*He leaned forward, gauntleted knuckles pressing into the console.**
"Malak fell... after the Mandalorian Wars." The words were stark, stripped bare. "They broke him. The Jedi Council's inaction. The screams. The genocide." Revan's voice hitched, a rare fracture in the modulated tone. "He saw weakness. Saw their paralysis as betrayal." He paused. The hyperdrive hummed, a counterpoint to the remembered thunder of Basilisk war drogs. "I was Sith then. Lord Revan. Power was the only answer I knew." His helmet tilted fractionally. "Malak… he had fury. Focus. Potential." The admission tasted like ash. "So I trained him. Sharpened that fury. Fed his disillusionment. Made him a weapon." The silence thickened, heavy with the ghost of shared atrocities. Elara flinched, seeing Skywalker's rage mirrored in Revan's bleak history. Teaching hadn't guided Malak; it had weaponized his despair.
**A harsh, humorless rasp escaped the modulator.**
"And then… I remembered." Revan's fist clenched tighter, durasteel creaking. "The Star Forge whispered madness. Vitiate's touch… it faded. The Jedi fractured inside me… won." His visor remained fixed on the streaking blue void, seeing battles long past. "I became Revan again. The Jedi." He slammed his fist against the console – a single, sharp impact. "Malak saw betrayal. Heresy." Revan's voice dropped to a raw whisper. "He embraced the Dark Side fully. Took the mantle I cast off. Became Darth Malak." Elara swallowed hard, imagining the schism: loyalty turned to hatred, brotherhood to bloody vendetta. The parallels were terrifying – Anakin's fall echoing Malak's, born from disillusionment and a master's flawed path. Revan hadn't just trained a Sith; he'd forged his own executioner.
**"We fought,"** Revan stated, the simplicity chilling.
"Above Rakata Prime. His Star Forge against my resolve." His crimson gauntlet lifted, hovering in the blue light. "I struck him down. Cut his jaw clean off." The gesture was abrupt, final. "Finished him." He lowered his hand slowly. "I killed my Padawan." The confession hung, brutal and unadorned. Not triumph. Defeat. The ultimate failure of a teacher. Elara saw the weary slump of his shoulders beneath the armor, the faint tremor in his lowered fist. He didn't look at her. He didn't need to. The lesson was etched in blood and betrayal: training Elara wasn't refusing her potential. It was guaranteeing her destruction – or his own. The void outside blurred, a river of stars flowing past a monument to broken trust. Silence settled like dust on a grave.
**"But I *won't* fall!"** Elara's voice cracked, raw with desperation.
She shoved herself upright, ignoring the spilled caf soaking her boots. Her green eyes blazed, fixed on his impassive mask. "I swear it! On my life! On *their* lives!" She gestured fiercely toward the hold where the younglings slept. "I saw what Skywalker became. I felt the Dark Side in that Temple – cold, hungry, *wrong*. I won't become that!" Her fists clenched at her sides, knuckles white against her grimy tunic. Hatred pulsed within her – for Palpatine's lies, for the clones' betrayal, for the burning library crèche. Yet beneath it, something fiercer burned: defiance. Survival. Protecting what remained. She met his void-black lenses. "Teach me how to fight it. Teach me how to protect them. *Please*." Her plea echoed in the humming cockpit, fragile as glass against durasteel.
**Revan's helmet tilted slowly.**
A dry, derisive rasp escaped his modulator – less a laugh, more the scrape of gravel on durasteel. His crimson gauntlet lifted, not toward her, but pointing a single armored finger directly at her chest. "Don't lie to yourself," his voice grated, stripped of mercy. "I can *feel* the hate boiling inside you. Like embers in wet wood." He leaned closer, the Mandalorian mask filling her vision. **"I felt it back in that hangar bay when you saw Skywalker's blade. That tremor in your Force signature? Pure, unrefined *rage**. Against the clones. Against the Empire. Against Skywalker himself."** His finger tapped the air rhythmically, each tap punctuating his words. **"You swear you won't fall? Hate promises nothing. Hate *demands*."** He leaned back, the accusation hanging like drawn steel. "It demands vengeance. Power. Control. The Dark Side doesn't seduce the weak. It consumes the passionate." His hollow gaze swept over her trembling form. "And you burn, Padawan."
**Elara recoiled as if slapped.**
His words weren't just accusation; they were dissection. She *had* trembled in the hangar. She *had* fantasized about Skywalker choking on his own hatred. The fury he named coiled hot and sharp behind her ribs – for the masters cut down, for the Initiates screaming, for the desecration of everything sacred. Her lips parted, a retort forming about justice, about righteous anger... but it died. Revan's finger remained extended, an armored blade pointing at her soul's flaw. The silence stretched, thick with the echo of blasterfire and Malak's betrayal. Her fists unclenched slowly, fingers trembling not with rage now, but with dawning, horrifying comprehension. He saw her potential for darkness clearer than she saw Coruscant's skyline.
