When one spends one’s entire life moving - a constant, nonstop whirlwind of growth and change - one never truly gets to stop and breathe, to think, to feel, to question, doubt and second-guess.
After they arrived on Viscara, landing on a far remote point of its wilderness, she let Puru to her own moments. Her own thoughts. The Chiss woman climbed atop the Silver Arrow and sat there, unable to shake away the need for silence, the urge to digest whatever it was that had been gnawing inside her since they jumped into hyperspace out of Kashyyk.
Nights in Viscaran wilderness were at last growing pleasant to her. The sky was particularly abundant with stars, and their twinkling glow reflected off the silver hull of Puru’s ship. It almost looked like a snowy field glittering under moonlight and, inevitably, that very thought reminded her of home.
From her earliest memories, Kthira’s life had been one of, simply put, constant, diligent forward motion interspersed with periods of upheaval and change.
The childhood of a Chiss youngling on Csilla is unlike anything in Republic space. There are moments of warmth and play, to be sure, but they’re scant, few and far between a constant and diligent striving for excellence. She remembers the Great Library on Csilla: endless hours studying and memorizing countless subjects, from history to mathematics, alongside other children. She remembers her actual schooling being even more demanding. She remembered her parents, proud of her overachieving, if socially aloof nature, dreaming of the day she would take up her own responsibilities in the family…
… she remembered the fatal day when those dreams were shattered by a simple, innocent act: she wanted to show her best friend in class how she could somehow make a datapad float in mid-air. She was eight.
And the memories of her life only came rushing like an avalanche, one after another.
She remembered her days after her exile. She remembered the day slavers caught her. She remembered her life - toiling and grasping just to survive day after day, to avoid punishment, to exist. She remembered Pren’al, a twi’lek male and fellow slave who had taught her how to survive in her new life.
She remembered the day - she was eleven then - when a Jedi, by “chance” found and rescued her.
More memories came, faster and faster.
The frightening yet exciting day she was inducted into the order. The proud, warm day when she became a Padawan. The exciting yet imposing sight of her former Master Yris, when she took the young Kthira under her tutelage for the first time. Years of harsh and even controversial training, and then the War. The fateful day she, her Master and Jhedok decided to join Revan’s crusade after the near-genocide of the Cathar.
Memories of the Wars were mingled together like one giant battle, one ceaseless explosion. Recollections of battle after battle. Wounds suffered. Friends lost. Death narrowly avoided dozens of times over. Memories of how she and Yris fell for each other. Memories of Jhedok’s increasingly hateful nature. After the death of her Master, her remembrance turned from war, into a spiraling descent into the dark.
Her grief. Her anger and hatred turned into bloodthirsty, merciless fanaticism until the war was over. The reckless eagerness with which she’d embraced conversion into Sith ways, with all the heedlessness of someone running away from her grief and her pain. It had mingled with the pull of the dark side, the addictive rush of wielding raw, untamed power. The constant scheming, backstabbing, senseless intrigue and murderous competition against the other Sith hopefuls. Until those intrigues ended… in defeat.
Those memories were the most vague. A descent. A saber wound in her gut. A vertigo-inducing fall into the depths of a ravine in Malachor. The planet’s cold tendrils seeping into her even life ebbed away.
Those memories were dark. Unseen. She could not remember what had happened as she drifted between life and death. Not even how long had passed then. All she remembered were two things: that every ounce of will in her body had desired life, had clung to it desperation, and that the fall had fundamentally changed her ways she did not yet understand.
The final memory was a more recent one, of but a couple days before in fact: she’d been standing on the balcony of their room on a small house far above a Wroshyr tree on Kashyyk. The only light was the faint, warm glow of the window behind her.
As she’d looked upon the nighttime vistas of Kashyyk on that night, she began to cry. A quiet, whimpering, stifled series of sobs with silent tears running down her blue cheeks. Even after arriving on Viscara, days later, she could not understand why she was crying.
Part of her knew why, even at that moment, even if it was a small fragment of the answer. It had had to do with the silence around her. With the serene yet wild air of Kashyyk’s night time. With the few days she’d spent away from Viscara and away from her ceaseless struggle. With the woman, the Jedi Knight, Puru, softly sleeping in their room behind her.
Yet, now… an insistent question began to nag at her mind as she sat atop Puru’s ship. It tugged and twisted at her thoughts more and more insistently as she mulled over her quiet moment of recolletions. All this time, since her downfall on Malachor, she’d been struggling, fighting, striving to grow again. To build herself back up. To build her strength, her power, all the prowess she’d lost. She’d been so focused on hunting Jhedok down. So focused on reclaiming her saber. On reclaiming her self. It turned out to merely be a continuation of her life up until that point, truly.
Before Malachor, every day had been constant striving to perfect herself, to be stronger, more intelligent, more powerful in the Force, even. Every day since Malachor, the struggle had remained the same.
And now, there it was, this question ringing in her mind. This question, for the first time. This question, subtly, gently coming now when she finally, for the first time, stopped moving.
It was so simple. All it asked was: who was it that she was building back up?
She had no answer to it.
