Jedi Knights.

Deep into the night Gantoris hunched over the cluttered worktable, secretly constructing his own lightsaber.

A blanket of shadows surrounded him, obliterating distractions that might keep him from his task. His dark eyes had adjusted to the tight-beam glowlamp that spilled a harsh pool of light over his debris-strewn work surface, leaving the rest of the room in murk. As Gantoris moved to pick up another precision tool, his shadow flapped like a bird of prey across the ancient stone walls.

The Great Temple sat silent, like an ancient trap to stifle sound. The other students in Master Skywalker’s Jedi academy—his praxeum, as he called it—had retired to their private chambers to fall into an exhausted sleep or to meditate on Jedi relaxing techniques.

Gantoris’s neck ached, and his shoulder muscles burned from holding his cramped position for hours. He breathed in and out, smelling the thickness of old smoke and the scratchy moss that had worked for millennia to pry through cracks in the precisely placed temple blocks.

The moss had withered not long after Gantoris had taken up residence in the chambers.…

Outside, the jungle of Yavin 4 simmered with restless life, rustling, chittering, singing, and shrieking, as stronger creatures fed, as weaker creatures died.

Gantoris continued to work. He no longer needed sleep. He could draw the energy he required using different methods, secrets he had been taught that the other students did not suspect. His unbraided black hair stuck out in wiry shocks, and an acrid, gunpowdery smell clung to his cloak, his skin.

He focused on the components scattered across the table: silver electronics, dull metal, glinting glass. He slid his fingertips across the cold bits of wire, picked up a sharp-edged microcontrol box with trembling hands. Widening his eyes in annoyance, Gantoris stared at his hands until the trembling stopped, then set to work again.

He understood how the pieces would all fit together. Once he knew, once he had drawn together sufficient Jedi knowledge, everything seemed obvious to him. Obvious.

The elegant energy blade served as the personal weapon of the Jedi,