**Revan lowered his finger.**
The gesture was deliberate, final. "Rage and hate," his modulator rasped, the distortion chillingly calm, "they scream in the dark. They push you past exhaustion, past fear." He leaned forward slightly, his void-black visor locking onto her wide, green eyes. "They shatter empires. Slay Sith Lords." A pause, heavy as a tombstone. "After the shattering... after the slaying?" His voice dropped to a near-whisper, colder than deep space. "What fills the silence?" He gestured vaguely around the cockpit, encompassing the void outside. "When your vengeance is ash on the wind? When every enemy lies broken?" He leaned back, the leather creaking. **"You turn the blade inward... or outward again."** He tapped his own chest plate slowly, a hollow *thunk*. "Find a new shadow to rage against. A new face to hate. Fuel the fire with the memory of old screams." His head tilted, a predator studying wounded prey. "Until the galaxy is nothing but targets... and your soul...?" He let the question hang, a dark, suffocating vapor. "...runs on pure spite."
**Elara stared at the caf stain spreading on the deck.**
She saw reflections in the dark liquid – Skywalker's molten eyes, Palpatine's cold smile, her own face twisted in fury as she imagined driving her green blade through clone trooper armor. Revan's bleak prophecy echoed: endless targets, endless rage, an eternity of screaming into an uncaring void. The younglings' muffled cries from the hold pierced the silence – fragile, terrified, existing *despite* the Empire. Hatred demanded their vengeance. But what came after? Would protecting them mean becoming the cold fury Revan described? She swallowed hard, the taste of bile and desperation sharp in her throat. "Then... what?" she whispered, the defiance flickering, guttering out like a dying candle. "If not anger... *what* moves the blade?"
**Revan leaned back, gauntlets resting flat on his thighs.**
The hyperspace tunnel streamed blue light across his bloodstained armor. When he spoke, his modulator hummed low, devoid of passion, yet heavy with millennia-old conviction. **"Use the Dark and the Light,"** he stated calmly, as if discussing engine maintenance. "Anger fuels the blaster bolt. Focus guides it." His helmet tilted fractionally toward her. "Skywalker burns. Palpatine schemes. They chain themselves to one side of the Force." A faint, contemptuous rasp escaped the modulator. "Weakness." His crimson gauntlet lifted, palm open. Violet sparks danced briefly across his fingers – pure Light, warm and steady. Then shadows coalesced, swirling like ink in water – cold, sharp Dark. They spiraled together in his palm, intertwining without conflict, creating a shimmering sphere of balanced energy. "Hate is a tool," he continued, his voice flat. "So is hope. Fear sharpens reflexes. Calm steadies the hand." The sphere pulsed once before vanishing. "Deny neither. *Master* both."
**Elara watched the fading afterimage.**
Not Sith lightning. Not Jedi serenity. Something *else*. A fusion, seamless and terrifying. The Dark hadn't consumed the Light; it hadn't annihilated it. They'd coexisted. Balanced. Like predator and prey in an ecosystem, one sustaining the other. Her mind recoiled—Jedi teachings screamed heresy. Yet… hadn't this heresy shielded younglings? Defied Skywalker? Saved her life? The caf stain beneath her boots seemed trivial now, a petty concern against the galactic schism unfolding before her. Revan's visor remained fixed on her, reading her turmoil as easily as a holocodex. She felt stripped bare, her fury exposed, her desperation laid open. "So… that?" she breathed, gesturing weakly at his empty palm. "That's… the answer?"
**"That,"** Revan's modulator rasped, the distortion flattening the word into undeniable fact, **"is the Way of the Gray Jedi."** He leaned forward, the pilot's seat groaning beneath his armored weight. His crimson gauntlet pointed deliberately at the swirling hyperspace vortex outside the viewport. **"There must be both Dark and Light.** Not warring nations, but tides of the same ocean. Deny the storm, and your ship founders. Fear the calm, and you never sail." His helmet tilted, a stark silhouette against the streaking blue. **"I will do what I must to keep the balance. As the balance,"** his voice dropped low, resonating with primal certainty, **"is what holds all life."** He gestured sharply, encompassing the sleeping younglings, the scarred Padawan, the galaxy burning behind them. **"There is no good without evil—its shadow defines the shape of virtue. But evil must not be allowed to flourish unchecked."**
**His fist clenched slowly, durasteel screeching softly.**
**"There is passion,"** he declared, the word igniting like plasma, **"yet peace must temper its wildfire.** Serenity," the modulator softened slightly, recalling meditation chambers long dust, **"yet emotion gives it meaning. Chaos,"** a glance toward the scarred hangar bay doors sealing the hold, **"yet order binds its fury."** He raised his open hand again, palm facing upward. Violet sparks flickered weakly alongside deep, swirling shadows—a visible testament. **"I am a wielder of the flame,"** he stated, the title ringing with ancient weight. **"A champion of balance."** His helmet turned fully toward Elara, the void lenses capturing her reflection—small, scarred, trembling with potential and peril. **"I am a guardian of life."** The declaration settled over her like armor. **"I am a Gray Jedi."** It wasn't pride. It wasn't defiance. It was simple, brutal truth—a creed forged in failure, tempered in war, and proven in the desperate flight from hell.
