- EmperorCaedusLevel Three
The Power of Darth Caedus: How Jaina Becomes the Sword of the Jedi
April 12th 2023, 1:05 am
THE POWER OF DARTH CAEDUS: HOW JAINA FULFILLS HER ROLE AS SWORD OF THE JEDI
Table of Contents
1) The Rise of Darth Caedus: High Stakes and Personal Growth
2) A Battle of Visions: Luke's Objective
3) Jaina's Empowerment: Luke's Role
4) Jaina Solo's "Edge": Preparing to Fight Caedus
5) Contronting Eo!Invincible Caedus: The Final Battle
6) Where does Caedus stack up?
7) Unraveling Jacen Solo: Exploring Jacen's Hype
1) THE RISE OF DARTH CAEDUS: HIGH STAKES AND PERSONAL GROWTH
In the very beginning of Invincible, Caedus reflects on his mistakes as a Sith, and comes to the realization that he had been weak as of late. Caedus knows in theory that the path to true power as a Sith Lord lies in the acceptance of emotional pain from his sacrifices, but he hadn't been adhering to this rule lately. Caedus was cutting himself off from his pain, and as foretold by the Sith tassels, the key to achieving Caedus’ full potential as a Sith Lord was to embrace his sacrifices and pain. This realization was a turning point for Caedus, and from now on, he embraced the pain and sacrifice required to become the powerful Sith he was meant to be, and remembered why he had become a Sith in the first place: to serve.Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:He had made a few mistakes. Caedus could see that now.
He had fallen to the same temptation all Sith did, had cut himself off from everything he loved-his family, his lover, even his daughter-to avoid being distracted by their betrayals. He could see now how blinding himself to his pain had also blinded him to his duty, how he had begun to think only of himself, of his plans, of his destiny:of his galaxy.
Self-absorption.
That was the downfall of the Sith, always. He had studied the lives of the ancients-such greats as Naga Sadow, Freedon Nadd, Exar Kun-and he knew that they always made the same mistake, that sooner or later they always forgot that they existed to serve the galaxy, and came to believe that the galaxy existed to serve them.
And Caedus had stepped into the same trap. He had forgotten why he was doing all this, the reason that he had picked up a lightsaber in the first place and the reason that he had given himself over to the Sith, the reason that he had taken sole control of the Galactic Alliance.
To serve.
Caedus had forgotten because he was weak. After Allana had betrayed him by sneaking off the Anakin Solo with his parents, his pain had become a distraction. He had been unable to think, to plan, to command, to read the future:to lead. So he had shut away his feelings for Allana, had convinced himself that he was not really doing this for her and the trillions of younglings like her, that he was doing this for destiny-for his destiny.
It had all been a lie. Even after what Allana had done, Caedus still loved her. He was her father, and he would always love her, no matter how much she hurt him. He had been wrong to try to escape that. Caedus needed to hold on to that love whatever it cost him, to cling to that love even as it tore his heart apart.
Because that was how Sith stayed strong. They needed pain to keep the Balance, to remind them they were still human. And they needed it so they would not forget the pain they were inflicting on others. To make the galaxy safer, everyone had to suffer-even Sith Lords.
And so there would be no angry outbursts when he confronted the Moffs over their unauthorized adventures, no demonstration killings, no Force chokings or threats to have his fleets attack theirs, no intimidation of any sort. There would be no consequences at all, for how were they to know of the worrisome things he had been seeing in his Force visions lately-the Mandalorian maniacs and the burning asteroids, his uncle's inescapable gaze-if he failed to tell them? Whether blunder or master stroke, the taking of the Roche system was as much his doing as the Moffs', Caedus saw now, and he was beyond punishing others for his mistakes. Starting today, Darth Caedus was going to rule not through anger or fear or even bribery, but as every true Sith Lord should, through patience and love and:pain.
- Powered Through Pain:
- Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines wrote:In her hands Lumiya held the tassels whose knots and threads were a language, a prophecy, an arcane instruction book of what Jacen had to do to achieve full Sith knowledge and power. On the low table in front of her was a candle, burning steadily and occasionally guttering in a draft.
The Tassels:Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice wrote:He will choose the fate of the weak.
He will win and break his chains.
He will choose how he will be loved.
He will strengthen himself through sacrifice.
He will make a pet.
He will strengthen himself through pain.
He will balance between peace and conflict.
He will know brotherhood.
He will remake himself.
He will immortalize his love.
-"Common Themes in Prophecies Recorded, in the Symbology of Knotted Tassels;" by Dr. Heilan Rotham, University of Pangalactic Cultural Studies.Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines wrote:"I can't teach you any more skills. You now have to pass through the final barrier and do what no ordinary man can-kill someone whose death will cause terrible suffering to those who love them, someone close to you."
"Who?"
"I can't tell you, because I don't know."
"Someone I love?"
"Do you love someone?"
"I allow myself to love many people." Careful . . . careful. You're on the knife-edge. "How will I know who to kill?"
"It'll become clear when the time is right. You'll know."
"And why is it the ultimate test?"
"Because taking the life of an innocent is always harder even than taking your own, if you're sincere. This is the ultimate test of selflessness-whether you're ready to face unending emotional pain, true agony, to gain the power to create peace and order for billions of total strangers. That is the sacrifice. To be vilified by others, by people you know and care for, and for your personal sacrifice to be totally unknown to those billions you save, to do your duty as a Sith. To do your duty for the good of the galaxy." She stood so close to him that her breath made the candle's flame flicker. "It's easy to be a clean-cut hero slaying monsters. There's always a little bit of vanity in it. There can be no room for vanity or pride in being despised."
It was true, and it was horrible. Courage often needed an audience. True selfless courage, by definition, took place in darkness, unseen.
Jacen held his hand in the flame. He held it there longer than he had ever done before, until he smelled his own flesh charring, and Lumiya reached out and jerked his arm away. He wasn't sure if he was testing his ability to transcend pain or beginning his own punishment.
He thought of his grandfather, killing simply for Padme's life. Whoever Jacen had to kill as the price of being able to wield the ultimate defensive weapon of Sith order, he would know his motives were totally divorced from his own narrow wants and needs ... like Tenel Ka and his Allana.Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines wrote:But there was still the faintest hint of the old Jacen, wounded by bereavement and pain, scared of doing necessary things. That was the last tinge of doubt and reluctance that his final step would erase. It would enable him to cross the line into his full Sith legacy.Legacy of the Force: Inferno wrote:Instead, Caedus unmasked his presence and opened himself to their meld. It was full of half-familiar feelings, of purpose and commitment and hope, of inclusion and fellowship and warmth-none of it directed at him, of course. He was surprised how lonely the exclusion made him feel, and how much he missed the companionship of family and friends. He had thought himself above such sentimental trivialities. But of course, he was not, and never would be.
The Sith way was one of deep sacrifice, and only now was Caedus coming to understand that he had not sacrificed the ability to love-only the ability to be loved in return. Time after time, he would be forced to betray his family and friends for the good of the galaxy, and time after time they would hate him for it. Yet he could never shrink from making those sacrifices. To do so was to sow the seeds of selfishness within himself, and down that path lay the greed and power lust that had corrupted Palpatine- and so many Sith before him.
So Caedus would continue to do what was necessary.Legacy of the Force: Fury wrote:In the days since his fight with Luke, he had come to the realization that he was all alone in the universe. It was like the plaintive wail of a five-year-old: Nobody loves me. He could manage a smile at just how self-pitying it sounded.
But it was true. Everyone who had once known love for him now hated him. His father and mother, his twin Jaina, Tenel Ka, Luke, Ben. ... Intellectually, as he had embraced the Sith path, he had known that it would happen. One by one, those who cared about him would be peeled away like the outer layers of his skin, leaving him a mass of bloody, agonized nerves.
He had known it ... but experiencing it was another matter. His body might be healing, but his spirit was in greater pain every day.
- The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia
A parallel is made in Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader concerning Vader’s limitations post-Mustafar. Sidious believes that Vader’s limitations are not primarily physical, but psychological, and that Vader must embrace the sacrifices he had made, and “it can all be yours”. For Vader to overcome his psychological weaknesses, he would need to be driven deeper into himself, and confront all his choices and his disappointments, embracing them and subsequently becoming empowered by them. If Vader ever overcomes this weakness, it could be at Sidious’s peril, indicating he would be reaching levels he had been prior to his maiming on Mustafar just through this shift in mindset.
Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader wrote:"This is an important time for you, Lord Vader," Palpatine was saying. "You are finally free to make full use of your powers. If not for us, the galaxy would never have been restored to order. Now you must embrace the sacrifices you made to bring this about, and revel in the fact that you have fulfilled your destiny. It can all be yours, my young apprentice, anything you wish. You need only have the determination to take it, at whatever cost to those who stand in your way."
…
"Do you recall what I told you about the relationship between power and understanding, Lord Vader?"
"Yes, Master. Where the Jedi gained power through understanding, the Sith gain understanding through power."
Palpatine smiled faintly. "This will become clearer to you as you continue your training, Lord Vader. And to that end I will provide you with the means to increase your power, and broaden your understanding. In due time, power will fill the vacuum created by the decisions you made, the acts you carried out. Married to the order of the Sith, you will need no other companion than the dark side of the Force..."
The remark stirred something within Vader, but he was unable to make full sense of the feelings that washed through him: a commingling of anger and disappointment, of grief and regret...
The events of Anakin Skywalker's life might have occurred a lifetime ago, or to someone else entirely, and yet some residue of Anakin continued to plague Vader, like pain from a phantom limb.
…
And so it fell to Sidious to complete Vader's convalescence.
As Emperor Palpatine, he had no need to reveal his Sith training and mastery to anyone, and for the moment Vader was his crimson blade. Let the galaxy think what it would of Vader: fallen Jedi, surfaced Sith, political enforcer... It scarcely mattered, since fear would ultimately bring and keep everyone in line.
Yes, Vader was not precisely what he had bargained for. Vader's legs and arms were artificial, and he would never be able to summon lightning or leap about like the Jedi had been fond of doing. His dark side training was just beginning. But Sith power resided not in the flesh but in the will. Self-restraint was praised by the Jedi only because they didn't know the power of the dark side. Vader's real weaknesses were psychological rather than physical, and for Vader to overcome them he would need to be driven deeper into himself, to confront all his choices and his disappointments.
Powered by treachery, the Sith Master-apprentice relationship was always a dangerous game. Trust was encouraged even while being sabotaged; loyalty was demanded even while betrayal was prized; suspicion was nourished even while honesty was praised.
In some sense, it was survival of the fittest.
Fundamental to Vader's growth was the desire to overthrow his Master.
Had Vader killed Obi-Wan on Mustafar, he might have attempted to kill Sidious, as well. In fact, Sidious would have been surprised if Anakin hadn't made an attempt. Now, however, incapable of so much as breathing on his own, Vader could not rise to the challenge, and Sidious understood that he would need to do everything in his power to shake Vader out of his despair, and reawaken the incredible power within him.
Even at Sidious's own peril…
So, the issue that Suit Vader suffers from and that keeps him locked below Sidious is the same issue that Caedus suffered from and ultimately fixed: he must embrace the sacrifices he had made, becoming empowered by them. If Vader embraces this it could be at Sidious’s own peril, so if that’s the gap that’s between Suit Vader and a theoretical Vader who sheds this limitation… well, Caedus' growth wouldn’t be anything less than substantial between Revelation and Invincible. This isn’t "mega-scaling technical growth" - this mindset is an essential aspect for Caedus reaching his full potential as a Sith Lord, and would result in monumental growth from Revelation leading into Invincible.
Moving onto the stakes of Invincible, Jaina, Luke, and the Jedi Council all believe that Caedus not only must be stopped, but killed, for the survival of the Jedi Order and well-being of civilization itself. The Second Galactic Civil War cannot be won through military might alone, but only through the death or redemption of Caedus, and the latter is deemed an impossibility, even by Han and Leia.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:Jaina nodded, then summoned to mind the speech she had been rehearsing about how the coalition couldn't win the war through military might alone; their only real hope was to dismantle the enemy command structure from the top down.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"I doubt we'll be fortunate enough to get away with simple assassination," Luke replied. "But yes. For some time now, it's been clear to me that our survival-and civilization's well-being-depends on ridding the galaxy of Darth Caedus."
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"Every day, it growz more clear to us that this fight will be won or lost in the mystic realm, not the physical," Saba added. "And the Force has named you Sword of the Jedi. We would have been foolz not to discusz your request."
- The stakes:
- Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:What Jaina did not know was whether she was ready. She could fight any three men in Keldabe and be the only one left standing. She could splat a dyeball on Fett's armor anywhere she wanted. She could outfly Mandalore's best pilots in any vessel they chose, and shoot down an entire squadron in elite combat simulations.
None of that meant she was good enough to bring down a Sith Lord.
And she had to be. If Mara had been frightened enough of her brother's transformation to attempt killing him, then it was up to Jaina to finish the job. Jacen-or Darth Caedus, as he called himself now-had to be stopped-for Mara and Ben and Luke, for her parents and Tenel Ka and Allana, for Kashyyyk and Fondor and the rest of the galaxy.
But was she ready?Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:The Jedi had retreated to the abandoned mining world of Shedu Maad to hide from Jacen, and ever since joining them here, Jaina had been wondering whether this dark corner of the galaxy would become their tomb. Like most good refuges, it felt safe and secure:and that was an illusion. After the trouble the Jedi had caused at Fondor, Jacen would be searching for their secret base with every resource he could spare-and this time, he would give them no time to evacuate. He would have a strike force waiting to pounce the instant he had any idea where they were.
Their only hope was to get him first.
The Jedi would never leave Shedu Maad alive-not unless they hunted down and killed Jacen before he hunted them down. Jaina knew that in her heart.Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:Jaina glanced away without returning the gesture, telling herself that she had only been looking in Jag's direction because Zekk wasn't present, that she wasn't ready to think about choosing anyone until she had finished with Jacen.
And to do that, she needed to win the support of the Jedi Council. The first step was to convince Luke and the others that the Jedi had to challenge Jacen no matter how strong he was; that they did not dare hide in the Transitory Mists until they could find some way to shift the the balance of power back in their favor.Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:Luke's gaze shifted from the darkness outside to Jaina's reflection. "Now-Jaina, why don't you tell us what's really on your mind?"
Jaina nodded, then summoned to mind the speech she had been rehearsing about how the coalition couldn't win the war through military might alone; their only real hope was to dismantle the enemy command structure from the top down.
But then she glanced in her parents' direction and saw the pain lurking in the depths of her mother's brown eyes, and how her father seemed to have aged ten years in the weeks she had been gone, and she knew she couldn't do that to them. It would be more honest to just come out and say it, to simply tell them about the awful decision she had made not so long ago, looking out over the beautiful Kelita valley with a forgotten Jedi general.
"Mom and Dad, I'm sorry for this." As Jaina spoke, she did not take her eyes from her parents. "But I think we have to go after Jacen. I think it's our duty."
Their eyes grew instantly glassy. Her mother's lip began to tremble, and her father's face grew red and grief-furrowed, but they did not look away.
Neither did they speak. It was Saba Sebatyne who asked, "Go after? What do you mean by go after? Arrest? Capture?" She ruffled her scales in disapproval. "This one knowz you have been training with Boba Fett, but that has not worked before."
Jaina shifted her attention to the Barabel. "I know, and it cost us some good people." She glanced around the table at the other Masters. "I mean eliminate. I mean hunt down and kill."
Not too surprisingly, it was her father who responded first. "No." Instead of looking at Jaina or anyone else, he stared at the table and just shook his head. "That's not Jacen. Jacen died in the war against the Yuuzhan Vong, just like Anakin did."
Jaina frowned, wondering how badly she had misjudged the impact her decision would have on Han Solo. "Dad, Jacen didn't die," she said. "He escaped with Vergere and-"
Her mother grabbed her arm, silencing her with a short squeeze. "Jaina, we haven't lost touch with reality. We're just saying that the man you're talking about isn't our Jacen."
"Jacen was a hero." Han's voice was as harsh as forge fumes. "He killed Onimi and won the war with the Yuuzhan Vong, and then he died of his wounds." He stopped talking for a moment, drawing in a loud breath and seeming to gather his strength, then finally looked up at Jaina with more anger and despair in his eyes than she recalled seeing, even when Chewbacca died. "Caedus is just the monster who stepped into the hollow shell that was left behind:and if anyone here is capable of taking him out, I'll gladly arm the detonator."
Jaina did not know how to react to the raw hatred in his voice, perhaps because she had not allowed her own anger to play a part in her decision-because she had decided dispassionately that it was appropriate to put a blaster bolt through her twin brother's head.
So Jaina merely nodded and reached over to take his forearm. "Okay, Dad:Caedus must die. We have to hunt him down and kill him."
Jaina had not used Jacen's Sith name earlier because she could not allow herself to pretend that she was thinking these things about someone other than her own brother-because when the time came, she knew it would not be Darth Caedus she saw in her sniper sight, but her brother, Jacen Solo, and if she wasn't ready to kill him, then she would be the one who died.
Jaina shifted her attention to Leia. "Mom?"
Her mother's eyes grew distant and unreadable; then she merely looked at the table and nodded. "That's not Jacen," she said. "And even if it was, I don't think we'd have any choice."
Luke finally turned away from the viewport. With sunken eyes and hollow cheeks, he looked like he had not slept in many nights. But there was also an eerie tranquillity about him that seemed both frightening and vaguely reassuring, as though he had been staring out that viewport for days, waiting for just this moment.
"Thank you," he said, and Jaina knew she had accomplished the second step of her plan. Now all she had to do was convince them she should be the one to send. "I've been wondering when someone else was going to come to the same conclusion."
"Then you approve?" While Kenth's voice was condemning, there was something in it that did not sound quite sincere to Jaina-as though he secretly agreed with Luke's decision, but felt the argument had to be made for form's sake. "Assassinating a Head of State?"
"I doubt we'll be fortunate enough to get away with simple assassination," Luke replied. "But yes. For some time now, it's been clear to me that our survival-and civilization's well-being-depends on ridding the galaxy of Darth Caedus."
Corran shook his head. "There are a lot of legitimate ways to be rid of Ja-" He caught himself and stopped, casting an apologetic look toward the Solos. Again, there was something missing from his tone, and Jaina had the sense that while he was sincere in what he was saying, he already knew that this was an argument he had no chance of winning. "To remove Caedus from power. Assassination isn't one of them. It would make us no different from him."
"We have tried arrest, and we have tried politicz," Saba replied. "And we have failed because we refuse to see the truth: Caedus remainz in power because he never balkz at the kill. If we wish to remove him, neither can we."
Kyp nodded in agreement. "That's right. Caedus won't be taken alive:and if we try, we'll be the ones who end up dead." He turned to Luke. "But if you've already decided we have to do this, why wait until Jaina brings it up?"
"To tell the truth, I was worried that my judgment might be clouded by a desire for vengeance." Luke glanced in Jaina's direction, and a look of genuine relief came to his eyes. "So I wanted to hear someone else say it first."
And because Luke agrees with this too, believing for the well-being of civilization and survival of the Jedi, that Caedus should be killed, then it’s reasonable to conclude that Luke would be doing everything in his power to take Caedus down.
Isn't Luke weakened in LotF due to Mara death?
No. Following Mara's death, it is true that Luke had been consumed by grief, causing him to withdraw from his duties as Grandmaster of the Jedi Order, and duties to the galaxy as a whole, however, at the end of Fury, Luke realizes through Ben's help that he could not ignore his responsibilities any longer, and resolved to shoulder the weight of his duties as a Jedi once more, a weight that kept him alive through the toughest of situations. Luke was shaken out of his depression by Ben, and with "new resolve" developed plans to defeat Darth Caedus.
Legacy of the Force: Fury wrote:Luke closed his eyes, feeling his way through the insulation of peacefulness he'd constructed for himself across these past months. Beyond it, he tried to find himself. But at first he could feel nothing but the weight of his grief, and the one thing that kept him functioning while carrying that burden-his desire to be reunited with Mara. Reunited when the time came. Reunited in the Force.
