Fein watches Dorian’s lightsaber pull apart before his very eyes, and wonders if he would even be able to take his apart should he try. Circuit boards and fused metal, peeling back like they were never welded into each other, casings and wires humming in the air, and in the midst of it all – an empty space where Dorian’s kyber crystal should have been. Spiraling slowly, lazily in the air, the ruin of what was once a lightsaber.
“Your crystal?” he asks, “Where …,” he phrases the question in a way Dorian would approve of, not when or where but, “Why?”
Fein remembers piecing his saber together. It feels like a different man took the designs from the hands of his master and replicated them to the letter. Blue lines that created map to the only future he’d ever known – he’d made his lightsaber like every saber he’d ever known, just as he’d only ever wanted to be like every knight he’d ever known.
He lifts his weapon from the ground, fingers fumbling along the grip, as he replicates what Dorian was able to do with the force with his hands. He wonders, for a moment, if he should have used the Force, then shakes the doubt away. He built this saber with his hands, he would do this now with the same hands.
After a moment his own crystal shines against the dark backdrop of the night, echoing the pulses of negative space where Dorian’s own should have been. Fein reaches out, and takes the crystal in his hand again, feeling the purity of its power echoing with his own Force signature.
“I see … a path,” he tells Dorian finally, “I can’t be the Knight I thought I’d be. Too much has changed. I have to embrace that instead of changing it.”
He looks up, their faces lit up by the glow of their crystal and by starlight. Fein’s a deeper green, an echo of the planet where he’d hid his past and begun his life; “I can’t remember this weapon, it doesn’t feel right in my hands because my hands have changed. I’ve got to create one that will fit.”
Excitement courses through him now. For the first time since they’d left Jedha (since he’d left the pits) he has a purpose again.
Dorian can’t say, but the day Emperor Palpatine executed Order 66, his entire world splintered off into fragments—a spiderweb of cracks pulsing from every decision he might make. When he held his weapon, all he felt was pain pain pain. Plagued in an instant by visions of him harming another, and then that life tumbling onto the next, and the next, for thousands of years to come—he couldn’t do it. Even the mere possibility that he could cause such unspeakable damage with his lightsaber was something he decided he couldn’t risk.
He looks over Fein’s shoulder and spots them playing together at the base of a large tree planted decades before they’d ever been born. It was her who he pulled from the Temple, it was her who he’d given his Kyber crystal.
These thoughts feel like an eternity for Dorian, though in reality, only occur in a manner of seconds. He hums a single note and replies, “Little Dreamwalker, we are all on separate pathways, some intersecting, some parallel to one another.” A long pause, the silence drawing out between them before he continues, “I saw something, once,” His voice grows softer, his gaze further away, “It was all red; my weapon humming steadily in my hands. I hid the crystal but kept the rest. I keep it with me as a reminder of my path.”
From then, he swore never to look into his future again. It’s been a shadow to him ever since.
Fein’s path shines clear and true. Once, there was another way—once, before the ruin of the Jedi befell them, he might have fought with that very same lightsaber in his hands. Dorian peers closely at the dark space behind Fein and realizes now as the image comes into focus that the weapon he wields in a different future is that of another kind.
At that, he smiles, something present to it. He nods once. “Good. Hold on to that path, Little Dreamwalker. The only one who can take it from you is yourself.”