**Silence followed.**
Thick, heavy, charged with the hum of the hyperdrive and the ghosts of Malachor. Elara stared at her reflection trapped within Revan's mask—a flicker of green eyes wide with revelation and residual terror. The Jedi Temple was ash. The Sith offered only chains. This… *Gray*… was blasphemy. Survival. Hope carved from darkness. Her gaze drifted past Revan's armored shoulder, focusing on the sleeping form of the youngest Initiate curled beside a ration crate—innocence preserved only because Revan had wielded *both* tides. She took a shaky breath. The boiling hatred inside her didn't vanish. It simply… shifted. Recognized its place as fuel, not master. Her voice, when it finally came, was a whisper scraping against the durasteel tomb of the cockpit: **"Teach me… that Way."** Not demand. Plea. Understanding dawned: hatred was a weapon. Balance was the *hand* that wielded it.
**Revan shook his head 'No'.**
The denial wasn't abrupt, but a slow, deliberate tilt of the Mandalorian helm—a silent eclipse against the streaking blue tunnel outside. His crimson gauntlet lifted, palm facing her, fingers curled slightly inward, not in refusal, but in a gesture invoking stillness. **"Learn it,"** his modulator rasped, the distortion devoid of warmth yet dense with imperative. **"Not taught."** He leaned back, the pilot's chair groaning beneath his weight. Behind the mask, his gaze—though unseen—felt like twin pressure points settling on the scorched fabric above her healed shoulder. **"Feel the Dark's hunger when Skywalker's blade grazed your skin. Taste its cold promise of power. *Hold* it."** His helmet tilted fractionally toward the hold where the younglings slept. **"Then feel the Light's warmth on their breaths. Hear its whisper urging you to protect them. *Hold* that too."** He lowered his hand slowly, a gauntleted fist resting on his thigh. **"Balance isn't taught. It's *forged*. Between your rage… and your reason."**
**He rose abruptly.**
The servos whined softly as he turned toward the cockpit hatch, leaving Elara's unanswered plea hanging in the charged air. Water dripped steadily from a rent in his armor onto the deck plating—a reminder of the flooded Temple, the burning hangar, the desperate escape. His stride was heavy, deliberate, exhaustion bleeding through the imposing frame. At the threshold, he paused. Without turning, his modulator crackled, low and rough: **"Start small."** A crimson gauntlet gestured vaguely toward her lightsaber hilt clipped at her belt. **"The next time blaster bolts fly… deflect with precision, not panic. Let the anger sharpen your focus—not cloud it."** He stepped into the shadowed corridor leading to the dimly lit hold, the blue light from the viewport slicing his silhouette into sharp, armored fragments. **"Fail,"** his voice echoed back, fading into the ship's deeper rumble, **"...and they die."** The hatch hissed shut behind him. Elara sat alone, the weight of his impossible demand settling onto her shoulders alongside the lingering scent of ozone, caf, and the sterile chill of hyperspace.
**A proximity chime pierced the silence.**
The cockpit viewport flared crimson as the freighter shuddered violently—an interdiction field clawing at its hull from a distant Venator lurking at the edge of the hyperspace lane. Outside the streaking blue tunnel, the distorted shapes of Star Destroyers solidified like predatory wraiths emerging from the void. Turbolaser batteries glowed ominously as they tracked the lone Consular ship. Elara sucked in a breath, icy fear instantly warring with the simmering fury ignited by the Imperial blockade. Her hand flew to her lightsaber. *Hold the Dark's hunger.* Skywalker's molten eyes flashed in her memory. *Hold the Light's warmth.* The muffled whimper of a waking youngling drifted from the hold. She ignited her green blade, its emerald light casting long, trembling shadows across the console. Anger honed her focus. Protection steadied her trembling hand. The ship bucked again under sustained tractor beam pressure. Failure wasn't an option. The forge awaited.