Then there was the other weight, the one he had largely slipped from his shoulders, the weight of his responsibility-to the Order, to his family, to the galaxy.
To the living.
Of course he had shrugged it off. No man could carry two such weights for any length of time. He would be crushed beneath them.
But he had to carry the one he had set aside, didn't he?
I'm sorry, Mara. Knowing it to be a betrayal, Luke slowly, carefully stepped out from under his grief.
It didn't leave him entirely-just as Mara was still part of him, the pain of losing her would always be with him, too.
But suddenly it was easier to breathe, to think. He wondered how long it had been since he had truly thought clearly.
And curiously, it didn't feel like a betrayal at all. Then there was that other weight, the weight of duty. He had carried it throughout his adult life, and at times it had ground him down. But at other times it had sustained him, helped keep him alive.
Perhaps that was why he had been so willing to abandon it: it had been keeping him alive at a time when he did not want to live.
With meticulous care, he picked up and shouldered that other weight.
He opened his eyes. His son stood before him, anxious, but now Ben sighed, a brief exhalation of relief. "Hey, Dad, look in a mirror."
"I don't need to."
"You know what? Your feelings betray you." Luke suppressed a snort. "Ben, if you ever, ever say I told you so..."
"I won't."
"...I'll put you through a training session that would make Kyp Durron cry."
…
"Show me a Jedi Knight who isn't obstinate." Luke stepped onto the lift plate and held his toe over the button inset in the permacrete. "Get to work on your weapon, son." He pressed the button and let the turbolift carry him down, back to his work, back to his responsibility.
- The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia
And Luke further reiterates in Invincible that his judgement is not clouded by vengeance, or attachment to Jacen of any kind.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"To tell the truth, I was worried that my judgment might be clouded by a desire for vengeance." Luke glanced in Jaina's direction, and a look of genuine relief came to his eyes. "So I wanted to hear someone else say it first."
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"Jaina, you're not the only one who's afraid for her family," Luke said, using the Force to speak over her father. "But you are the only one who's allowing her attachments to interfere with her judgment.
Luke's declaration that Caedus' death is necessary is based on his duty to the Jedi Order as well as the galaxy.
2) A BATTLE OF VISIONS: LUKE'S OBJECTIVE
Over the course of Invincible, both Luke and Caedus use visions as a way to strategize over the other. It's a theme that keeps popping up again and again, both Luke and Caedus are constantly looking into the future and analyzing the best way to go about the final events of the war.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"That's right," Luke said. "He would have realized that I'm using visions of the future to plot strategy, and he would have started to grow suspicious of what he was seeing."
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:Jaina didn't understand why her uncle had insisted on leaving the Owools behind-or why he had been so mysterious about his reasons. She felt sure it involved the strange duel of Force visions he was waging with her brother. Obviously, there were things he couldn't reveal without messing up his plan, but it would have been nice if he'd just said that.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:In fact, she was beginning to feel like a holopiece in a dejarik match between her uncle and her brother-one that would determine not only their destiny, but that of trillions. And she wasn't even a player in the game, just a monnok being moved through dimensions she did not comprehend.
- A Battle of Visions:
- Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote: There would be no consequences at all, for how were they to know of the worrisome things he had been seeing in his Force visions lately-the Mandalorian maniacs and the burning asteroids, his uncle's inescapable gaze-if he failed to tell them? Whether blunder or master stroke, the taking of the Roche system was as much his doing as the Moffs', Caedus saw now, and he was beyond punishing others for his mistakes.Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:Caedus's heart began to pound not with fear, but with excitement. His visions of late had been filled with his uncle's face-Luke Skywalker attacking him here on Nickel One, Luke firing on him from one of Fett's Bes'uliike, Luke sitting on Caedus's throne, claiming the New Empire as his own. Had he-Lord Caedus-finally put an end to those visions-finally ruled out the possibility of those futures becoming the future?Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:Then Luke spoke without turning to face them. "It wasn't your fault." There was no disappointment or displeasure in his voice, only concern. "I knew Ben would be captured. I knew it before I sent you."
All three of the Solos stopped cold, forcing C-3PO to step around them before he continued forward. "I beg your pardon, Master Luke," he said. "I must have misunderstood you. Did you just say that you expected Ben to be captured?"
"Not expected." Luke turned, revealing a face so ashen and haggard that Jaina almost gasped out loud. His eyes were a pair of black holes, seeming to swallow every ray of light that came near, and the wrinkles around his mouth were so deep and long that he looked like a Bith. "Knew. I saw it in the future."
"Before you sent us?" Leia demanded. Her shock had given way to anger, and Jaina had the feeling that her mother was strongly considering Force-blasting Luke off the edge of the launching deck. "And you didn't warn us?"
"I couldn't," Luke said. "It would have changed the outcome."
"That's the point," Han said, stepping so close that Jaina reached out to grab his arm. He jerked free, then jabbed a finger toward Luke's chest. "I don't know what kind of spacesick got hold of you, but that's my nephew you set up."
"I know, Han," Luke said, and Jaina could feel his heart breaking. "He's also a Jedi Knight, and it had to be done. I'm sorry I couldn't tell you, but that would have changed how you reacted."
Leia's boiling temper ebbed to a simmer. "I hope you can explain now," she said. "And it had better be good, because I'm beginning to worry that my son isn't the only one in this family who's gone to the dark side."
Luke's faced twitched as though he had been slapped. But he nodded as though he had been expecting this reaction, and suddenly Jaina realized why her uncle hadn't warned them about what he had foreseen.
"You did it to protect me," she said, stepping forward. "You didn't tell us because it would have betrayed something to Jacen."
"That's right," Luke said. "He would have realized that I'm using visions of the future to plot strategy, and he would have started to grow suspicious of what he was seeing."Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:Han and Leia exchanged glances, then Han said, "That's our plan." He glanced back at the preparations on the ready deck, then added, "Just so I'm clear on this-there is no spy on the Council. Caedus saw Ben in a vision-one you saw, too-and that's how Tahiri knew Ben would be on Coruscant?"
Luke nodded. "In Monument Plaza, by the Devoted Technician," he said. "If I saw Ben there, then so could Caedus. The only thing I don't understand is why Caedus wasn't there himself."Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"Your plan to discover the location of the secret Jedi base has failed," Caedus surmised. Actually, the broad outlines of the plan had been his, but the failure was obviously in the details-and those had been mapped out by Tahiri. "Ben slipped free of your surveillance."
"Slipped isn't quite accurate," Tahiri said. "He discovered our, um, agent trailing him and took measures."
Caedus frowned-though not because Tahiri had lost track of Ben. He had foreseen that possibility in his visions and taken other measures. He just didn't like the idea of losing his secret security droid. As irritating as SD-XX could be, lately it had seemed to him that the droid was the only one who truly understood him.
Luke uses this to his advantage. Both Luke and Caedus see a future in which they will fight eachother. Through meditation, Luke focuses these visions of their upcoming fight onto Caedus, and forces the future to move along a different path, that path being instead of Caedus fighting Luke - Caedus will fight Jaina. But this is a balancing act, as Luke must stay "as close" as he can to the future of Caedus vs Luke in order to prevent Caedus from growing suspicious of the visions he is experiencing, even going as far as letting Ben be captured by Caedus's apprentice, Tahiri Veila, something he had foreseen in his visions, so that Caedus wouldn't catch on that Luke is affecting his Force visions. Luke's goal is to stay as close to this future without actually fighting Caedus himself, "at least not physically." This affects Luke as well, as he is unable to see Jaina fighting Caedus in his own visions.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:Luke's faced twitched as though he had been slapped. But he nodded as though he had been expecting this reaction, and suddenly Jaina realized why her uncle hadn't warned them about what he had foreseen.
"You did it to protect me," she said, stepping forward. "You didn't tell us because it would have betrayed something to Jacen."
"That's right," Luke said. "He would have realized that I'm using visions of the future to plot strategy, and he would have started to grow suspicious of what he was seeing."
Leia's brow shot up. "You're altering Caedus's visions?"
"It's:more like jamming," Luke said. "When I meditate on the future, I'm focusing so hard on Caedus that when he looks into the future, I keep showing up."
"Sounds like altering to me," Han said. "If you were just jamming, Caedus would know it. But you're fixing it so he sees you instead of the real future."
"Not exactly," Luke said. "Remember, the future is always in motion. Caedus sees what might happen-if I were there instead of Jaina."
Han frowned and ran a hand over his brow. "My head hurts."
"It's not that hard to understand," Jaina said. She turned to Luke. "You're influencing what Caedus sees by focusing on him in your meditations-"
"Then forcing the future to move along a different course by not acting in accordance with your visions," Leia finished.
"To an extent," Luke said. "But it's a balancing act. I try to stay close enough to what I've seen to prevent Caedus from realizing that I'm trying to mask something."
"That something being me," Jaina said.
"Right," Luke answered. "I stay as close as I can to the future we're seeing without actually fighting Caedus-at least, not physically."
…
"Which is where I come in," Jaina said. It gave her no satisfaction. In fact, she was beginning to feel like a holopiece in a dejarik match between her uncle and her brother-one that would determine not only their destiny, but that of trillions. And she wasn't even a player in the game, just a monnok being moved through dimensions she did not comprehend. "Does that mean you can see whether-"
"I can't," Luke interrupted. "I'm trying to keep you hidden from Caedus's visions, which means I can't see you, either."
- Caedus's reactions:
- Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:There would be no consequences at all, for how were they to know of the worrisome things he had been seeing in his Force visions lately-the Mandalorian maniacs and the burning asteroids, his uncle's inescapable gaze-if he failed to tell them?Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:And then, once his thinking had cleared, he began to see how the situation must look to someone who did not have the Force. To someone who could not look into the future and see Luke hunting him down, or see Mandalorian maniacs bursting from walls and asteroids burning as bright as stars, Caedus's assertion might be hard to believe. Without such foresight, it might be easy to convince oneself that this lonely cluster of rocks could not be as important as all that-that the balance of an interstellar war could never hinge on what was about to happen here.Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:It always came down to Luke. It had been Luke's eyes into which he had been looking when his arm was taken, it was Luke's face that haunted his dreams, it was Luke who he saw in his visions. Sometimes Luke was chasing him through a desert landscape filled with spires and arches, sometimes Luke was driving a crimson lightsaber through his heart:sometimes Luke was wearing Caedus's black robes, sitting on his dark throne, ruling his Sith Empire.
Why doesn't Luke just face Caedus on his own? Why go through this elaborate battle of Force visions?
The answer to this is as Luke explains, that fighting Lumiya out of vengeance had tainted him with the dark side, and that any future involving himself going after Caedus ends in darkness. If he goes after Caedus, he wins, but wins by turning to the dark side and becoming Caedus.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"Every future that begins with me going after Caedus ends in darkness. I know I'm the only one who can be sure of stopping him, but no matter how I envision it, it always leads to darkness."
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"You're saying that killing Lumiya in vengeance tainted him with the dark side."
"Yes." Saba glanced in Luke's direction, then lowered her chin in apology. "This one fearz that if you go after Caedus, no matter how the hunt beginz, it must end in vengeance. That is why you can see nothing but darknesz down that path."
"And this one believes you're right," Luke replied.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:If I had any doubts about it before, my visions have only confirmed what Saba suggested on Shedu Maad-I have been tainted by killing Lumiya in vengeance. I can't go after Caedus without becoming the same as Caedus."
- Full context:
- Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"I know you have," Luke said. "But I'm not going to need support because I can't kill Caedus."
There was a short silence while everyone contemplated this startling statement. Then Saba Sebatyne began to siss.
"Master Skywalker," she said, "you are alwayz making jokes at such strange timez."
"I don't think he's joking," Han said. He turned toward Luke. "Look, buddy, if this is about our feelings-"
"Han, it's not." Luke met the gazes of both of Jaina's parents, then said, "To tell the truth, I've been looking forward to running him down."
Jaina winced inside, and not just for herself. Her parents had told her that Luke claimed to hold only himself and Caedus responsible for Mara's death-that he had not let slip one bitter remark or asked a single pointed question. But all the Solos realized how difficult it must be for him not to blame the parents for the crimes of the child. It would only be natural to blame them for raising a monster, to wonder how they could have gotten it so wrong. So if Luke had finally let slip a vengeful remark, Jaina knew her parents would be willing to overlook this one moment of human imperfection-as would Jaina, had she not understood what he was really saying.
"You've been looking forward to it a little too much?" she asked. "Is that what you mean?"
"Exactly." Luke's gaze slid away from the table. "Every future that begins with me going after Caedus ends in darkness. I know I'm the only one who can be sure of stopping him, but no matter how I envision it, it always leads to darkness."
"Because you want it too much," Kyp said. "You said yourself that your judgment was clouded by vengefulness. If you could purify yourself, maybe go to Dagobah and meditate-"
"It is not Master Skywalker'z judgment that is clouded," Saba said. "It is him."
"What?" Han demanded. "He's not allowed to get mad when someone kills his wife?"
"This one does not think it is anger that cloudz him," Saba replied. "This one thinkz it is what he did to Lumiya."
"I think the word you're looking for is taints, Master Sebatyne," said Leia. "You're saying that killing Lumiya in vengeance tainted him with the dark side."
"Yes." Saba glanced in Luke's direction, then lowered her chin in apology. "This one fearz that if you go after Caedus, no matter how the hunt beginz, it must end in vengeance. That is why you can see nothing but darknesz down that path."
"And this one believes you're right," Luke replied.Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:Leia looked into the dark holes beneath Luke's brow, then demanded, "What are you seeing? What scares you that much?"
Luke looked away, studying the ready deck as though the answer were down there somewhere. "I'm not sure," he said. "There's a shadow in the future. And the farther I look, the darker it grows."
"Caedus." Han spoke the name as though it were a curse. "No mystery there."
"He's part of it," Luke said, "the seed-though exactly how remains hidden to me."
"But the darkness doesn't go away when you kill Caedus," Jaina surmised.
Luke nodded and looked away. "That's right."
"You lose?" Han asked, incredulous. "Tell me you're kidding."
Luke swallowed and forced himself to meet Han's eyes, and Jaina could feel something like:shame in the Force.
"It's worse," Luke said. "I win."
As usual, it was Jaina's mother who understood first. "Oh," she said simply. Her hand went to her mouth, then she reached for his arm. "Luke, I'm sorry. What I said earlier, about going to the dark side, I didn't mean:"
"I know." Luke smiled and patted her hand, but there was too much darkness in his eyes to tell whether the smile was genuine. "But it's true. If I had any doubts about it before, my visions have only confirmed what Saba suggested on Shedu Maad-I have been tainted by killing Lumiya in vengeance. I can't go after Caedus without becoming the same as Caedus."
So because Luke cannot fight Caedus physically for his fear of turning to the dark side, he uses Force visions of him doing so as a way to plot strategy, that he really is fighting Caedus. In order for this strategy to work, he needs to stay as close to Caedus’s vision as possible: a fight with the real Luke. This is Luke's objective leading into Jaina (commonly referred to as Juke (Luke-amped Jaina) vs Caedus on Nickel One.
3) JAINA'S EMPOWERMENT: LUKE'S ROLE
Leading directly into Caedus vs Juke, Han and Leia look upon Luke's body, his body strapped to his seat like a lifeless statue. Luke wasn't breathing, moving, or blinking, and appeared to be completely absent. Even Leia, a Jedi Knight by this point that has a close bond with Luke, sensed that Luke was "sort of gone", the implication being Luke's absence had implications beyond the physical realm.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"Oh dear," C-3PO said. "It seems Master Skywalker is no longer with us."
"What?" Han's heart clenched so tight it seemed to stop beating, but he kept his gaze fixed on the rapidly growing corvette. "How? Our hull hasn't even been breached!"
The upper cannon turret fell silent, and Leia called down, "Not dead, Han. He's in a:" She paused, searching for the word, then finally explained, "I don't know how to explain it. Luke's just sort of:gone."
"Sort of gone?" Han echoed. He couldn't help himself-he had to look. "How can you be:"
Han let his sentence trail away, for Luke was sort of gone. His body remained strapped into his seat, with his hands resting on the systems console and his gaze fixed between the shield status display and the targeting screen. But it was like looking at one of those figures in the House of Plastex back on Coruscant. Luke wasn't breathing, he wasn't moving, he wasn't even blinking; he just wasn't there.
"Great." When Han looked forward again, it was to see that the corvette's beam-spewing arch had grown as long as his arm. He transferred missile control to the pilot's station and sent four concussion missiles streaming toward its bridge. "Now he decides to take some time for himself."
As Caedus realized that he was fighting Luke, he struggled to believe it. He had sensed Luke's presence far way from their current location, and didn't believe that Luke could have traveled that distance in a short amount of time. These were the only reasons Caedus was suspicious, though, because Luke's presence was undeniable, and all that matters is that Luke was here and he must fight. Later, upon deep reflection, Caedus still retains the belief that he had been fighting Luke, citing Luke's Force presence and dismissing the idea of an illusion trick. This doesn't only come from Caedus though, as Jaina agrees with this as well. As Jaina recalls her "strange" surge of Force powers, she muses Luke may really have been there as Caedus suggested.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:Just a few minutes earlier, Caedus had sensed his uncle's presence far above Nickel One, in the same blastboat as his mother, father, and Saba Sebatyne. And now here Luke was, inside the asteroid. Even Jedi Grand Masters could not be in two places at once-Caedus knew that-but he did not waste time being confused.
All that mattered was that Luke was here, somehow, and that he was the one swordsman in the galaxy whom Caedus did not dare fight one-armed. Even as Luke leapt forward weaving a basket of lightsaber slashes, Caedus sprang back out of the projection booth, launching himself into a high Force flip designed to put as much distance between himself and his attacker as possible.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:The fighting around the Roche system was growing fiercer by the hour, but he could not leave-did not dare leave-until he understood what had happened to him in the Tactical Planning Forum. He had been fighting Luke one moment, Jaina the next, and then they had both been there-not just illusions of them, but presences real enough to bat blaster bolts back at the stormtroopers attacking them.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"There was only one Jedi," Mirta said. "Your sister, Jaina."
"My sister?" Caedus roared despite himself. "You expect me to believe that?" He waved the stump of his arm at her. "That Jaina did this?"
"I don't know who did that, but Jaina was the only Jedi I saw." Mirta seemed completely unimpressed by his anger. "And don't look so surprised. She's been training with Mandalorians."
"Then why didn't she share their disposal barge?" Caedus demanded. He turned to the lieutenant. "Take your sample."
"What?" Mirta seemed genuinely shocked. "You're a Jedi! Can't you tell I'm not lying?"
"I'm a Sith," Caedus corrected. "And I don't need the Force to know you're lying. There were two Jedi there. I fought them both."
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:He thinks Luke was with us."
Jaina paused, recalling Caedus's confusion at the end of the battle. She also recalled her own condition, how the strange surge in her Force powers had suddenly faded just before Caedus had redirected the stormtroopers' fire. "Maybe Luke was there."
- Full contexts:
- Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"No." Caedus used the Force to make himself heard over the scream of their blasters. He motioned at the stormtrooper survivors. "You two, secure the Moffs in the anteroom. I'll handle the sniper personally."
"Personally?" Moff Westermal asked in his deep, refined voice. "Are you sure that's wise, Lord Caedus? You're already injured."
"Kosimo makes a good point," Lecersen added. "Let the Elite Guard deal with the sniper. The rest of the company will be here any moment."
"My injuries are of no concern," Caedus said, trying not to smile. They had called him Lord Caedus; a New Empire was at hand. "And the Elite Guard won't be arriving in time. I'm afraid the Mandalorians sealed this section of the command warren before their attack."
Caedus waved the Moffs up toward the anteroom, then turned back to the projection booth to see the muzzle of a pellet accelerator pushing through a makeshift firing port, which the sniper had cut through the projectionist's blaster-scorched viewing pane. He managed to raise the arm on his injured side in the weapon's general direction, then reached out with the Force and made a twisting motion with his hand. The barrel trembled for an instant, then started to bend against the edge of the firing port.
The sniper was not surprised. The weapon simply spun free as it was abruptly released, and the snap-hiss of an igniting lightsaber sounded from inside the projection booth. Despite the pellet wound his shoulder had suffered earlier, Caedus did not hesitate to activate his own blade. His pain would only fuel his power, and if he did not attack the sniper, he knew the sniper would attack him. He Force-leapt up through the hole into the smoky, flashing interior of the booth and pivoted around to block the fan of blue light that came slicing toward his neck even before he could sense who he was fighting.
Whoever it was, the enemy was good.
Caedus felt a boot slam into his ribs-an instant before he saw it coming with his Aing-Tii fighting-sight-and the breath left his lungs. He countered with a head-high backslash and brought his own foot up, landing a Force-enhanced snap-kick between the legs of the brown-robed blur attacking him. The blow drew a pained grunt but failed to even stagger his foe.
A bony elbow slammed up under his chin, rocking him onto his heels. Then, finally, Caedus felt a familiar tingle in the back of his mind, and he saw the image of a violet blade slashing at his vulnerable side. He swept his own lightsaber down across the front of his body in a desperate reverse block that barely caught the attack in time to prevent it from slicing him in two, then whirled into a spinning back kick that landed squarely in his foe's stomach and drove him back:a mere two steps.
It was enough.
Now Caedus could see who he was fighting, and he could not believe it. A gaunt-faced man with eyes as blue and cold as vardium steel, nostrils flaring red with anger and exertion, a thin-lipped snarl filled with confidence and disdain.
Luke Skywalker.
Just a few minutes earlier, Caedus had sensed his uncle's presence far above Nickel One, in the same blastboat as his mother, father, and Saba Sebatyne. And now here Luke was, inside the asteroid. Even Jedi Grand Masters could not be in two places at once-Caedus knew that-but he did not waste time being confused.
All that mattered was that Luke was here, somehow, and that he was the one swordsman in the galaxy whom Caedus did not dare fight one-armed. Even as Luke leapt forward weaving a basket of lightsaber slashes, Caedus sprang back out of the projection booth, launching himself into a high Force flip designed to put as much distance between himself and his attacker as possible.
So, Leia believes Luke's Force presence is gone, Caedus believes Luke had actually been there, and Jaina reaches the same conclusion.
Moreover, once Luke rendezvous with Luke and the others after the fight, Luke was able to recall every blow Caedus had landed on Jaina "without even having to glance" in her direction, and is able to confirm other injuries that Jaina had forgotten she had received. Luke remembers Jaina's injuries as if he had received them himself. Also recall that it is Luke’s objective to stay as close to their visions of a true fight between Luke and Caedus as he can without actually fighting Caedus, “at least not physically”.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:The next thing she remembered was stumbling into the hangar with a company of stormtroopers on her tail, then Jag, Zekk, her mother, and about half a dozen other Jedi-okay, Jag wasn't a Jedi, but he had fought like one-coming out of nowhere to drive them off. And she recalled her uncle warning the others about her injuries as they rushed to help her, how he had seemed to know every blow she had taken without having to even glance in her direction.
- EmperorCaedusLevel Three
Re: The Power of Darth Caedus: How Jaina Becomes the Sword of the Jedi
April 12th 2023, 1:06 am
There is one more key piece of evidence that cements how extensive Luke’s empowerment had been that I will post later, but first let’s go through other examples that are similar to what Luke does here. I will go through the types of illusions that Luke is familiar with/capable of using.
In the 1978 novel Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, as Luke engages Vader in a fight, Luke taps into the guidance of Kenobi even though he is physically gone. Vader dismisses Luke's abilities, but Luke responds by saying that Kenobi is with him. As the fight continues, Luke is shown able to deflect Vader's Force attacks, something Vader thought Luke was incapable of doing, believing such power in a child was impossible.
Other sources clarify that the spirit of Ben Kenobi “enabled” Luke (with no training by this point) to defeat Vader, and that Luke was guided by his spirit to defeat Vader. Moreover, in the Return of the Jedi novelization, in the context of Luke’s upcoming fight with Vader, Luke could draw on the memory of Ben for strength.
Source: Star Wars the Ultimate Visual Guide: Updated and Expanded
Source: Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars Databank
- Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars Databank
Moving on, in the 1996 novel the New Rebellion, Luke, knowing that there is no other way to defeat the Dark Jedi Kueller without going even darker and further empowering him, starts reaching out to Leia through the spirit plane, aiming to come back even stronger than he had been before and guide Leia to defeat Kueller.
So, if Luke is anything like Ben Kenobi, he can possess his allies and guide their weapons to defeat their opponents, doing this by surrendering his life-force, with the first steps he takes being going back to the spirit realm where he fought Exar Kun, doing this while still conscious and in the middle of a fight. In contrast with Invincible, he is passed out, not breathing, as well as Leia believing he is gone through the lens of Force senses.
Is there precedent for anything like this happening in Legacy of the Force?
Yes. In Bloodlines, Jacen senses that his mother needs assistance in landing the Falcon, and begins centering himself, visualizing Leia sitting in the cockpit and feeling her emotions and Force presence, and exhales an infinite breath "through" Leia, able to see through her eyes, reading the cockpit readouts and seeing the surrounding area. Jacen channels “his Force power” through Leia, and Leia uses this power to save the Falcon.
The last quote is Jacen explaining his recent feat to Luke, meaning Luke knows about what Jacen does and likely learned it in preparation for fighting Caedus through Jaina. Not only are they both within the Legacy of the Force series itself, meaning Troy Denning likely drew from Bloodlines when writing Invincible, but both feats share quite a few similarities with one another. For one, Jacen is able to see through Leia’s eyes as if he were there himself, and Luke is able to recall every blow landed on Jaina as if he experienced them himself. Secondly, Jacen is projecting simply “his Force power” into Leia, and exclaims to Leia “use me”, as if she not only has access to his empowerment, but to Jacen himself. This is recreated with Luke, where both Jaina and Caedus come to the conclusion Luke was really there. Not just a Force signature, not just some of his power, but he was there, and with that comes everything Luke has.
Moreover, Troy Denning confirms he’ll "certainly" have to call on all his resources if he is to prevail, but he needs to rely on more than his Jedi abilities, and even though he can throw moons around, my impression at what Denning is getting at is big feats of raw Force strength aren't what's needed to prevail in Legacy of the Force, and that's not what the series is about. Juke is likely what Denning is referencing.
So then why didn’t Caedus realize Luke had been using the same ability he had used earlier in the series? This goes back to the battle of visions outlined earlier, Caedus is expecting Luke to fight him, the person he’s fighting by all indicators seems to be Luke, and Luke is purposefully staying “as close” to the real fight between Luke and Caedus that both parties have been seeing in their visions. Caedus either doesn’t think Luke knows of the ability and rules it out, or Caedus simply doesn’t think of it at the time. Why would he, when all indicators lead him to believe he had fought the real Luke.
Doesn't Luke also use an illusion trick as well though? Caedus is able to see Luke's face after all, so wouldn't he be expending power to maintaining an illusion over Jaina as well?
I'm not even sure that's the case, but in the event that he had been, the power to conjure an illusion like that requires little to no effort.
Before mantling the title Darth Caedus, Jacen fights Mara as a pathway to his Sith ascension, and is able to pull a convincing enough illusion that fooled Mara for the crucial seconds needed to land a killing blow while basically on death's door.
Jacen’s knee is broken, his body was crushed by a tunnel that Mara poured all her strength into, then with one last surge deflects a blaster bolt and continues on fighting, Mara and sears Jacen’s chin with a vibroblade, with Jacen continually losing strength as the fight continues, “flailing” his saber to fend her off, on the “knife-edge” of dying, falls into a crater, and is stabbed in the gut by Mara’s shoto.
So, the power to conjure up an illusion is extremely, extremely inconsequential, and not much effort is required for someone of Luke’s caliber. The only reason the illusion was so convincing was because it was the cherry on top of everything else. As said earlier, Caedus almost immediately rules out a simple illusion trick .Caedus sees a future where he fights Luke, he believes Luke’s presence really has been there, and on top of that he sees that he is fighting Luke.
This idea tows the line of the popular reaction scaling argument proposed by The Ellimist and others, and while that argument does support this one here, it should be noted that Caedus is not just considering power here. Earlier in the series, Jacen demonstrates his knowledge of Luke's Force attack by recognizing its “characteristic traits”, even in the dark, which highlights the fact that Jacen has a deep understanding of Luke's abilities beyond just using his raw power.
Moreover, Caedus's measuring stick is Luke as foreseen in not just his visions, but Luke's as well. The real Luke was seen fighting Caedus by both parties involved, and it's this that the Juke fight is supposed to measure up to.
Then going into Invincible, Jaina exclaims that despite the Masters and several Jedi Knights being her superior in the Force and lightsaber skill, she should be the one to fight Caedus, because she’ll have advantages no one else has.
It is further elaborated in the Fate of the Jedi: Dramatis Personae that Jaina used these new Mandalorian techniques coupled with her “attunement” to Jacen to ultimately defeat him, and that she is the only one capable of doing so.
- Fate of the Jedi; Dramatis Personae
Moving on, this next section will outline the prophecy of the Sword of the Jedi, how Jaina lives up to this title in Invincible, and how it ties in to everything above.
Jaina being the Sword of the Jedi stretches all the way back to the New Jedi Order series, in which during their knighting ceremony, Luke deems Jaina the Sword of the Jedi. The Sword of the Jedi is a symbol of strength and leadership for the Jedi Order, expected to lead the way in battle, bring peace to others, and be a guiding force for their allies. The title also acknowledges that their life will be full of challenges and they will never truly find peace, but they will be blessed for bringing peace to others.
But all the way up until early in the Legacy of the Force series, Jaina and others are still unsure what the prophecy actually means. All that’s known is that the Force itself spoke through Luke when reciting the prophecy.
This story thread only starts to take meaning during the latter portions of Legacy of the Force, where it grows increasingly apparent that Jaina will fulfill her role as Sword of the Jedi upon slaying Caedus. This is the burden of being Sword of the Jedi, she must stow away personal problems and replace them with what matters - the future of the galaxy and the lives of the innocent people who live in it. She will do what needs to be done to protect the galaxy, even if it means sacrificing her own happiness and taking on the burden of her brother's death. This realization grows increasingly more clear going into Invincible, that only Jaina can stop Caedus.
Note: Jaina’s belief that she’s his equal seems to come from the point of view of their respective Force potentials, as she has said Caedus is much stronger both before and after this point.
But as revealed later in Invincible, being the Sword of the Jedi has another meaning as well. As Caedus is coming for Luke, Jaina exclaims why would he be hunting down Luke if she was the one who fought him, but Saba replies Caedus not going after the sword (Jaina) but rather the warrior who wields the sword (Luke).
- Legacy of the Force: Invincible
If you remember earlier, I said there was another key piece, well here it is. Jaina is the Sword and Luke is the Jedi. Jaina is the vessel in which Luke fights Caedus in, for if Luke fights Caedus himself, he will fall to the dark side and become the same as Caedus. Recall the earlier line in which Luke says he’ll stay “as close” as he can to the future they’re seeing without actually fighting Caedus-"at least, not physically". That line now makes much more sense from the point of view that Luke had indeed fought Caedus - he just wasn’t physically there. That as well as Luke remembering every one of Jaina's blows, as well as both Jaina and Caedus believing Luke had been there.
Before moving onto the final Caedus section, I will address some of the evidence used against Caedus in Invincible itself, which is Saba laughs at the prospect of Luke being unable to kill Caedus.
Upon Luke's admission that he is unable to kill Caedus, the Council sits in silence, contemplating the gravity of his words. The fact that Luke’s statement required contemplation implies that they recognize they do recognize the validity of Luke's claim generally speaking, and moreover, Saba has no idea how powerful Caedus really is, with not even Luke himself knowing the full extent of Caedus' power. Later on, the Council is shown to have hushed discussions about Caedus' abilities and foresight, and despite the danger he poses, Saba is excited with the prospect of facing Caedus, even with the way Caedus handled her in Fury (ragdolled into an explosion), and Caedus’ past success in leaving Luke severely injured to the point that he required stay in a bacta tank for a week.
So it’s much more likely the case that Saba’s quip is not meant to be an honest analysis of Luke versus Caedus (she doesn't have the knowledge to assert such), but an attempt to lighten the mood in the face of a overall bad situation (the Council is startled), while also demonstrating her strong-willed nature to never run away/give up the fight.
Upon her final confrontation with Caedus, which ends with his death, Jaina considers reaching out to Luke again for help in her upcoming fight. However, she ultimately decides against it because Caedus would be prepared for Luke’s strength, and that if Jaina expected to defeat Caedus, she’d have to fight her own way.
A question you might have is: why wouldn’t Jaina opt to use Luke’s power? Luke is much stronger than her, seeing as without Luke’s power she goes from being able to catch blaster bolts with her fingers to barely being able to hold her lightsaber after Luke stops. There are four main reasons for this;
1) Overconfidence: Jaina believes that Caedus would particularly be overconfident in a fight against her specifically, because he is magnitudes stronger than her in the Force.
2) The Sword of the Jedi prophecy: Jaina realizes she isn’t as capable as Luke in defeating Caedus, but she remembers the Sword of the Jedi prophecy, and recognizes the significance of being chosen for this role: to lead the fight against enemies of the Jedi. Some of this was discussed earlier, but the Jedi Council also recognizes the importance of this prophecy, having already discussed this at length before bringing it up with Jaina, and concluding she is the one to face Caedus despite her being less skilled in the Force and with a lightsaber than the Council.
3) Familial: Jaina believes that when Caedus realizes it’s her who he is fighting, it’ll trouble him to know that Jaina, and by proxy his entire family, would be coming after him. While she believes this wouldn’t help her perform better in the fight, the Council notes that the reason Caedus is particularly dangerous is because he is never unwilling to kill, and that if the Jedi try to take him alive, it’ll be the Jedi who end up dead, so this is perhaps what Jaina is speaking to. Despite Luke being family, Jaina doesn’t believe Luke would have this advantage over Caedus because of Caedus’ obsession with him.
4) An opportunity to ambush Caedus: Jaina learns a variant of Art of the Small, a technique in which she is able to completely hide her presence from others in preparation for her fight with Caedus. She emphasizes that catching him in a vulnerable state would be ideal, and is worried that Caedus would be able to sense her despite learning the ability (before any Luke empowerment). If she had Luke’s power that she needed to hide from Caedus as well, Caedus would’ve undoubtedly sensed her approach, because the likelihood of Jaina being able to hide Luke’s power when she questions the ability to hide even her own is nonexistent. And we see how this manifests in their final confrontation when Jaina catches Caedus in a vulnerable position (“fiery roaring in his ears” upon learning the Imperials sent a nanovirus to kill Allana), and is able to land a saber to the gut.
In the 1978 novel Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, as Luke engages Vader in a fight, Luke taps into the guidance of Kenobi even though he is physically gone. Vader dismisses Luke's abilities, but Luke responds by saying that Kenobi is with him. As the fight continues, Luke is shown able to deflect Vader's Force attacks, something Vader thought Luke was incapable of doing, believing such power in a child was impossible.
Splinter of the Mind's Eye wrote:“I’m going to kill you, Darth Vader.”
That humorless laugh again. “What a high opinion you hold of yourself, Skywalker.”
“I’m … I’m Ben Kenobi,” Luke whispered in an odd way.
For just a moment Vader seemed shaken. “Ben Kenobi’s dead. I killed him myself. You are simple Luke Skywalker, an ex-farm boy from Tatooine. You are no master of the Force and the equal of Ben Kenobi you will never be.”
“Ben Kenobi is with me, Vader,” Luke snarled, gaining confidence every second, “and the Force is with me, too.”
[...]
As Vader drifted slowly back to the floor he grabbed his right wrist with his left hand, made a fist, and seemed to convulse like a man retching. A ball of pure white energy the size of his fist materialized in front of Vader’s hands and moved down toward the wide-eyed Luke.
Something made Luke realize he could never reach his saber before the white globe touched him. He threw up both hands and looked away. So he didn’t see what happened.
His hands seemed to blur. The white globe struck them, bounced back, and contacted Vader gently as the latter touched the ground. There was a soft crack as of an explosion far in the distance. Vader was knocked head over heels and the globe vanished.
But when the white energy ball had touched Luke’s hands, the power inherent in the kinetite, or restrained energy globe, had thrown him to the ground. Had he resisted it unsuccessfully it would have thrown him across the chamber and through the temple wall.
Now he lay on his belly while Vader rolled slowly onto his side, shaking his head in disbelief. His eyes refocused, to see a shaken but otherwise unharmed Luke crawling slowly toward his lightsaber.
“Not … possible!” Vader muttered, starting to crawl toward his own weapon. The left side of his body armor was dented inward as if by a giant’s fist, where the kinetite had struck. “Such power … in a child. Not possible!”
- Full passage:
- Luke felt a wild sense of elation as he brandished his father’s weapon. “I’m not worried about anything, Vader. Not now. I have no more worries and only one concern.” His voice held an unaccustomed hint of conviction. “I’m going to kill you, Darth Vader.”
That humorless laugh again. “What a high opinion you hold of yourself, Skywalker.”
“I’m … I’m Ben Kenobi,” Luke whispered in an odd way.
For just a moment Vader seemed shaken. “Ben Kenobi’s dead. I killed him myself. You are simple Luke Skywalker, an ex-farm boy from Tatooine. You are no master of the Force and the equal of Ben Kenobi you will never be.”
“Ben Kenobi is with me, Vader,” Luke snarled, gaining confidence every second, “and the Force is with me, too.”
“You do have something of the Force about you, boy,” Vader admitted. “A master of it you are not, however. That dooms you. Only a master could do … this.”
The Dark Lord lunged and Luke spun well clear. At the same time, Vader was staring not at Luke, but at the ground. A small fragment of the fallen ceiling rose, shot straight for Luke’s head. Seeing it coming, he reacted as Kenobi had taught him … without thinking.
A much smaller stone lifted and intersected the path of the charging rock. The two met. Though Vader’s missile was by far the larger, it was deflected just enough by Luke’s rock to send it shooting past his shoulder harmlessly.
Panting, he stared challengingly back at Vader. “Good, boy,” the Dark Lord confessed, “very good. But my stone was the heavier. My powers are the stronger.”
“Not strong enough, Vader,” Luke insisted as he lunged forward. His thoughts were of Kenobi, of the techniques of saber and Force the old Jedi knight had laboriously taught him. He tried to let the Force guide his arm.
Vader parried, blocked, parried again, and found himself being forced backward by the aggressiveness and skill of Luke’s demonic attack. The breath mask tilted back for a second. A section of heavy bas-relief on one of the supporting pillars was loosened, fell away.
At the last instant Luke sensed it, jumped backward. The huge carved panel shattered between them. Both men rested uneasily as the dust settled. Luke gulped for air, while Vader showed less aplomb and increasing tension.
“You are good, Skywalker,” he declared. “Very good indeed, for a child. But the end will be the same.” He raised his saber and came charging over the broken panel.
Now it was the Dark Lord who initiated the assault. Luke found himself forced steadily backward as Vader threw an unceasing blizzard of stone shards and saber cuts at him. It was impossible to counter them all.
Somehow Luke did so.
They were circling in the center of the temple floor now. Lying on her side, the Princess tried to turn and watch. The pain of her wounds rose about her like a steel wall. Around her thoughts the wall closed, and in response her eyes closed and she slumped back to the cold, cold stone.
Again the two enemies paused, only now it was Vader who was panting heavily. “Kenobi … trained you … well,” the Dark Lord admitted admiringly. Some of his usual insouciance had been drained by the steady fighting. “And you have some … natural ability of your own. You have proven a challenge. I enjoy … a challenge.”
Still unhurt, Luke whispered defiantly, “Too much of … a challenge for … you!”
“No,” Vader assured him, “no. You overestimate yourself, child.” The Dark Lord drew himself up to his full, awesome height. “I have finished playing with you.”
Swinging his saber until it was no more than a blue blur in the dank air of the temple, he leaped straight up into the air. It was more than a jump, less than levitation. Out of the blue circle of energy he flung the saber.
Instinctively—he had no time to think—Luke parried. The Force inherent in the thrown saber knocked Luke’s out of his hand. Both weapons flew off to the right and lay, still gleaming, still activated, on the ground, near a dark circular opening that gaped black in the floor.
As Vader drifted slowly back to the floor he grabbed his right wrist with his left hand, made a fist, and seemed to convulse like a man retching. A ball of pure white energy the size of his fist materialized in front of Vader’s hands and moved down toward the wide-eyed Luke.
Something made Luke realize he could never reach his saber before the white globe touched him. He threw up both hands and looked away. So he didn’t see what happened.
His hands seemed to blur. The white globe struck them, bounced back, and contacted Vader gently as the latter touched the ground. There was a soft crack as of an explosion far in the distance. Vader was knocked head over heels and the globe vanished.
But when the white energy ball had touched Luke’s hands, the power inherent in the kinetite, or restrained energy globe, had thrown him to the ground. Had he resisted it unsuccessfully it would have thrown him across the chamber and through the temple wall.
Now he lay on his belly while Vader rolled slowly onto his side, shaking his head in disbelief. His eyes refocused, to see a shaken but otherwise unharmed Luke crawling slowly toward his lightsaber.
“Not … possible!” Vader muttered, starting to crawl toward his own weapon. The left side of his body armor was dented inward as if by a giant’s fist, where the kinetite had struck. “Such power … in a child. Not possible!”
…
“Vader is much more attuned to the Force, albeit its dark side, than I am, Halla. It’s likely that he can sense the crystal’s natural disturbance. It would be faint, but someone as powerful as Vader could barely detect it. And he has more than that to go on. We were traveling in as straight a line as possible. He needs merely to plot along it and hunt for the crystal’s effect when he angles off his course.
Other sources clarify that the spirit of Ben Kenobi “enabled” Luke (with no training by this point) to defeat Vader, and that Luke was guided by his spirit to defeat Vader. Moreover, in the Return of the Jedi novelization, in the context of Luke’s upcoming fight with Vader, Luke could draw on the memory of Ben for strength.
Source: Star Wars the Ultimate Visual Guide: Updated and Expanded
Source: Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars Databank
- Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars Databank
Moving on, in the 1996 novel the New Rebellion, Luke, knowing that there is no other way to defeat the Dark Jedi Kueller without going even darker and further empowering him, starts reaching out to Leia through the spirit plane, aiming to come back even stronger than he had been before and guide Leia to defeat Kueller.
The New Rebellion wrote:Luke was raising his lightsaber, his heart pounding. He was reaching out with the Force, going back to the place he had gone when he first fought Exar Kun. He would be out of his body but protected within the Force. Just as Ben had done in his battle with Darth Vader.
- The New Rebellion:
- Fueled by hatred, anger, and fear.
Luke was making him stronger. Luke's response, his hatred, his own self-loathing at creating this thing, this student who had become a horror, was making the thing even stronger.
Kueller slammed his blade against Luke's, and the sparks lit the area all around them. Luke parried. Parried again. And again. He was trapped in a cycle of hatred and anger. If he fought, Kueller got stronger, and if he attacked, Kueller got stronger still.
Luke glanced at the mouth of the alley.
No Leia.
He was alone with this thing he had created. The rogue student. The Vader to his Ben.
Vader.
Ben.
Luke grinned. He suddenly knew what he had to do to break free.
[...]
Her hands were useless, and Kueller was no longer listening to her arguments. He was watching Luke.
Luke, who looked like a man possessed.
Luke, who had always warned her not to give in to anger, was giving in to his.
And Kueller was smiling. He seemed to be growing taller, and broader, the aura of power around him so great that it made him seem invincible.
Then a look passed across Luke's face. It was a familiar look, but it wasn't his. She had seen it before.
On the day she met him, so many years ago.
She had seen that look the only time she had seen Obi-Wan Kenobi alive. He had been fighting Darth Vader, and then he smiled, and raised his lightsaber--and Vader cut him in half. His lightsaber's blade faded, the hilt spinning through the air before landing on his empty, steaming cloak.
Luke had said Obi-Wan believed that moment made him stronger, but really it had only made him dead.
Dead.
Leia stumbled a few steps forward. Luke didn't see her in the growing darkness. Kueller hesitated as Luke slowly raised his light-saber blade toward his face.
Just as Obi-Wan had.
Kueller smiled.
Just as Vader must have.
"Luuuuuuuuuuke!" Leia screamed as Kueller brought his lightsaber up, preparing to strike.
[...]
Luke was raising his lightsaber, his heart pounding. He was reaching out with the Force, going back to the place he had gone when he first fought Exar Kun. He would be out of his body but protected within the Force. Just as Ben had done in his battle with Darth Vader.
So, if Luke is anything like Ben Kenobi, he can possess his allies and guide their weapons to defeat their opponents, doing this by surrendering his life-force, with the first steps he takes being going back to the spirit realm where he fought Exar Kun, doing this while still conscious and in the middle of a fight. In contrast with Invincible, he is passed out, not breathing, as well as Leia believing he is gone through the lens of Force senses.
Is there precedent for anything like this happening in Legacy of the Force?
Yes. In Bloodlines, Jacen senses that his mother needs assistance in landing the Falcon, and begins centering himself, visualizing Leia sitting in the cockpit and feeling her emotions and Force presence, and exhales an infinite breath "through" Leia, able to see through her eyes, reading the cockpit readouts and seeing the surrounding area. Jacen channels “his Force power” through Leia, and Leia uses this power to save the Falcon.
Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines wrote:Jacen filled his lungs with a long, slow breath and centered himself to try something he had never attempted before.
Mom, I hope you can handle this.
He pictured Leia sitting in the copilot's seat. Her emotions and her presence in the Force washed over him and he visualized himself in her place, behind her eyes, seeing what she saw. For a moment he was simply observing; but then a feeling like a sigh drained out of him and it was as if he were exhaling an infinite breath into his mother-no, through his mother. Now he was no longer sitting in the alcove between two topiary bushes, but staring at an array of lights and readouts and at hands that weren't his. Beyond the console, Coruscant loomed in the viewport.
If Jaina had joined the effort, she was hardly detectable. He had drowned out her presence in his own mind with the sheer strength of the telekinesis he was projecting.
Take this, Mom. Use me. Use the Force I'm channeling through you.
He heard her say "Uh!" as if something had startled her. Then he could feel pressure in his lungs as if he were running hard and fighting for breath. He had no idea how long it lasted. But he had the sense of clutching something tight to his chest, and an awareness somewhere outside his mind and yet at its core showed him the Falcon enveloped in the Force, the hull around her drive assembly compressed instead of expanding catastrophically.
He was sure he wasn't seeing what his mother was actually looking at, because he had none of the images of entering the atmosphere or landing. The scenes inside the Falcon's cockpit were being supplied by his memory. He was simultaneously aware both of that rational fact and that his Force power was being funneled through his mother, helping her hold the drive assembly in place by telekinesis.
Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines wrote:Jacen walked up behind Luke and patted his shoulder. "I'm sorry, Uncle Luke. If I'd known you were here, I'd have called ahead to say they were coming. Dad's pretty strung out right now, and it's not just the politics. It's Jaina and Thrackan and now the Falcon."
It crossed Luke's mind that Jacen should have been able to detect his and Mara's presence in the Force, but it was an unkind thought. Perhaps part of shutting down his own presence was becoming insensitive to others. Luke realized Jacen's Force skills seemed to be getting stronger and more subtle every day, and he felt uneasy.
"What did Han mean about projecting the Force?"
Jacen shrugged, once again the thoughtful man who felt compassion for every living thing. "Mom was trying to hold the Falcon's hull together so-I suppose I added my Force-strength to it through her. Almost like we did against the Killiks to deflect their weapons."
"Almost," said Luke. No, they hadn't quite done that: channeling the Force was a new one to him. "You've developed some impressive skills lately."
The last quote is Jacen explaining his recent feat to Luke, meaning Luke knows about what Jacen does and likely learned it in preparation for fighting Caedus through Jaina. Not only are they both within the Legacy of the Force series itself, meaning Troy Denning likely drew from Bloodlines when writing Invincible, but both feats share quite a few similarities with one another. For one, Jacen is able to see through Leia’s eyes as if he were there himself, and Luke is able to recall every blow landed on Jaina as if he experienced them himself. Secondly, Jacen is projecting simply “his Force power” into Leia, and exclaims to Leia “use me”, as if she not only has access to his empowerment, but to Jacen himself. This is recreated with Luke, where both Jaina and Caedus come to the conclusion Luke was really there. Not just a Force signature, not just some of his power, but he was there, and with that comes everything Luke has.
Moreover, Troy Denning confirms he’ll "certainly" have to call on all his resources if he is to prevail, but he needs to rely on more than his Jedi abilities, and even though he can throw moons around, my impression at what Denning is getting at is big feats of raw Force strength aren't what's needed to prevail in Legacy of the Force, and that's not what the series is about. Juke is likely what Denning is referencing.
Troy Denning wrote:Q: Will the Legacy series show Luke employing the full extent of his powers? I've sometimes felt that previous depictions of Luke have been reluctant, for whatever reason, to show what he's fully capable of. After all, he is Grand Master of the Jedi order, probably the most powerful and skilled Force-user in the universe.
TD: Very powerful characters suffer from the Deus ex Machina syndrome, and Luke is certainly no exception. Because nobody is sure exactly what his limits are, I think that some readers expect him to be capable of fixing huge problems with little more than the Force. The trouble is, those kinds of stories fall into the superhero tradition, and Star Wars is space opera. The heroes are supposed to face huge problems and have limited resources—it’s the imbalance between the two that makes space opera, at its best, so engaging.
So I’m not sure how to answer the question. Luke is certainly going to face some enormous tests of his strength and character, and he’ll certainly have to call on all of his resources if he is to prevail. But is he going to shove moons around with the Force? I don’t think so. To survive Legacy of the Force, he’s going to have to rely on more than his Jedi abilities.
(https://www.powells.com/book/-9780345477521/2-9)
So then why didn’t Caedus realize Luke had been using the same ability he had used earlier in the series? This goes back to the battle of visions outlined earlier, Caedus is expecting Luke to fight him, the person he’s fighting by all indicators seems to be Luke, and Luke is purposefully staying “as close” to the real fight between Luke and Caedus that both parties have been seeing in their visions. Caedus either doesn’t think Luke knows of the ability and rules it out, or Caedus simply doesn’t think of it at the time. Why would he, when all indicators lead him to believe he had fought the real Luke.
Doesn't Luke also use an illusion trick as well though? Caedus is able to see Luke's face after all, so wouldn't he be expending power to maintaining an illusion over Jaina as well?
I'm not even sure that's the case, but in the event that he had been, the power to conjure an illusion like that requires little to no effort.
Before mantling the title Darth Caedus, Jacen fights Mara as a pathway to his Sith ascension, and is able to pull a convincing enough illusion that fooled Mara for the crucial seconds needed to land a killing blow while basically on death's door.
Jacen’s knee is broken, his body was crushed by a tunnel that Mara poured all her strength into, then with one last surge deflects a blaster bolt and continues on fighting, Mara and sears Jacen’s chin with a vibroblade, with Jacen continually losing strength as the fight continues, “flailing” his saber to fend her off, on the “knife-edge” of dying, falls into a crater, and is stabbed in the gut by Mara’s shoto.
- Legacy of the Force:
- "I know you can hear me, Mara. You can still back out of this."
His voice echoed. There was no response, just as he expected, so he began walking deeper into the maze of drains, lightsaber in his right hand and blaster in the other. The only light around him now was a green haze from the glowing blade of energy.
"I could," he said quietly, "go back, block the entrance to this complex with flammable material, and set fire to it." She could hear him, all right: he could hear water dripping slowly deep in the tunnels. Sound was magnified, even if it was hard to pinpoint the origin. "And the fact that these tunnels have vents means the chimney effect would smoke you out, asphyxiate you, or barbecue you."
Silence.
He held his breath, listening.
Crack.
His right knee exploded with blinding pain as Mara cannoned out horizontally, Force-assisted, from a side conduit and caught his leg on the joint with her boots, ripping the tendons. As he lost his footing in the narrow passage, screaming, he found himself wedged for a second and groping for support. He lashed out with his lightsaber, shaving powdery brick from the wall. Mara dropped to the muddy floor to dodge the lightsaber, then sprang up and sprinted away down the tunnel.
It wasn't a good start. Jacen swore and made himself run after her, willing endorphins to numb his leg and telling himself that he knew she was setting up a trap. She wanted him confined, pinned down, penned.
If she thought tunnels would even the odds, she was wrong. He'd bury her here.
[...]
The rumbling began. She brought down both sections of tunnel, before and behind, with a massive exertion in the Force that made her breathless. She didn't hear him call out. Even in the damp conditions, clouds of fine debris filled the air and made her choke.
Mara waited, one hand over her mouth and nose, shoto drawn, and listened in the Force.
There was whimpering and the chunk-chunk sound of the last falling bricks. She didn't expect that weight of debris from a low ceiling to cause impact injury, but to engulf and immobilize him. He wouldn't be dead-yet.
She waited in silence, a nonexistent presence herself, until she could hear no more movement.
Okay. Let's see what I have to do to end this.
An arm was all that protruded from the rubble. Through a fist-sized gap, she could see the wet, blinking glint of an eye and bloodstained face. A hand reached out to her, fingers splayed, bloody and shaking. Other people might have felt an urge to take that hand, the most distinctively human of things, but it was an old, tired Sith stunt, and she'd used it herself too many times.
She took her blaster and leveled it at the eye, one-handed, forefinger resting on the trigger. She had the shoto ready in case a coup de grace was called for.
She felt as detached and steady as she'd ever been as the Emperor's Hand.
"Tell my mom I'm sorry I failed her," Jacen whispered.
"She knows," Mara said, and squeezed the trigger.
[...]
They said that the human body was capable of extraordinary feats of strength when in extremis. For a Jedi, it was something else entirely.
Jacen Solo wasn't ready to die, not now, not so close to his ascendance, and not in a stinking drain like vermin.
He deflected the energy bolt with one last surge of the Force and sent the rubble erupting off his crushed and bleeding body like a detonation. Bricks hammered the walls and rained fragments, knocking Mara flat like a bomb blast. She made an animal noise that was more anger than pain and flailed for a moment as she tried to get up.
The effort froze Jacen for two vital seconds. But he knew if he didn't get up now and fight back, Mara would come in for the kill, again and again, until he was worn down and too weak to fend her off.
He scrambled to his feet, staggering more than standing, and suddenly understood.
It was Mara who had to die to fulfill his destiny.
Killing her was the test: the words of the prophecy were meaningless, and at a visceral level he knew that her death was the pivotal act. He didn't know how, and this wasn't the time to stop and think about it. He surrendered totally to instinct for the first time in ages. Whatever guided a Sith's hand had to guide him now.
But he was hurt, and badly.
Ben ... he didn't know where Ben fitted into this, but now he knew he did, as surely as he knew anything. Jacen didn't care, because he knew he had to kill Mara now and nothing else would make sense until he did that.
He fumbled for his lightsaber and thumbed it into life again. Mara was already back on her feet, coming at him with the shoto and vibroblade, brick dust and black-red blood snaking down her forehead from a scalp cut. She leapt at him with the shoto held left-handed, fencing-style, seared the angle of his cheekbone, and caught him under the tip of chin with the vibroblade as he jerked back.
She shouldn't have been able to get near him. He had total mastery, and she was just athletic and fast. He pushed back at her in the Force, sending her crashing against a wall with a loud grunt, but she kept coming at him, one-two, one-two with the shoto and the blade, and he was being driven back, his strength ebbing. He needed space to fight.
He drew his dart gun and fired one after the other, but Mara scattered all four needles in a blur of blue light. They fell to the ground. He turned and scrambled through the collapsed brick, using the Force to hurl debris up at her from the floor of the passage while she leapt from block to boulder to chunk of masonry, until she Force-leapt onto his back and brought him down.
They rolled. This wasn't a duel: it was a brawl. She thrust her vibroblade up under his chin and he jerked his head to one side, feeling the tip skate from his jaw to his hairline as it missed his jugular. He couldn't draw the weapons he needed. He was losing blood, losing strength, waning, flailing his lightsaber to fend her off. It was almost useless in such a close-quarters struggle. Mara, manic and panting, flicked the shoto to counter every desperate stabbing thrust.
"Ben . . . I'll see you dead first. . . before . . . you get . . . Ben."
Jacen was on the knife-edge between dying and killing. They grappled, Force-pushed, Force-crushed: he threw her back again, trying to Force-jolt her spine and paralyze her for a moment, but somehow she deflected it and bricks flew out of the wall as if someone had punched them through from the other side. She almost Force-snatched the lightsaber from his hand, but even with his injuries he hung on to it. He wouldn't die. He couldn't, not now.
"You can't beat me," he gasped. "It's not meant to be."
"Really?" Mara snarled. "I say it is."
Then she launched herself at him-unthinking, a wild woman, hair flying-and he Force-pushed to send her slamming against a pillar in midleap. But the battering he'd taken and the ferocity of her relentless attack had blinded him to danger from another quarter. As he lurched backward to avoid her, his legs went from under him and he stumbled into a gaping crack opened up by the subsidence. He fell badly: red-hot pain seared from ankle to knee. His lightsaber went flying. Pain could be ignored, but the moment it took him to get to his feet again was enough for Mara to right herself and come back at him with the shoto and plunge it into the soft tissue just under the end of his collarbone.
Lightsaber wounds hurt a lot more than he ever imagined. Jacen screamed. He summoned his own weapon back to his hand and Mara crashed into him, knocking him flat again and pinning him down. Her vibroblade stopped a hand span from his throat as he managed to grab her hair and drag her face nearer and nearer to his lightsaber. She struggled to pull back, hacking at him with the shoto but blocked by his dwindling Force power each time.
Her vibroblade grazed his neck. He fumbled in his belt for a dart. She jerked back with a massive effort, leaving him clutching a handful of red hair, and the only thing that crossed his mind as she arched her back and held her arms high to bring both shoto and vibroblade down into his chest was that she would never, ever harm Ben.
Jacen stared into her eyes and instantly created the illusion of Ben's face beneath her. She blinked.
It gave him the edge for that fraction of a moment. It was long enough to ram the poison dart into her leg with its protective plastoid cone still in place.
It was just a small needle, ten centimeters long. He stabbed her so hard that the sharp end punched through the cone and the fabric of her pants.
Mara gasped and looked down at her leg as if she was puzzled rather than hurt. The dart quivered as she moved, and then fell to the floor.
"Oh . . . it's done . . ." Jacen said. The shoto fell from her hand and she made a vague and uncontrolled pawing movement with the vibroblade. It caught him in the bicep, but there was no strength behind the blow, and she dropped the weapon. "I'm sorry, Mara. Had to be you. Thought it was Ben. But it's over now, it's over . . ."
"What have you done? What the stang have you done to me?" But she was already losing her balance as the poison paralyzed her, and she slumped to one side as he got to his feet, staring up at him more with shock than rage or fear.
"The prophecy." It didn't matter now: the toxin-complex, relatively painless-was circulating through her body. "Don't fight it. No healing trance. Just let go . . ."
Mara tried to get up but sank back to sit on her heels, with an expression as if she'd forgotten something and was trying to remember. She crumpled against the wall. Jacen had never felt such relief. It didn't have to be Allana, or Tenel Ka, or even Ben. It was over, all over.
"What?" Mara said. She tried to put her fingers to her lips, shaking, but her hand fell back to her lap. She looked at them as if expecting to see blood.
Jacen suppressed his instinct to help her. "It's my destiny, Mara-to be a Sith Lord, and bring order and justice. I had to kill you to do it. You're going to save so many people, Mara. You've saved Ben. You've saved Allana, too. It's not a waste, believe me."
"You're ... as vile as he was."
Jacen could hardly understand what she was saying. "Who?"
"Palpatine."
"It's not like that," he said. He had to make her see what was happening. It was important. He owed her that revelation. She'd made the sacrifice, although he was now starting to wonder what that meant for whatever love he had to give up. "It's not about ambition. It's about the galaxy, about peace. It's about building a different world."
She stared back at him, and now he could see-and feel-her disgust. He wasn't sure if it was aimed at him or at herself.
Jacen hurt. He was starting to feel the full extent of his injuries, and he needed to heal himself. He also needed to get out of this tunnel.
So, the power to conjure up an illusion is extremely, extremely inconsequential, and not much effort is required for someone of Luke’s caliber. The only reason the illusion was so convincing was because it was the cherry on top of everything else. As said earlier, Caedus almost immediately rules out a simple illusion trick .Caedus sees a future where he fights Luke, he believes Luke’s presence really has been there, and on top of that he sees that he is fighting Luke.
This idea tows the line of the popular reaction scaling argument proposed by The Ellimist and others, and while that argument does support this one here, it should be noted that Caedus is not just considering power here. Earlier in the series, Jacen demonstrates his knowledge of Luke's Force attack by recognizing its “characteristic traits”, even in the dark, which highlights the fact that Jacen has a deep understanding of Luke's abilities beyond just using his raw power.
Legacy of the Force: Betrayal wrote:Jacen had barely closed his eyes again when his compartment door blasted inward. The shock of the concussion startled him, delaying him a deadly half second . . . but as he rose, as he gestured for his lightsaber, as the long barrel of the first intruder's black rifle entered and swung toward him, the attacker was suddenly bowled off his feet. Jacen felt the pulse in the Force that did it, felt the characteristic traits of Luke's exertion within it. Lightsaber in hand, Jacen snapped it on, took a fraction of a second to wave at Ben's bed and flip it over, sending the boy into the wall and covering him with the bed. Only then did Jacen leap out into the central chamber.
Moreover, Caedus's measuring stick is Luke as foreseen in not just his visions, but Luke's as well. The real Luke was seen fighting Caedus by both parties involved, and it's this that the Juke fight is supposed to measure up to.
4) JAINA SOLO'S "EDGE": PREPARING TO FIGHT CAEDUS
Over the course of Revelation, Jaina trains with the Mandalorians with the intent of killing Caedus (she goes to Mandalore believing she can arrest him, but rules this out as an impossibility later on). What Jaina learns is to beat Caedus she will have to “fight dirty”, and mold her style in a way that'd exploit Caedus’s weaknesses. She believes she doesn’t need to be fitter, stronger, or even more skilled, but needs to become so unpredictable that Caedus cannot anticipate her.Legacy of the Force: Revelation wrote:"You assumed too much. You're just training, nobody wants to hurt you, the nice Mando is helping you, he's standing all wrong to attack... you want to win? Start out to win. Hit first."
"You're telling me to fight dirty. I get that."
"No, I'm telling you this isn't about lightsaber tech-nique. I'm more than twice your age, no Force powers, and I still got you to drop your guard. Winning isn't about being better. It's finding your opponent's weakness and exploiting it."
"But what about Jacen's weaknesses?"
"They're yours."
"He's my twin. I know him."
"And he knows you. Be someone else."
Jaina clipped her lightsaber to her belt and understood both the simplicity and enormity of her task. The solution was obvious. It was just very hard to achieve. She didn't need to be fitter, or stronger, or more skilled; she needed to play it so out of character that Jacen wouldn't be able to counter or anticipate her.
[…]
"We'll try to give you an alter ego, "Beviin said. "A nasty Jaina. A crafty, cheating Jaina. A bounty-hunting Jaina."
[…]
No, Mandalorians weren't what she'd expected at all.
And she would learn to be as much of a surprise to her brother as they were to her. Thanks, Fett.
Then going into Invincible, Jaina exclaims that despite the Masters and several Jedi Knights being her superior in the Force and lightsaber skill, she should be the one to fight Caedus, because she’ll have advantages no one else has.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"So is Jacen," Jaina replied, relying on a technicality-but knowing that it would work in her favor if anybody tried to argue that a Jedi Knight wasn't powerful enough to confront Caedus. "I know that you Masters-and several Jedi Knights-are more skilled in both Force and lightsaber than I am. But I'm his twin sister. I'll have advantages no one else will."
It is further elaborated in the Fate of the Jedi: Dramatis Personae that Jaina used these new Mandalorian techniques coupled with her “attunement” to Jacen to ultimately defeat him, and that she is the only one capable of doing so.
- Fate of the Jedi; Dramatis Personae
Moving on, this next section will outline the prophecy of the Sword of the Jedi, how Jaina lives up to this title in Invincible, and how it ties in to everything above.
Jaina being the Sword of the Jedi stretches all the way back to the New Jedi Order series, in which during their knighting ceremony, Luke deems Jaina the Sword of the Jedi. The Sword of the Jedi is a symbol of strength and leadership for the Jedi Order, expected to lead the way in battle, bring peace to others, and be a guiding force for their allies. The title also acknowledges that their life will be full of challenges and they will never truly find peace, but they will be blessed for bringing peace to others.
New Jedi Order: Destiny's Way wrote:"Jaina-Solo!"
Jaina stepped forward, and Luke could feel her cool presence in the Force, the precise way her footsteps matched the drumbeat that still thudded up from the orchestra pit. She wore her military uniform-Cal Omas had asked her to, in order to show her commitment to the New Republic. Kyp and Kenth Hamner, the two pilots, robed her.
Luke put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her dark eyes, and a chill suddenly seized him, flooding his nerves with cold fire.
"I name you the Sword of the Jedi," he said. "You are like tempered steel, purposeful and razor-keen. Always you shall be in the front rank, a burning brand to your enemies, a brilliant fire to your friends. Yours is a restless life, and never shall you know peace, though you shall be blessed for the peace that you bring to others. Take comfort in the fact that, though you stand tall and alone, others take shelter in the shadow that you cast."
Luke fell silent, and for a long horrified moment he stared into Jaina's wide-eyed face.
He hadn't meant to say that. He hadn't meant to say anything like it. Yet the words had poured forth from him like the ringing sound of a giant bell, a bell that was being tolled, not by Luke, but by someone else.
He sensed the other Jedi staring at him. Had he actually spoken loudly enough for them to hear?
Luke's hands trembled as he drew the cowl over Jaina's head. When he returned to the podium he had to fumble for the microphone switch.
"Draw your lightsabers," he said, "for the first time as Jedi Knights!"
But all the way up until early in the Legacy of the Force series, Jaina and others are still unsure what the prophecy actually means. All that’s known is that the Force itself spoke through Luke when reciting the prophecy.
Legacy of the Force: Exile wrote:"And I'm not taking the Sword of the Jedi designation too seriously. How can I, when I don't even know what it means? Not even Uncle Luke really knows what it means.
He's never been entirely sure why he said it. Maybe it was the Force speaking through him."
…
But if the Force was speaking through the Grand Master when he pronounced you the Sword of the Jedi, and if the Sword is anything like I like Chosen One, then there's some sort of imbalance that needs to be addressed. And that would seem to point to Lumiya."
This story thread only starts to take meaning during the latter portions of Legacy of the Force, where it grows increasingly apparent that Jaina will fulfill her role as Sword of the Jedi upon slaying Caedus. This is the burden of being Sword of the Jedi, she must stow away personal problems and replace them with what matters - the future of the galaxy and the lives of the innocent people who live in it. She will do what needs to be done to protect the galaxy, even if it means sacrificing her own happiness and taking on the burden of her brother's death. This realization grows increasingly more clear going into Invincible, that only Jaina can stop Caedus.
Note: Jaina’s belief that she’s his equal seems to come from the point of view of their respective Force potentials, as she has said Caedus is much stronger both before and after this point.
Legacy of the Force: Revelation wrote:"I thought I'd made up my mind so many times, but Mirta brought me up short today. My brother killed her mother, and she still begged me not to kill him, just in case I was wrong." "And what if you let him live, and you're wrong?" Jaina shut her eyes. She could sense Venku still taking a slow walk around the perimeter, a little irritable, growing impatient. The two men didn't live around here. They came down into Keldabe from the remote north, the Oyu'baat regulars said. Even Mandalorians didn't drop in on them for a cup of caf and a chat.
"They call me the Sword of the Jedi, "Jaina said. "That's supposed to be my destiny. It's odd how these prophecies start to make sense when it's too late."
Legacy of the Force: Revelation wrote:If anyone can stop Jacen, then, it's me. I'm his equal, and I'm the Sword of the Jedi. But I just don't have his... training. I've no idea what he learned from Lumiya, let alone what he picked up on his travels during those five years.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"Every day, it growz more clear to us that this fight will be won or lost in the mystic realm, not the physical," Saba added. "And the Force has named you Sword of the Jedi. We would have been foolz not to discusz your request."
Legacy of the Force: Revelation wrote:"Then, Bard'ika, I'll do it for them, so they have a galaxy to grow up in." Her heart broke, and not for the first time. She thought of the strill, desperate and unhappy, biting those who loved it, and knew the burden of being the Sword of the Jedi. Her biggest fear now wasn't that she would have to live the rest of her life with Jacen's death on her conscience. She had found a way to replace it with what mattered-not her personal problems, but the threat to the future of kids like Gotab's great-great-grandchildren, and-yes, even Fett's.
- Full passages:
- Legacy of the Force: Revelation wrote:Not the thought that Jacen might be mad-if that made any difference to what he did-but that he was miserable somewhere in his soul. She thought of the Embrace of Pain, and the Jacen who had survived it, and wondered if his torturer Vergere had been even more poisonously subtle than anyone had ever imagined. Pain was central to Jacen's life now. He thought he couldn't avoid it or forget it. So he used it.
And in the end, he'd grown to need it, and thought others did, too, and that there was a virtue in necessity, because he could do nothing to stop that pain as long as he lived.
Better that it's me, then, Jacen. Better someone who loves you and knows you, than an executioner who just sees you as vermin.
Did that make any difference?
"To think I blamed Jacen's weakness for getting my other brother killed, "she said. "It was me who was going to the dark side then."
"Forget about you, "Gotab said sharply. "You have a job to do, that's all. Personally, I never bought this pious nonsense about Jedi violence being fine as long as it was done with a pure heart. Sophistry, my dear. You're going to kill your brother because he's a power-hungry, murdering dictator, no one else in your Jedi circle has the moral courage to do it, and you stand the best chance of stopping him. Finish the job like Fett and Beviin showed you. Then you can worry about your motives when the galaxy is safe again, and you have time for the luxury of contemplating the state of your soul."
It was as harsh as a slap in the face. But Jaina felt a cold certainty cascade over her as if she'd been doused with icy water, making her instantly alert.
It wasn't the kind of revelation that left you feeling enlightened and uplifted, understanding the galaxy better.
It was the sort that said there was only one way out of the burning building if you wanted to live, and you would have to pass through fire.
She stood up and stretched her legs. "Thank you, Bard'ika, "she said. "I didn't come here to feel better about this situation. I came here for clarity. You've given me that." "It has to be your choice, Jaina. Not my orders." "I choose, then, "she said. "I bet you have grandchildren, yes?"
"Great-great-grandchildren, actually.... twenty of them."
"Then, Bard'ika, I'll do it for them, so they have a galaxy to grow up in." Her heart broke, and not for the first time. She thought of the strill, desperate and unhappy, biting those who loved it, and knew the burden of being the Sword of the Jedi. Her biggest fear now wasn't that she would have to live the rest of her life with Jacen's death on her conscience. She had found a way to replace it with what mattered-not her personal problems, but the threat to the future of kids like Gotab's great-great-grandchildren, and-yes, even Fett's.
Jaina's position on Caedus's power relative to herself before and after Revelation:Legacy of the Force: Fury wrote:"I'm his twin. I have as much power as he does. ... potentially. But he's had training I haven't. I need to counter it with training he hasn't had. And the sort of ingenuity you showed me."Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"That's not really news, Mirta," Jaina said. "Maybe not even true. He's magnitudes stronger than me in the Force. All I've got on him is five weeks of Mandalorian commando training."
But as revealed later in Invincible, being the Sword of the Jedi has another meaning as well. As Caedus is coming for Luke, Jaina exclaims why would he be hunting down Luke if she was the one who fought him, but Saba replies Caedus not going after the sword (Jaina) but rather the warrior who wields the sword (Luke).
- Legacy of the Force: Invincible
If you remember earlier, I said there was another key piece, well here it is. Jaina is the Sword and Luke is the Jedi. Jaina is the vessel in which Luke fights Caedus in, for if Luke fights Caedus himself, he will fall to the dark side and become the same as Caedus. Recall the earlier line in which Luke says he’ll stay “as close” as he can to the future they’re seeing without actually fighting Caedus-"at least, not physically". That line now makes much more sense from the point of view that Luke had indeed fought Caedus - he just wasn’t physically there. That as well as Luke remembering every one of Jaina's blows, as well as both Jaina and Caedus believing Luke had been there.
Before moving onto the final Caedus section, I will address some of the evidence used against Caedus in Invincible itself, which is Saba laughs at the prospect of Luke being unable to kill Caedus.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"I know you have," Luke said. "But I'm not going to need support because I can't kill Caedus."
There was a short silence while everyone contemplated this startling statement. Then Saba Sebatyne began to siss.
"Master Skywalker," she said, "you are alwayz making jokes at such strange timez."
"I don't think he's joking," Han said. He turned toward Luke. "Look, buddy, if this is about our feelings-"
"Han, it's not." Luke met the gazes of both of Jaina's parents, then said, "To tell the truth, I've been looking forward to running him down."
Upon Luke's admission that he is unable to kill Caedus, the Council sits in silence, contemplating the gravity of his words. The fact that Luke’s statement required contemplation implies that they recognize they do recognize the validity of Luke's claim generally speaking, and moreover, Saba has no idea how powerful Caedus really is, with not even Luke himself knowing the full extent of Caedus' power. Later on, the Council is shown to have hushed discussions about Caedus' abilities and foresight, and despite the danger he poses, Saba is excited with the prospect of facing Caedus, even with the way Caedus handled her in Fury (ragdolled into an explosion), and Caedus’ past success in leaving Luke severely injured to the point that he required stay in a bacta tank for a week.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:This time Vatok didn't look back, leaving Jaina alone with her fears, wondering not only whether he and Mirta and the rest of the Mandalorians were headed to their deaths, but whether she might be, as well. Even Luke did not know the full of extent of Caedus's powers, and Jaina had no illusions about being her brother's equal in terms of Force strength. If it came down to a straight Force battle, she would die. It was that simple.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:Han would have argued the Force comment, except that the firestorm in the Throat suddenly seemed to be dying away. He checked the wall display and saw that Caedus's fleet was slowing down. Unfortunately, it was still short of the area where the Hapans were lying in ambush.
"Uh-oh," he said, more to himself than anyone else. "It looks like they're getting careful."
Saba hissed, and the rest of the Masters in the room began to whisper about Caedus's battle powers and his ability to read the future. Luke said nothing; he just stood in front of the viewport, his hands folded behind his back and his gaze fixed on the deck between his feet.
Legacy of the Force: Fury wrote:In the moment he had before those detonators went off, Caedus acted to whittle down the enemy numbers as they had been whittling down his. He gestured, exerting himself telekinetically, and Saba Sebatyne slipped laterally into the starboard pit, almost atop the doomed droid there.
Her leap toward safety was almost instantaneous, but almost wasn't good enough. The detonators went off. The blast caught Sebatyne when she was only a meter or two in the air. It propelled her like an old-fashioned munition to the port-side wall, slamming her into that surface five meters above the floor, and she slid, flaming, down into the pit.
Luke and Ben looked Caedus's way. He smiled at them and shrugged. "One down."
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"Perhaps later, Princess Leia," Tenel Ka interrupted. "But Prince Isolder knew the location of this base. Apparently, Darth Caedus forced him to reveal it, because the Anakin Solo has broken out of the Roche system with the Remnant assault fleet. They were last seen entering the Transitory Mists near Roqoo Station."
"Caedus is coming to us?" asked Saba Sebatyne, looking entirely too happy about it. "You are certain?"
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"I must say, that seems quite wise," C-3PO said. "The last time you two fought, you were forced to spend your nights in the bacta tank for an entire week."
So it’s much more likely the case that Saba’s quip is not meant to be an honest analysis of Luke versus Caedus (she doesn't have the knowledge to assert such), but an attempt to lighten the mood in the face of a overall bad situation (the Council is startled), while also demonstrating her strong-willed nature to never run away/give up the fight.
5) CONFRONTING EO!INVINCIBLE CAEDUS: THE FINAL BATTLE
Upon her final confrontation with Caedus, which ends with his death, Jaina considers reaching out to Luke again for help in her upcoming fight. However, she ultimately decides against it because Caedus would be prepared for Luke’s strength, and that if Jaina expected to defeat Caedus, she’d have to fight her own way.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:Recalling the surge of Force power she had experienced when she fought Caedus the first time, Jaina wondered if she should reach out to her uncle Luke when the fight began. Perhaps he would be able to bolster her strength as he had on Nickel One. But then she recalled Mirta's comment about her brother underestimating her, and she realized that calling on Luke would be a mistake. From what Mirta had said-and what she had observed herself on Nickel One-Caedus was obsessed with their uncle. He would be ready for Luke's strength, prepared to see through Luke's illusions as he had not been the first time. If Jaina expected to win this fight, she would have to fight in a different way-her own way.
A question you might have is: why wouldn’t Jaina opt to use Luke’s power? Luke is much stronger than her, seeing as without Luke’s power she goes from being able to catch blaster bolts with her fingers to barely being able to hold her lightsaber after Luke stops. There are four main reasons for this;
1) Overconfidence: Jaina believes that Caedus would particularly be overconfident in a fight against her specifically, because he is magnitudes stronger than her in the Force.
Legacy of the Force: Revelation wrote:If anyone can stop Jacen, then, it's me. I'm his equal, and I'm the Sword of the Jedi. But I just don't have his... training. I've no idea what he learned from Lumiya, let alone what he picked up on his travels during those five years. But he'll make a mistake sooner or later. He's way too cocky not to overestimate himself.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"Now, the thing you need to know about your brother:he underestimates you."
"That's not really news, Mirta," Jaina said. "Maybe not even true. He's magnitudes stronger than me in the Force. All I've got on him is five weeks of Mandalorian commando training."
"And that's enough to get the job done." Mirta's tone was reprimanding, like a parent scolding a child for wanting a third bowl of frezgel. "But I mean, his weakness is more delusional. He's convinced you couldn't have taken his arm-at least not alone. He thinks Luke was with us."
Jaina paused, recalling Caedus's confusion at the end of the battle. She also recalled her own condition, how the strange surge in her Force powers had suddenly faded just before Caedus had redirected the stormtroopers' fire. "Maybe Luke was there."
2) The Sword of the Jedi prophecy: Jaina realizes she isn’t as capable as Luke in defeating Caedus, but she remembers the Sword of the Jedi prophecy, and recognizes the significance of being chosen for this role: to lead the fight against enemies of the Jedi. Some of this was discussed earlier, but the Jedi Council also recognizes the importance of this prophecy, having already discussed this at length before bringing it up with Jaina, and concluding she is the one to face Caedus despite her being less skilled in the Force and with a lightsaber than the Council.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:Jaina's heart sank. It was beginning to sound like Luke intended to go after Caedus himself, and she could not decide whether to feel betrayed or confused. She had no hope of convincing anyone-maybe not even herself-that she was more capable of slaying her brother than Luke. But what of the vision he had experienced on Mon Calamari, when he had promoted her to Jedi Knight? Hadn't he foreseen that she would be the Sword of the Jedi, always leading the fight against enemies of the Order?
[…]
"And there's the whole Sword of the Jedi vision Luke had when he made Jaina a Jedi Knight." His voice was cracking, but Han Solo didn't falter as he spoke-and he didn't balk. "That's got to mean something."
Jaina's heart beat an extra time in surprise, and she looked over to see her parents shining approval at her through tear-filled eyes.
[…]
"Every day, it growz more clear to us that this fight will be won or lost in the mystic realm, not the physical," Saba added. "And the Force has named you Sword of the Jedi. We would have been foolz not to discusz your request."
"Even before I made it-that's the creepy part." Jaina turned to Luke. "You knew I was going to ask for the Council's sanction, didn't you?"
"I've seen some things that have led me to expect it, yes." A note of distress in Luke's voice suggested that not all those futures turned out well. "I apologize for not being more direct, but we had to be sure you were ready."
"So this was a test," Jaina said, turning toward Kenth and Corran. "Your reservations about killing Caedus-"
"Have already been discussed at length in your absence," Kenth assured her. "We just wanted to be sure everyone present appreciated our reluctance in granting this sanction."
3) Familial: Jaina believes that when Caedus realizes it’s her who he is fighting, it’ll trouble him to know that Jaina, and by proxy his entire family, would be coming after him. While she believes this wouldn’t help her perform better in the fight, the Council notes that the reason Caedus is particularly dangerous is because he is never unwilling to kill, and that if the Jedi try to take him alive, it’ll be the Jedi who end up dead, so this is perhaps what Jaina is speaking to. Despite Luke being family, Jaina doesn’t believe Luke would have this advantage over Caedus because of Caedus’ obsession with him.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:Before Saba could act, Jaina stepped to her uncle's side. "Let me go."
"You?" This came from the other end of the table, where Corran sat looking surprised and worried. "You're only a Jedi Knight."
"So is Jacen," Jaina replied, relying on a technicality-but knowing that it would work in her favor if anybody tried to argue that a Jedi Knight wasn't powerful enough to confront Caedus. "I know that you Masters-and several Jedi Knights-are more skilled in both Force and lightsaber than I am. But I'm his twin sister. I'll have advantages no one else will."
[…]
"I know," Jaina said. "But it will trouble him that it's me coming after him. We know from debriefing Allana how misunderstood he feels, how betrayed he feels because we've all chosen to stand against him. It won't protect me in a fight, but I can use it against him in other ways."
"And he won't use your feelings against you?" Kyp asked. "He's your brother, and you still love him. I can feel that."
"I still love him," Jaina admitted. "But that won't make me hesitate-not even for a nanosecond."
[…]
Of course her parents would want to be her support team; their feelings about Jacen had to be as strong as her own, and they would want him stopped just as much as she did. And Jaina knew better than to think she would have any chance of keeping them away when she was placing herself in this kind of danger-her mother might have had the strength to let her go after her brother alone, but not her father. He was going to be watching her tail whether she wanted him there or not.
Besides, if it was going to trouble Jacen to know that it was his sister hunting him, then it would trouble him even more to have all three Solos after him. It would hurt anyone to discover that his entire family was determined to kill him.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:From what Mirta had said-and what she had observed herself on Nickel One-Caedus was obsessed with their uncle. He would be ready for Luke's strength, prepared to see through Luke's illusions as he had not been the first time.
4) An opportunity to ambush Caedus: Jaina learns a variant of Art of the Small, a technique in which she is able to completely hide her presence from others in preparation for her fight with Caedus. She emphasizes that catching him in a vulnerable state would be ideal, and is worried that Caedus would be able to sense her despite learning the ability (before any Luke empowerment). If she had Luke’s power that she needed to hide from Caedus as well, Caedus would’ve undoubtedly sensed her approach, because the likelihood of Jaina being able to hide Luke’s power when she questions the ability to hide even her own is nonexistent. And we see how this manifests in their final confrontation when Jaina catches Caedus in a vulnerable position (“fiery roaring in his ears” upon learning the Imperials sent a nanovirus to kill Allana), and is able to land a saber to the gut.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:She was concentrating on keeping her presence hidden, and the technique-the same one Caedus had taught Ben, and which Ben had then taught to her and his father-was too new to her to risk splitting her concentration.
…
The display was small, the image it showed even smaller, and it took Jaina a moment to make out what she was seeing. Even then, she did not quite believe her eyes.
The screen showed one of the smooth-polished cells that passed for VIP quarters in Nickel One. Seated in the corner, slumped in a large flowform chair with one hand raised toward his brow and his yellow eyes focused vacantly on the floor, was the brooding, dark-cloaked figure of her brother.
Darth Caedus-alone, deep in meditation, and vulnerable.
Jaina understood almost instantly. "The preparations!" She looked up at Mirta. "That's what Fett was doing when I left-tapping into the surveillance system."
"Not tapping." There was a note of jolly good humor to Vatok's correction. "Taking."
Mirta continued to hold the vidreceiver, allowing Jaina to study the image as long as she liked. It was hard to believe it might be so easy-that all she had to do was watch her brother's cell until he was meditating or sleeping or doing any of a dozen other things that would leave him vulnerable.
And of course, it would never be quite that easy. Her brother would feel her coming, or sense that he was in danger, or just change locations unexpectedly.
But it was a start.
[hideedit]Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:"The tissue samples have already been collected."
"What?" Caedus went over to the gurney. "Show me."
The droid turned both of the prince's hands up, revealing half a dozen bruises and needle marks on the interior of the forearms. There was a muffled scream in the corridor outside, but Caedus could barely hear it over the fiery roaring in his ears. He did not need to ask what the marks meant, because he had seen similar marks on Mirta's arms after the Remnant medic collected her samples for the nanokiller.
The marks meant that Lecersen and the Moffs had betrayed him:and his vision. They meant that Allana's nanokiller was probably already on its way to the Dragon Queen.
Caedus pulled his comlink and opened a channel to his aide, Orlopp. "Have a hold placed on all launches from the Anakin Solo," he ordered, turning toward the door. "And find out if we've launched any missile boats recently-especially missile boats carrying Remnant forces."
There was an uncomfortable pause, then Orlopp asked, "Did you say missile boats?"
Caedus's stomach went cold. "Tell me."
"A missile boat just launched from this hangar," Orlopp reported. "I had to wait for it to clear the containment field before I blew the Beam Racer."
"What about the crew?" Caedus asked. "Were they ours?"
"They were in Alliance uniforms," Orlopp reported. "New uniforms:and a Remnant colonel saw them off. Shall I have a recall order issued?"
"It's worth a try, but they won't obey." Caedus came to the door and, lacking a second hand to reach for the control pad, stopped to finish his order. "Have my StealthX prepped for immediate:"
He let the sentence trail off as the door opened on its own, revealing a dark-uniformed woman with an athletic build and brown, furious eyes.
"Jaina?"
A lightsaber snap-hissed to life, and suddenly Caedus felt as though he were going to vomit fire.
[…]
The invisible fist of a Force blast slammed Jaina in the chest and sent her flying back, her breath groaning from her lungs and her lightsaber hissing free of Caedus's stomach. From the fight on Nickel One, she had learned the dangers of letting her head snap back on impact. She tucked her chin, then fought to hold it there as she struck the durasteel wall on the far side of the corridor.
- EmperorCaedusLevel Three
Re: The Power of Darth Caedus: How Jaina Becomes the Sword of the Jedi
April 12th 2023, 1:06 am
And upon Jaina slaying Caedus, Jaina becomes the Sword of the Jedi, with everything the title meant (including being the Sword for Luke).
This is further reinforced by Jacen’s decision to align himself with Lumiya. Across all potential timelines where he doesn’t join forces with her, Jacen inevitably faces off against Luke in a confrontation in which both are strengthened through loss: for Luke, likely the death of Mara Jade. This duel is immediately preceded by the detonation of Lumiya’s asteroid in book 7, meaning it’s unlikely that this is some far flung future outside the range of LotF books - but to a future that occurs not very far from Fury, which is Invincible. Furthermore, TCSWE reflects that Caedus will kill Luke in every future, and that the only way to stop this is to prevent Nelani Dinn from telling Luke by killing her.
In all possible futures in which both Luke and Caedus are strengthened by their loss, Caedus always beats Luke. Caedus gains this as of Invincible.
The conclusion is simple: as of the end of Invincible, Luke is not expected to win against Caedus. The most generous interpretation for Luke is that they are around the same level by the end of Invincible, and that neither of them are expected to win against the other. But when accounting for Jaina’s own power being added to Luke’s, Jaina’s new fighting tactics devised specifically to exploit Caedus’s weaknesses, Jaina’s attunement to her brother, as well as Jacen’s visions from Betrayal reflecting Caedus will always win, well… it becomes clear that Caedus seems to be Luke’s superior.
There could be many factors for why that is though. It could be Luke is more powerful but Caedus makes up for it with his diverse set of skills such as Aing-Tii fighting-sight (advanced precog), or that Caedus is outright more powerful.
[hideedit]
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:On some level, Jaina knew, they were probably trying to reassure her, to let her know that nothing had changed between them. But that was impossible, of course. Jaina had become the Sword of the Jedi, with everything that meant.
- Full passage:
- As they drew nearer and saw Jacen's head resting in Jaina's lap, they finally exhausted their last reserves of composure. Her father's lip began to tremble and her mother's brown eyes turned liquid with sadness. They knelt beside her, trying not to look at their son's body but unable not to, and seemed helpless to speak around the lumps in their throats.
After a couple of seconds, her mother pulled an airsplint from the medpac in her hands and immobilized Jaina's broken arm, while her father found a canister of sterinumb and gingerly sprayed her burns. The tasks seemed to help them focus their thoughts, and they began to give her unscorched shoulder and unbroken arm tentative squeezes of affection.
On some level, Jaina knew, they were probably trying to reassure her, to let her know that nothing had changed between them. But that was impossible, of course. Jaina had become the Sword of the Jedi, with everything that meant.
“Always you shall be in the front rank, a burning brand to your enemies, a brilliant fire to your friends. Yours is a restless life, and never shall you know peace, though you shall be blessed for the peace that you bring others. Take comfort in the fact that, though you stand tall and alone, others will take shelter in the shadow that you cast.”
So Luke had spoken when he made Jaina a Jedi Knight, and so Jaina had become. It wasn't a destiny she would have chosen-but who ever truly chooses? She doubted that her brother had envisioned his destiny to end here, with him lying dead in his sister's lap.
This is further reinforced by Jacen’s decision to align himself with Lumiya. Across all potential timelines where he doesn’t join forces with her, Jacen inevitably faces off against Luke in a confrontation in which both are strengthened through loss: for Luke, likely the death of Mara Jade. This duel is immediately preceded by the detonation of Lumiya’s asteroid in book 7, meaning it’s unlikely that this is some far flung future outside the range of LotF books - but to a future that occurs not very far from Fury, which is Invincible. Furthermore, TCSWE reflects that Caedus will kill Luke in every future, and that the only way to stop this is to prevent Nelani Dinn from telling Luke by killing her.
In all possible futures in which both Luke and Caedus are strengthened by their loss, Caedus always beats Luke. Caedus gains this as of Invincible.
- Full passage:
- Lumiya looked sober, unhappy. "I know my fate is no longer my own. I want to see the Sith rise with you at the head of the order, Jacen, and for that reason I swear myself to your service." She knelt as she spoke, lowering her head-an invitation for a blessing, or for a killing stroke. "But whichever one of you is in charge here will choose my fate, my future."
Her voice low, Nelani said, "Put your hands behind your back." As Lumiya obeyed, Nelani pulled a pair of stun cuffs from her belt pouch.
Jacen frowned. There was something wrong about this situation, and for a moment he suspected treachery on Lumiya's part, but a glimpse into the likely immediate future dispelled that notion. He saw Lumiya obedient, unresisting, being led back to the shuttle.
His mind flickered forward through the likely time streams. The future, as Yoda had said so frequently and famously that the quotation littered the Jedi archives, was always in motion, and many potential futures led from this event.
But they began congregating in certain areas. Nelani testifying against Shira Brie, also known as Lumiya, also known as Lumiya Syo. Lumiya convicted, being executed, being locked up in solitude, being locked up in a mass prison and assassinated by someone whose father she had killed decades ago. All she knew vanishing, dying with her.
Along all these paths, the galaxy continued to come unhinged, rebellion sparking in all corners, the Galactic Alliance crumbling, like a cancer-racked body, eating itself from the insides out, whole populations dying.
Detonators destroying this place, blowing the asteroid into millions of pieces, scattering the knowledge hidden here. An ancient Star Destroyer raining turbolaser destruction down on the surface of Ziost, purging it of knowledge lingering there.
Scores of time lines congregated on Jacen Solo and Luke Skywalker, bringing them together. The two of them faced each other, their surroundings changing every second as the scene slipped from time line to time line, yet their poses and the lightsabers lit in their hands remained the same, as did the anger and tragic loss twisting both their faces.
They spun, they struck, the impacts of their lightsabers causing flares of light to cast the walls and floors behind them into greater darkness. On and on they fought, their loss giving them strength, until-Jacen cut Luke down. Sometimes it was a blow across the shoulder, down into the chest. Sometimes it was a slash, too fast to see, across the throat that sent the older man's head from his shoulders. Sometimes it was a thrust to the stomach, followed by minutes of agony, Luke writhing in a futile struggle for life while Jacen, tears running down his cheeks, knelt nearby.
Luke died.
Luke died.
"No," Jacen whispered. He summoned himself back to the here and now.
Nelani and Lumiya were walking away. The younger woman held the older by the shoulder, guiding her.
Jacen lit his lightsaber and struck. Nelani jumped away, but the glowing blade merely parted the cuffs that held Lumiya's hands together behind her back.
Both women looked at him.
"She remains free," Jacen told Nelani. "If you take her . . ." He could not say the rest of the words. Luke dies. And I kill him.
There was more to it than that. For a moment, he was drawn back into the streams of probability that led him into the future.
Nelani could leave without her prisoner. She would return home to Lorrd and tell all to her superiors. To Luke.
Jacen cut Luke down. Luke died.
Nelani could be persuaded not to tell. She would rethink her promise later and break it, telling all to Luke.
Jacen cut Luke down. Luke died.
Only in the time streams where Nelani fell, never to rise, did Luke remain on his feet, in command, alive. Other tragedies, shadowy and indistinct, swirled around him, but he lived.
Jacen returned again to the present. The truth of what lie had just experienced through the Force numbed him.
But it was the truth, and he had to be strong enough to face it.
Lumiya knew it, or had some sense of it. There were tears on her cheeks to match the ones he felt on his own. "There is this about being Sith," she told him. "We strengthen ourselves through sacrifice."
Jacen nodded, grudging acceptance of that fact. "Yes."
6) WHERE DOES CAEDUS STACK UP?
Bringing back this quote:The conclusion is simple: as of the end of Invincible, Luke is not expected to win against Caedus. The most generous interpretation for Luke is that they are around the same level by the end of Invincible, and that neither of them are expected to win against the other. But when accounting for Jaina’s own power being added to Luke’s, Jaina’s new fighting tactics devised specifically to exploit Caedus’s weaknesses, Jaina’s attunement to her brother, as well as Jacen’s visions from Betrayal reflecting Caedus will always win, well… it becomes clear that Caedus seems to be Luke’s superior.
There could be many factors for why that is though. It could be Luke is more powerful but Caedus makes up for it with his diverse set of skills such as Aing-Tii fighting-sight (advanced precog), or that Caedus is outright more powerful.
[hideedit]
- EmperorCaedusLevel Three
Re: The Power of Darth Caedus: How Jaina Becomes the Sword of the Jedi
April 12th 2023, 1:08 am
7) UNRAVELING JACEN SOLO: EXPLORING JACEN'S HYPE
I get it: it's hard to say anyone in general is at that level and leave it at that. That Caedus can be with the legendary Grandmaster just before tussling with Abeloth herself in the very next series. The goal of this next section will be to highlight Jacen's hype leading into Legacy of the Force, and how Caedus could've achieved this level of power.
Note: the goal isn't to make any hard claims in this next section as the previous section had, but to generally outline why Caedus ought to be placed at the level being argued for.
Potential
Luke is able to sense both Jaina and Jacen individually in the womb, which implies to Luke that they are tremendously strong in the Force. In contrast, Anakin Skywalker was unable to sense Luke and Leia individually, and was unaware of their relation until he probed Luke's mind in RotJ.
Heir to the Empire wrote:The Skywalker heritage was indeed with them; the fact he could sense them at all implied they must be tremendously strong in the Force.
Heir to the Empire Sourcebook wrote:Anakin Skywalker, Jedi Knight and hero of the Clone Wars, was slowly being corrupted to the Dark Side by his own lust for power and the evil influence of the Emperor. He finally left his young wife to fully embrace the Dark Side, unaware that she was pregnant with twins.
The twins were so attuned to one another that Leia believes the depth of their connection to one another is something she doesn't have with Luke.
The Last Command wrote:Later, in retrospect, the whole thing would seem obvious, if not completely inevitable. But at that moment, the revelation was startling enough to send a shiver through the core of Leia's soul. The twins, growing together in the Force even as they'd grown together within her, had somehow become attuned to each other—attuned in a way and to a depth that Leia knew she herself would never entirely share.
- The Last Command Sourcebook
- The Last Command Sourcebook
It also should be noted that the many quotes saying Jaina/Jaina have "Skywalker talent", and are "inheritors" of the Skywalker Force powers should be indications in of themselves that there's not this random drop off from Luke/Leia (the commonly held position), but that Jaina/Jacen's potential is (at the bare minimum) representative of what we know of the Skywalker family, which at this point includes Luke/Leia, post-1999 Anakin Skywalker and Anakin Solo.
- Fact Files #118
New Jedi Order
For this next section I will be going through the events of the New Jedi Order series (mainly Traitor) that further reinforce Jacen's hype.
When Jacen is sent on the Myrkr mission, things take a turn for the worst, his brother dying to save the Jedi from the voxyn as well as being captured by the Yuuzhan Vong and Vergere. It’s during this time when Jacen becomes troubled with the dark side (or what he perceives as the dark side).
Upon regaining the Force, Jacen suddenly feels a surge of red anger and hatred wash over him, and unleashes a galaxy of hatred and rage in the form of lightning at Vergere and others. Jacen’s hatred had become “the only law of the universe”, his power roaring through him and becoming a vortex of any object he could find to throw at the Yuuzhan Vong, eventually burying them alive, and worse: being happy about it.
- New Jedi Order: Traitor:
- "Yes," he said solidly into the darkness. "I'm a Jedi."
A long, long silence, in which he seemed to hear the entire room drawing a slow, slow breath.
"Indeed?" She sounded sad. Disappointed. Resigned to a melancholy fate.
"Then the game is over."
"Really?" he said warily. "It is? "
"Yes," she sighed. "And you lose." The room burst to light; after so long in the dark, Jacen felt like he was being jabbed in the eye with a piece of the sun. He flinched, shading his eyes with an upraised arm. Slowly his eyes cleared; the room was larger than he had thought--a ten-meter ceiling, walls decorated with the same floral mosaics, lit by blazing glow globes the size of the Falcon's cockpit, hanging suspended by tripled chains of verdigris-caked bronze that swung gently above its tiled floor...
And it was full of Yuuzhan Vong. He turned to Vergere. Beyond a ring of warriors, she stood companionably beside a medium-sized male who wore a long, loose-fitting robeskin of black. They spoke, but Jacen could not hear them. His ears roared like a forest fire. The Yuuzhan Vong male spoke again, more sharply, but Jacen did not understand.
Could not understand. Had no need to understand. Jacen had seen this male before. He had seen this male on Duro, with Leia's lightsaber behind his belt. He had seen this male on the worldship at Myrkr.
He knew this male's name, and he tried to say it. Tried to say...
But before he could even open his mouth...A hot tidal surge of red billowed through him, and washed away the world. Jacen did not swim in the red tide, he floated: drifting, spinning in the eddies, tumbling in the surf. The red tide ebbed, waves washing out, and he bobbed to the surface. The red tide drained from his head, leaving him gasping on the floor. His hands hurt. He looked at them, but he couldn't quite see them, or he couldn't quite make sense of what he saw; his eyes wouldn't quite focus. He let his right hand fall to the chilly mosaic tile of the floor, wondering blankly that the outwash of the red tide had left the floor so cold, and so dry.
A savor of scorched meat hung in the air, as though his father had jury-rigged the autochef again. But Dad couldn't have jury-rigged the autochef. There was no autochef. And Dad wasn't here, couldn't be here, would never be here--and the smell... Nothing made sense.
How had he fallen to this floor? What caused this roil of smoke and dust? A curving wall of rubble choked off three-quarters of the chamber--where had that come from?
Answers were beyond him. But his hands still hurt. He raised his left hand and frowned his vision clear. A circle in the middle of his palm--a disk about the size of a power cell--was blackened, cracked, oozing thick dark blood. Wisps of smoke coiled upward from the cracks.
Oh, he thought. I guess that explains the smell.
"How... how does it feel, Jacen Solo..."
The voice was thin, ragged and harsh, rasping, broken by coughs. The voice was familiar. The voice was Vergere's. "...to once more... touch the Force?" She lay crumpled on the floor a few meters away, just within a ragged archway lipped with jagged stone, as though some incomprehensibly powerful creature had trampled her as it crashed through the wall.
Broken stone littered the floor. Her clothing was shredded, smoldering, red embers sliding along torn edges, and burned flesh beneath it still smoked.
"Vergere!" He was at her side without knowing how he got there. "How...
what happened?"
A sickening conviction clotted in his guts. "Did I...?" His voice trailed off. He remembered...
Through a fever-dream haze, red-soaked images leaked back into him: the room filled with Yuuzhan Vong warriors, Vergere standing beside Nom Anor as though the two knew each other, as though they were coworkers.
Comrades. Friends. Nom Anor had said something to her, and she something to him, but betrayal had hammered any hope of meaning from his brain.
He remembered a long gathering breath: inhaling a galaxy of hatred and rage--And he remembered channeling that whole galaxy of rage down his arms and hurling it at Vergere. He remembered watching her writhe in the electric arcs of his hatred: remembered the sizzle of his own hands burning as lightning burst through them: remembered how that pain had only fed his anger. And he remembered how good it had felt.
Clean. Pure. No more wrestling with right and wrong, good and evil.
Every knotty problem of Jedi ethics had dissolved in one brain-blasting surge; once he had surrendered complexity, he'd found that everything was simple. His hatred became the only law of the universe. Anger alone had meaning, and the only answer to anger was pain.
Someone else's pain. Anyone else's pain. Even now, awake, alert, choking on horror, he could feel the sweet echo of that clean, pure rage. He could hear it calling to him. It coiled inside him: a malignant parasite chewing at the bottom of his mind.
What have I become?
Note: You could say this is due to the power of the old Jedi temple they were on, but this is not true, as the temple only brings out what Jacen already has within him. This is something Jacen directly states (he can’t run from himself), and is proven to be true as evidenced by calling on this dark power later away from any nexus.
Jacen, upon learning the realization that the dark power was brought out of him by a light side nexus (the old Jedi temple) and proving Vergere’s point that light and dark are only a reflection of oneself, runs away for days until his legs refuse another step. It’s at this point that Jacen meets an apparition of Anakin Solo, which is later revealed to be a reflection of himself. His dark power - the red tide - swells in his chest, but he keeps it at bay for now. It’s not until Jacen realizes he cannot sense this apparition at all, believing it to be a masked Yuuzhan Vong, that his dark power comes forth, going from his legs refusing another step to effortlessly somersaulting and running at the apparition of Anakin. The dark power gives him strength when he has none.
- New Jedi Order: Traitor:
- "Jacen! Hey, Jacen! Over here!"
He knew the voice. He could not remember ever not knowing this voice; it was as familiar as his own. The voice was a trick--he knew it was a trick, it had to be, he'd been tricked this way before but he could not make himself ignore it. With the deliberate caution of an experienced climber in a tricky traverse, he reached up and grabbed the rail with his free hand, so that he had enough strength to hold on while he turned his head to look. On a smog-blackened balcony jutting just below the far end of the gangway, stood Anakin.
Jacen muttered, "You're not real."
"Come on, Jacen!" Anakin waved, and beckoned. "This way! Come on!
You'll be safe here!"
Jacen closed his eyes. There was no such thing as safe.
"You're not real." When he opened them again, Anakin was still there, still beckoning, wearing a loose-fitting tunic and pants in the Corellian style, lightsaber hung loosely at his belt. He waved Jacen on, jittering with urgency.
"Jacen, come on! What's the matter with you? Let's go, big brother, let's go!"
"I saw you die," Jacen said. He opened himself to the throb of the Force around him; the red tide swelled within his chest, but he pushed it down, focusing tightly, reaching out with his feelings...
Uncle Luke had told, sometimes, of getting guidance from his dead Master, the legendary Obi-Wan Kenobi. He had told of seeing his Master, hearing his voice, feeling him in the Force, long after Kenobi's death...
Jacen could see Anakin. Could hear his voice. But when he reached toward his brother through the Force, he felt nothing. Nothing at all.
"Two out of three," Jacen said through his teeth. The red tide roared into his ears. He clenched his teeth together to lock his voice in the back of his throat. "Two out of three makes you Vong."
"Jacen! What are you waiting for? Come on!" He could put up with a lot. Had put up with a lot. More than anyone should ever have to.
But to have some Yuuzhan Vong masque himself as Anakin... The red tide gathered in a wave of power that spun him into an effortless rising somersault, flipping high above the crumbled catwalk. He landed balanced upon the rope-thin rail, his feet rock-steady, his arms loose, nerveless at his sides. His power would not let him fall.
The shadow worm in the center of his chest shouted for blood. Two out of three makes you dead.
"All right," the shadow worm rasped through Jacen's mouth. "Wait there.
I'm on my way."
He ran along the rail lightly, swiftly, a drumbeat of murder in his heart drowning any thought of the long fall below; he was at the catwalk's end in seconds, but Anakin had already darted through the balcony door into the building. Jacen spread his arms and let his rage uphold him as he fell forward, kicking off the rail, gliding over the hundred-meter drop onto the balcony. He landed in a crouch, skidding, left hand splaying onto a smooth cold layer of slime that coated the balcony. Hawk-bats burst out of the doorway, shrieking and clawing, a wheeling cloud of leather and fur and talon. Jacen made a fist: an instant gale howled around him, sending the hawk-bats scattering, tumbling helplessly away into the darkness.
He sprang forward, eating ground like a sand panther running down a paralope, bounding through the ink-black interior of the building with the Force to guide him around and over obstacles. A flash of booted feet disappearing through a doorway into a globe-lit corridor drew him onward. He reached the doorway in one long Force-boosted leap.
Impossibly, Anakin was already a hundred meters away, at the far end of the corridor, looking back over his shoulder.
"Come on, Jacen! You have to run! Follow me!"
"Count on it." Jacen burst into a sprint; the Force lent wings to his heels, driving him inhumanly fast, and faster, and faster still. He covered the hundred meters in an eyeblink, and found Anakin still well ahead, still looking back, beckoning, urging him onward.
Jacen ran. The pursuit became a dream of flight, of effortless leaps, feet only skimming the floors beneath. The Force rolled through him, a crimson river sweeping him onward, beyond the sterile precincts below the crater. The river not only fed him strength, it spoke the structure of the buildings through which he raced directly into his mind: he could feel twists and turns and doorways ahead and behind, could feel where his path might be blocked with rubble or where the floor might not support his weight. It whispered girders and beams, transparisteel and duracrete beneath the Vonglife that thickened around him, Vonglife growing to a riot of shapes and colors, fibrous and fleshy, that clung to walls and ceilings and sprang from floors, Vonglife he could see and smell and touch, but that still wasn't real, couldn't be real, not to Jacen, not now, because it didn't shape the flow of the crimson river. It didn't exist in the Force, and so for Jacen it didn't exist at all.
Right up until he ran into a corridor that snapped closed behind him like the maw of a space slug. He skidded to a stop. The floor and walls were warm, body temperature, ridged with cartilaginous rings that glowed a sickly bioluminescent green. The ends of the corridor felt open--in the Force, there was nothing around him save wide-open space--but to his eyes, the corridor was closed at both ends by flaps of striated flesh like muscular valves.
Anakin was nowhere to be seen. Panting dry rage, Jacen turned his mind toward that void in the center of his chest where the slave seed had once been. The Force faded from his consciousness; the structure of the broken buildings around him faded into the same nonexistence from which the Vonglife now emerged--but even as the nature of this corridor leaked into his mind, he found he still couldn't feel Anakin. Maybe it wasn't just in the Force that be didn't exist, Jacen thought. Hawk-bats had scattered in panic when he'd leapt to the balcony..
. why hadn't they reacted to Anakin? In the cold smooth slime that had coated the balcony's surface, there had been no footprints. Suckered. He'd let the red tide drown his brains.
I've been had. With a crackle of deforming cartilage, the ring closest to the mouth of the corridor squeezed shut, then the next and the next and the next. Jacen frowned, struggling to correlate this with what he sensed through the remnants of the slave seed-web: no malice, no blood lust, nothing aggressive at all, only a kind of pleasurable contentment, a happy relish pulsing around him--then the contraction of the rings reached him, crushing him off his feet, squeezing him along the corridor like a glop of vegitein in a null-g foodpaste tube, and he understood.
The contraction of the rings wasn't an attack, it was a peristaltic wave.
This wasn't a corridor. It was a throat.
Jacen then finds himself swallowed by a Yuuzhan Vong beast, learning that he was lured by use of telepathy, which explains why he saw the spirit of Anakin. The Yuuzhan Vong beast swallowing Jacen symbolically represents what’s happened with Jacen as well - his darkness has swallowed himself. Jacen believes the universe hates him, so he hates it back. With the dark power he commands, everything has become simple. Jacen then Force chokes what he believes was an apparition of a child, but upon realizing that this was not an apparition - a real person - his hatred and strength failed him, apologizing to the girl. When Jacen realizes she’s in trouble, about to get killed by the beast, he realizes he has no strength to help her, or even stand once the dark power fades. Jacen, angry with himself that he cannot help her, welcomes back the dark power.
- New Jedi Order: Traitor:
- Jacen knelt, shuddering, eyes squeezed shut, hands splayed on the flesh-warm floor. After the valve at the end of the corridor had dilated to let him squirt through, it had sealed itself behind him with a wet, meaty slap. He tried not to listen to the screaming. please somebody please please somebody HELP ME...
The screaming was another trick.
Probably. please oh PLEASE help me I don't want to do this I don't want to DO this can't you HELP ME PLEEEEEEASE...
It had to be a trick. The floor had the grainy smoothness of water-worn limestone, all grays and browns, pocked and pimpled with mineral deposits dissolved in the fluids dripping from overhead along down-reaching irregular nipple-cones like stalactites. Some of them wore the iridescent sheen of travertine. Scattered clots of bioluminescent growths shed a soft yellow-green glow--these could have been some kind of cave moss, or phosphorescent fungus. To the eye, this place was a typical cavern of porous limestone, hollowed by the erosion of a vanished underground river.
That's why Jacen had his eyes closed. Because he knew it wasn't.
It was a stomach. It was the belly of the beast that had swallowed him. With his eyes open, the dissonance between what he saw and what he felt had spun his brain into dizzy retching nausea; even with his eyes closed, even driving his consciousness down into the hollow center of his chest, the shimmering discord was twisting his mind inside out. He could feel the beast as though he were the beast throat and stomach and chilly semisentient satisfaction at having lured another victim... but he could still feel his own body, still feel the bruises left by the cartilage rings of the throat, the sting of one elbow where he had skinned it skidding through the beast's pyloric valve, the ache in his swelling knee that he did not remember twisting while he'd chased the phantom Anakin, the hot rasp of his own breathing, and the cold empty fullness in his stomach, which was inside the belly of the beast, which was the belly of the beast, because the beast and he were one.
He had swallowed himself.
...please oh PLEASE why why WHYYYY please I don't want to die like this you have to help me HELP me you have to HELP MEEEEEE...
The voice sounded human. Female. Raw, ragged, sobbing with exhausted terror. It sounded absolutely real. As real as Anakin had looked. He wouldn't fall for it again. Many kinds of Vonglife used forms of telepathy, from yammosks to villips--even coralskippers reportedly had a mental bond with their pilots. It was obvious to Jacen now: this great cavern beast was a sessile Vonglife predator that had developed a specialized variety of telepathy to lure victims into its mouth. The hallucination of Anakin was only a side effect: any victim would see someone or something they'd instinctively trust to lead them to safety. They would follow blindly, trusting, and be consumed.
The irony was bitter: the shadow worm that coiled through his chest had defended him from that false trust, while the rage that fed the worm had sent him headlong into the cavern beast's mouth anyway. This, Jacen reflected in his first clear thought since falling into the dark, is going to be an ugly way to die.
But that was okay. Dying was okay; he didn't mind. Better to die than to live with the darkness inside him. At least it would be over. He could just kneel here and wait to die...
If only it were quiet.
please help me please aaaaAAAAAA...
The phase transition of terror into raw agony jolted Jacen's eyes open, and he lurched to his feet. He couldn't listen to this, trick or not. He knew too much about pain.
"Shut up," he growled, low in the back of his throat. "Shut up shut up shut up." The screams echoed through a puckered gallery mouth that yawned a few meters to his left: a tunnel beyond led down, dropping away into the yellow-green gloom. Jacen stumbled drunkenly on the slope. The screams continued: wordless now, bleak, animal, edged with despair.
The tunnel led deeper and deeper, turning upon itself in a long loose spiral, opening at last into another cavern vastly larger than the first, a cavern dank, dim, the bioglow that had lit the throat and the chamber above only shimmering faintly through the mouths of other tunnels that opened around the walls. White swirls of mist curled through the air...
no, not mist, Jacen discovered as he entered the cavern, but smoke: eye-burning, chokingly harsh, tasting of acid. The floor of this cavern was ruggedly uneven, dimpled as though it were only a thin skin over bowls big enough to swim in; the bowls tapered steeply downward, bottoming in upcrumpled hummocks of stony flesh like lips of refresher-sized mouths.
He coughed, batting smoke away from his face, and staggered toward the screams, following a winding course balanced on the thin curving rims where the bowls met edge to edge. Deep in the cavern, one of those mouths had pursed around a girl. Jacen paused above her, balanced on the warm stone bowl rim. She looked as real as Anakin had: real from her tangled, matted hair to the tear-streaked dirt that smeared her face. Only her head and one arm protruded from the tight-sealed lips that held her, and when she saw him above she reached for him, fingers straining helplessly, eyes white with pain and fear.
"Please whoever you are PLEASE you have to HELP ME please it's EATING me, it's, it's, it's eating me ALIVE--"
He knew what those puckered lips were, now. The cavern above was actually only a crop, or a gizzard; the real stomachs were behind those mouths at the bottoms of the bowls below. That's why the cavern beast was showing him a girl down there. She was bait.
"Shut up," Jacen whispered. "You're not real. Shut up." All he wanted was a quiet place to die. Was that too much to ask? Hadn't he earned that? Why did everything have to be so hideous, so gruesome, so just plain rotten all the time? Couldn't he even die in peace? Did the whole universe hate him? There's only one answer when the universe hates you, whispered the shadow worm from the base of his skull. Hate it back.
So he did. It was easy. He hated the universe. Hated everything about it: all the pointless suffering and empty death and all the stupid mindless mechanical useless laws and all the squirming blood-smeared ignorant life, hated the stony flesh under his feet and the air that he breathed, hated himself, hated even the hate he felt and suddenly he wasn't tired anymore, he wasn't confused anymore, everything was simple, everything was easy, everything made sense because hate was everything and everything was hate, and he didn't want to die anymore.
All he wanted was to hurt someone. He looked down at the screaming girl.
He hated her. She wasn't even real. Like a dream. He could do whatever he wanted. Anything. His heart thundered, and his breath came short and hot. Anything. Power raged through him as though a dam had burst in his chest. He smiled, and stretched forth his hand, and made a fist.
The Force stifled her screams to a shocked choke. Through the Force he could feel her terror, feel the savage burning of digestive acids slowly dissolving her skin; in the Force he could feel power, real power, power enough to crack her skull like a pterosaur egg, power enough to...
Wait, begged his last shred of sanity. Wait... He could feel her... in the Force?
"Oh..." he whispered. His knees buckled. "Oh, oh no, oh please no..."
His hatred and his strength failed together. He pitched forward, his boots losing purchase on the rim, and he tumbled down the inner curve of the bowl to splay tonelessly beside the stomach-mouth. He might have just lain there, just let himself pass out, let himself sleep until the mouth beside opened again to close around him, instead, but a hand, a girl's hand, a real hand belonging to a real girl, clutched desperately at his robeskin, yanking him awake, and her shriek scorched his ears.
"HELP me you have to HELP ME you have to help me..."
"Sorry," Jacen mumbled, blinking rapidly, trying to make his eyes focus, struggling weakly to rise. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't know..."
His vision cleared, and he saw her, really saw her, for the first time.
He saw that her hair had once been long and flowing and golden blond under its coating of greasy dirt; he saw that her eyes were blue, and her face a delicate oval; he saw that... She's barely even my age. And if I don't do something RIGHT NOW, she won't get any older. He couldn't trust his legs to support him; he swung himself around to brace his feet against the crumple of stomach-lips, and took her wrist in both hands.
He pulled hard, hard as he could, hard enough to make her begging turn to a yelp of pain...
"You're breaking my ARM please you have to get up, you have to pull me UP.. ."
Get up? He didn't have the strength to stand. He didn't have the strength to save her. He had only strength enough to hurt her even more. And to torture her final minutes with empty hope. He could barely imagine what she must have gone through, to miss the evacuation of Coruscant, to survive the bombardment, and the invasion of the Yuuzhan Vong. To have lived through the shattering transformation of her world into theirs: the tearing of a whole planet from its orbit. To have hidden in constant terror all these weeks and months in the downlevel shadows, desperately avoiding the conquerors. And when the cavern beast had led her down its throat...
Her heart must have been bursting with relief and joy. She had finally found sanctuary--Then she had found that the only real sanctuary is death. And how she would come to that death: eaten alive, digested while still awake and aware. And when she had looked up to see him on the rim above her, an explosion of sudden hope. Because she couldn't know that the man who had come to her rescue was a broken ex-Jedi, tainted with darkness, half mad with suicidal despair. How had he ended up so useless?
The simple unfairness of it made him angry. Why should he be the one who has to watch this girl die? He'd never asked to be a hero. He'd never asked for power. From the very day he was born, the whole galaxy had been watching him, waiting for him to do something great, something that would live up to the legend of his illustrious parents, of his legendary uncle.
He couldn't even live up to his own legend. Such as it was. And there had been plenty of people who had enjoyed that, hadn't there? There had been plenty of dirty sniggering people who got plenty of dirty sniggering satisfaction out of calling him a coward behind his back, and not one of those nasty vicious sniggering creeps had even once had to feel what it was like to hang in the Embrace of Pain, or toil hopelessly to save a few lives in the Nursery, or be forced to face the black-hearted indifference that was the real truth of the universe...
Anger blossomed within him, surged and swept him away in the familiar red tide, but this time he didn't fight it, didn't struggle and thrash and drown himself in its current.
He welcomed it. In the red rising tide, he found all the power he needed.
[…]
He lowered his head. "I... I don't know. I might have let myself.." fall, he finished silently. He couldn't say it. He had let himself fall. He had fallen faster and farther than any mere drop to his death.
[…]
"Oh, sure. Saved her. I sure did." Jacen coughed, gagging on the memory.
"But the others..." There had been other people in the belly of the beast: a lot of people, fifty or more, nearly all human. They had come crowding to the mouths of the stomach chamber gullet-tunnels only a moment after Jacen had freed the girl. None of them was happy. With raw Force rolling through him in dark waves, he had been able to seize his own hands telekinetically, using them like tools to peel back the clamped-shut lips of the stomach-mouth. He could feel every centimeter of the girl in the Force, could feel her terror and hope and the agony of her acid-scorched skin, and with the Force he'd lifted her effortlessly, setting her safely on the bowl rim above. A Force-assisted leap had carried him neatly to her side, then he'd lifted her in his physical arms and leapt to the gullet-tunnel down which he'd come.
Her clothing had hung in tatters, her skin reddened, peeling, seeping fluid, cooking in the slow heat of the acids that still coated her; Jacen had swiftly stripped off the remnants of her clothing, replacing them with his own robeskin. It's all right. You'll be all right, he had told her. The robeskin will take care of you. It would not only absorb and eliminate the leftover acids, but also eat necrotic skin on her burns and probably save her from serious infection, even gangrene.
He hadn't told her that, of course; despite the darkening thunder of the Force rolling through him, he hadn't been thoughtlessly cruel enough to tell her--after what she'd been through--that the clothing he had given her was already eating parts of her flesh. And then, clad only in his breechclout, he had looked up and seen the others. The cavern-beast people, fifty-odd of them. Some of them had blasters. Some of the blasters had been pointed at him.
"It was so... so sick. I couldn't believe it." Jacen shook his head.
Jacen gave into the dark side completely, using it for strength when there was no other substitute, and letting his dark power run wild.
Again, note, Anakin Solo is a projection of Jacen's own psyche.
- New Jedi Order: Traitor:
- "Better that than what's happening to me," Jacen whispered. "Better off dead."
you think so?
Regret welled up inside him, building a pressure of guilt and self-loathing that he could no longer lock away. He looked at his hands: at the burn-cracked flesh in the middle of his palms, roasted in the lightning of his rage.
"Anakin, I went dark."
did you?
"Under the old Jedi Temple, when Vergere handed me over to Nom Anor--what I did was bad, but it wasn't evil. It was panic, and exhaustion, and suddenly finding the Force again when I thought it had been taken from me forever. Saving the girl... I'm not sorry for that. Anger was all I had left. And I didn't hurt anybody."
except yourself.
"But that's okay, isn't it? Isn't that part of being a Jedi, to sacrifice your own welfare to save others?"
Anakin turned one palm upward.
you tell me.
Jacen looked away. Remembering hurt. Talking hurt even more. But not talking about it--not admitting what he'd done, rationalizing it, justifying it--that he would not do. I haven't fallen that far, he thought. Yet. He had used the darkness for strength, letting it course through his veins like blood to keep him upright and functioning while the cavern-beast people appeared, while he learned who they were and what they had done to survive. He might have been able to hold on to his temper, if it had only been that. What they had done-- what they had become--sickened him, but he was not a judge. He was a Jedi. He might still have found some way to help them. Even as the stomach-mouths gaped around them, fogging the chamber with their acidic gases, and the cavern-beast people had closed in around him, blasters leveled, coldly murderous while faking regret, he might still have resisted his dark lust to do them harm. The final ounce of pressure on Jacen's trigger had come from the girl.
He's the last, he's the last! she had shouted. Take him--him! He's the last!
"She turned on me," Jacen said quietly.
do you blame her?
He shook his head. "How can I? She's just a girl. A girl who knows what it feels like to be digested alive. A girl who knew that if it wasn't me, it'd be her. Again."
i guess i mean, did you blame her?
"That's different." Jacen's face was bleak as a sandstone cliff on Kirdo III. "I blamed all of them. I hated them. And I set out to hurt them."
really?
"I knew what I was doing; I knew exactly what it meant. I reached into the dark. I wanted it. I reveled in it. I remember laughing. I remember telling them how much trouble they were in. I remember feeling them through the Force as their fake regret turned to real fear. I remember liking it." They had fired on him, blaster bolts streaking scarlet through the greenish acid-fog. Laughing, Jacen had caught their blaster bolts with the palm of his right hand, effortlessly channeling away the destructive energies before they could do him harm.
Flicks of his wrist had seized those blasters with the Force and tossed them negligently aside.
how many of them did you kill?
"All of them." Jacen looked down at his trembling hands. He clenched them until his burns leaked blood onto his palms. "None of them. What's the difference?"
While the Force had roared through his head, he'd reached down into the hollow center of his chest, into the void where the slave seed had been, and there he had found the dim semiconsciousness of the cavern beast.
With the Force for power, he'd created a delusion: a simple conviction so deeply rooted in the cavern beast's murky mind that no evidence to the contrary could ever shake it. Humans are poisonous. So is every other sentient species of the New Republic.
The cavern beast had had no resistance against this kind of trick; it lacked even the rudimentary ability to say to itself, 'But none of the ones I've already eaten have made me sick'... All it'd had was a defensive reflex. It vomited. A massive surge of reverse peristalsis had swept up the people, the girl, Jacen, and every other foreign object throughout the cavern beast's immense interior and washed them all out through the luminescent cartilage-lined throat down which Jacen had entered. He remembered their anger, and their growing panic as the pile of people outside the cavern beast's mouth had disentangled itself into individuals again, and they'd found the teeth of their sanctuary locked against them. No longer could they pay for safety from the Yuuzhan Vong with the lives of others.
You've killed us, someone had sobbed. You've killed us all. Jacen had stared at them, icy with power. Not yet. These soft, weak, contemptibly treacherous creatures--he could imagine nothing more loathsome. He'd turned his back on them. Walked away. He'd left them to the Yuuzhan Vong, and to each other. but you did help them. better death than life bought with innocent blood.
"Is that supposed to make it all right? I wasn't trying to help them.
I wanted them to suffer. I can't even blame it on the dark side--I know that now. The dark side didn't make me do anything."
i know. that's not the way it works.
"It was all me, Anakin. I gave in to my own darkness. I let my dark side run wild..."
you could have killed them all. you had the power. and you could have killed the cavern beast. you had power enough for that, too, i bet. just like you could have killed vergere, and nom anor. but you didn't kill anybody. instead you used the power you'd found to serve life. your dark side ain't all that dark, big brother.
"It doesn't matter. You can't fight the dark with the dark."
that's uncle luke talking. fighting the dark was his job. the yuuzhan vong aren't dark. they're alien.
"And I can't seem to make myself fight them."
who says you have to?
Jacen's head snapped up. "You do. Everyone does. What other answer is there?"
why are you asking me?
Anakin had lost his playful crooked smile, and he'd moved close enough that Jacen could reach out and touch him. If he could make himself move his hand. If there had been anything there to touch. The despair that pinned him to his seat swelled into a black hole of hopelessness that sucked air from his chest.
- EmperorCaedusLevel Three
Re: The Power of Darth Caedus: How Jaina Becomes the Sword of the Jedi
April 12th 2023, 1:08 am
Vergere and the Yuuzhan Vong then offer Jacen his brother’s lightsaber and, Jacen has a choice to make. He could walk the path of Anakin: the path of a pure warrior. Jacen was a natural with a lightsaber (a common allegory for combat in general), and with the dark power at his disposal, he could surpass any living Jedi including Luke, even the Jedi Knights of old, and become the greatest sword of the Force who had ever lived.
The passages from before are to show that the dark power being talked about about is not about a ‘what-if Jacen went dark’ scenario (I.e; Dooku’s estimation of Dark Yoda in Yoda: Dark Rendezvous), nor about some future dark power Jacen could one day wield - it’s talking about Jacen’s darkness during the novel and directly leading up to this point. This is also supported by the use of a lightsaber as symbolism, all Jacen needs to do is dawn the lightsaber and it all becomes his.
Jacen's choice to pass the lightsaber to Vergere signifies his rejection of the path of the pure warrior, contrasting the way of Luke and the late Anakin Solo. The manifestation of Anakin's spirit, again, a projection of Jacen's own psyche, reinforces this notion. In their exchange, Jacen rejects the notion that becoming a human weapon is sufficient to overcome the Yuuzhan Vongt. He recognizes the need for a different approach, one that is less reliant on brute force to beat the Yuuzhans.
Jacen's epiphany marks a crucial turning point in his character, as before this point, Jacen was confused on his role in fighting against the alien invaders. It's here that he realizes the war isn't won with him becoming a warrior, but rather in becoming both a student and a teacher, which are one of the same. This realization carries immense significance as it underscores the insufficient ways of the traditional Jedi warrior approach, exemplified by Luke and Anakin Solo, in dealing with the Yuuzhan Vong. The death of Anakin Solo serves as a symbol of the limitations of the warrior-type Jedi, and the need for a new strategy to combat this powerful enemy. Jacen embodies this new approach as well as Vergere's new Force philosophy, and his transformation throughout Traitor culminates in him becoming a Jedi unlike any other, an embodiment of the will of the Force, and even becoming more powerful than Luke just prior to TUF.
Another point, and a topic I’ll talk about briefly (because it honestly deserves a blog of its own) is Vergere’s Force philosophy. Vergere believes that the dark side does not exist. The Force is one, everything is the Force, and the Force does not take sides. Jacen learns this the hard way, believing it was a dark side nexus that caused him to succumb to the dark side, but it was in fact a lightside nexus (the old Jedi temple). Vergere believes Jedi fear the dark side and use it as an excuse to control others, and that there is no light or dark, but only the Force. This Force philosophy was approved by George, and grants its user a complete view of the Force in comparison to those in the movies. Use of the Force in this way is unlike any other seen before, and was concocted during Vergere’s 50 years among the Yuuzhan Vong. This philosophy was brought to the wider New Jedi Order by the end of the Unifying Force, and makes them more powerful than “dreamed possible.” Luke also famously uses this philosophy to overcome his fear of the dark side.
So this is to say, Jacen’s dark power, which could make him the greatest sword of the Force who had ever lived, is then expanded upon by his use of the light side, which makes him far more powerful than he had dreamt of prior to its use. Though one can say this is just Jacen’s point of view, let us not forget who wrote Traitor. Matthew Stover almost never writes his characters to be wrong about something like this. Anakin Skywalker believes himself to be the most powerful Jedi, and the OOU section of the Revenge of the Sith novel confirms this. Yoda is said to be the most powerful foe of the darkness, and most use that quote to say he is. Furthermore, if anything, Jacen underestimates himself. Jacen is fine with admitting his saber skills are below most of the main cast as of the Unifying Force (which is questionable given how he and Kyp compare based on their fights with Yuuzhan Vong slayers), and later on in Legacy of the Force, Jacen’s opinions on his powers aren’t at all misplaced.
But the argument isn’t even that Jacen absolutely reaches this level. The argument is that based on the preponderance of evidence, we have strong reason to believe so. There is strong reason to believe that Jacen Solo in the New Jedi Order has the power to become the greatest sword of the Force there ever was, if he chose that path.
By the time Jacen takes up the mantle of Darth Caedus, he makes the switch and becomes more focused on combat. When recovering from his duel in Inferno, Caedus takes pride in the fact that he had waged his fight against Luke so well, and his dedication to combat is further evidenced by Caedus's decision to pursue Luke by killing him in the context of a fight.
As well as Caedus believing himself to be perhaps the best swordsman there ever had been, except for Luke.
Jacen's Knowledge and Mastery
What we know about Jacen by this point is that he is the hero of the Yuuzhan Vong war, leading the Jedi to victory. He has become the embodiment of the will of the Force from Traitor onwards, and his power is such that if he chose the warrior path he could be the greatest sword who’d ever lived, before joining his dark power with his light power, and becoming even more powerful than that. Jacen only gets better from here on.
During the 5 year stretch between the end of the Yuuzhan Vong war and the Dark Nest trilogy, Jacen went on a five-year search for the true nature of the Force, studying a hundred different ways of harnessing the Force from various Force sects, every arcane Force philosophy, and uncovering totally new avenues of Force study. It’s through this that Jacen perfected his use of the Force, becoming a “complete master.” By Legacy of the Force, the only threshold Jacen needs to reach to become a fully realized Sith Lord is not through knowledge or any technique, but through sacrifices.
There are many quotes detailing how one’s knowledge of the Force has direct impact on fighting prowess, but here are a couple.
Overall Force knowledge is said to have a direct impact on combat ability, even regardless whether any specific ability is being used. This makes sense, as the more you connect with the Force in its various ways, and the more knowledge you have of using the Force, the easier it is to streamline the use of the Force not only in a way that's generally better, but tailored to your personal preferences.
CONCLUSION
Here are the main points:
1) Darth Caedus receives massive growth leading into Invincible
2) Luke's empowerment of Jaina (Juke) in her first fight with Caedus is to a degree that represents an actual fight with Luke vs Caedus. Luke is aiming to be as close as possible to the visions of Luke vs Caedus without him actually fighting Caedus, atleast not physically. This is further reinforced by both Jaina and Caedus independently reach the conclusion that Luke had really been there, Leia being unable to sense Luke's presence, Luke recalling every blow that Jaina sustained without even looking, as well as Saba's comments that Jaina is the Sword and Luke is the Jedi, making the Sword of the Jedi. Jaina lives up to this prophecy by the end of the book.
3) Caedus would be prepared for Luke's strength by the end of Invincible, and if Jaina is expected to win against Caedus, it'd have to be her own way.
The passages from before are to show that the dark power being talked about about is not about a ‘what-if Jacen went dark’ scenario (I.e; Dooku’s estimation of Dark Yoda in Yoda: Dark Rendezvous), nor about some future dark power Jacen could one day wield - it’s talking about Jacen’s darkness during the novel and directly leading up to this point. This is also supported by the use of a lightsaber as symbolism, all Jacen needs to do is dawn the lightsaber and it all becomes his.
New Jedi Order: Traitor wrote:The opportunity. Anakin's lightsaber. Anakin had made it. Anakin had used it. It had changed him, and he had transformed it. Its crystal was not like those of other lightsabers, but was a living Vonglife gem.
Part Jedi. Part Yuuzhan Vong, he thought. Almost like me. They were offering him Anakin's life: his spirit, his skill, his courage.
His violence. Jacen had first used a lightsaber in combat at the age of three. He was a natural. And now he could feel the Yuuzhan Vong. And the Force was with him. He could follow Anakin's path. He could be pure warrior. He could be even greater than his brother had been: with the dark power he could command, he could surpass any living Jedi, even Uncle Luke. Surpass even the Jedi Knights of old. He could be the greatest sword of the Force who had ever lived.
More: He could avenge his brother with the weapon his brother had forged.
I could pick that up, he thought, and kill them all. Is that who I am?
Is that who I want to be?
Jacen's choice to pass the lightsaber to Vergere signifies his rejection of the path of the pure warrior, contrasting the way of Luke and the late Anakin Solo. The manifestation of Anakin's spirit, again, a projection of Jacen's own psyche, reinforces this notion. In their exchange, Jacen rejects the notion that becoming a human weapon is sufficient to overcome the Yuuzhan Vongt. He recognizes the need for a different approach, one that is less reliant on brute force to beat the Yuuzhans.
New Jedi Order: Traitor wrote:Jacen reached for the lightsaber, but not with his hand. The handgrip seemed to levitate, bobbling in the air above Nom Anor's palms--then it flipped away, hurtling toward Vergere. She caught it neatly, and set it on the table at her side. He stared at her, and not at her--he gazed at his own reflection on the glossy black curves of her bottomless eyes. He gazed silently, expressionlessly, until he felt himself reflect the reflection: he became pure surface, gleaming over an infinite well of darkness. A mirror for every image of night. He filled himself with stillness; when he was so still that he could feel the universe wheel around the axis he had become, he stood up.
Nom Anor hissed soft triumph. "You will become a star, a sun, the Sun--and you will fill the galaxy with the Light of the True Way."
"All right," Jacen said.
A cold, still surface, flawless: unrippled by weakness, or conscience, or humanity.
"Why not?"
- New Jedi Order: Traitor:
- "I've changed, Anakin. I've... I can't excuse it. I can't even explain it. But you--you should know--"
it's okay, jace. no matter what happened--no matter what you've done, or what's been done to you--you're still my big brother, y'know? you always will be.
"Big brother," Jacen echoed tonelessly. His eyes ached. He leaned his elbows to his knees, and rested his face in his burned hands. "Funny...
these past couple of years, I felt like you're the big brother."
that's kinda silly.
"Is it? You--Anakin, you were so sure of yourself. So sure of everything.
So strong. I really--I looked up to you, Anakin. You always seemed to know what to do next. Things were so easy for you."
everything's easy when you have no doubts.
"But that's what I wanted. To be sure. That's what I thought being a Jedi was."
He lifted his face, and his eyes were wet. He laughed bitterly through his tears. "Don't you get it? You're exactly what I want to be when I grow up."
what, dead?
"You know what I mean."
i didn't question things because i was never the questioning kind of guy.
i was never thoughtful, like you. i was more like uncle luke: a human weapon. point me at the bad guys and turn me loose, i knock 'em down and everybody cheers. but things are different now. doing things the old way--my way, uncle luke's way--that's just getting people killed.
look at what happened to me. what's happening to all of us.
[…]
you could have killed them all. you had the power. and you could have killed the cavern beast. you had power enough for that, too, i bet. just like you could have killed vergere, and nom anor. but you didn't kill anybody. instead you used the power you'd found to serve life. your dark side ain't all that dark, big brother.
"It doesn't matter. You can't fight the dark with the dark."
that's uncle luke talking. fighting the dark was his job. the yuuzhan vong aren't dark. they're alien.
"And I can't seem to make myself fight them."
who says you have to?
Jacen's head snapped up. "You do. Everyone does. What other answer is there?"
why are you asking me?
Anakin had lost his playful crooked smile, and he'd moved close enough that Jacen could reach out and touch him. If he could make himself move his hand. If there had been anything there to touch. The despair that pinned him to his seat swelled into a black hole of hopelessness that sucked air from his chest.
"Who else can I ask? What can I do? What am I supposed to do now?" He sagged, shaking. "I've completely lost it, haven't I? Here I am, arguing with a hallucination. You don't even exist!"
does it matter? you're not that easy to get through to, big brother.
i have to take any means available.
"How can it not matter?" Jacen suddenly shouted. "I need... I need... I don't know what to believe! I don't know what's real anymore!"
on the seedship, i was a force projection. then i was telepathic bait.
now i'm a hallucination. that doesn't mean I'm not me. why does everything have to be one or the other?
"Because it does! Because things are either one thing, or something else! That's the way it is! You can't be fake and real at the same time!"
why not?
"Because--because you can't, that's all!"
the force is one, jacen. it encompasses all opposites. truth and lies, life and death, new republic and yuuxhan vong. light and dark and good and evil. they're all each other, because each thing and everything is the same thing. the force is one.
"That's a lie!"
yes. and it's the truth.
"You're not Anakin!" Jacen shouted. "You're not! Anakin would never talk like that! Anakin would never believe that! You're just a hallucination!"
okay. i'm a hallucination. that means you're talking to yourself. that means what i'm saying is what you believe.
Jacen's epiphany marks a crucial turning point in his character, as before this point, Jacen was confused on his role in fighting against the alien invaders. It's here that he realizes the war isn't won with him becoming a warrior, but rather in becoming both a student and a teacher, which are one of the same. This realization carries immense significance as it underscores the insufficient ways of the traditional Jedi warrior approach, exemplified by Luke and Anakin Solo, in dealing with the Yuuzhan Vong. The death of Anakin Solo serves as a symbol of the limitations of the warrior-type Jedi, and the need for a new strategy to combat this powerful enemy. Jacen embodies this new approach as well as Vergere's new Force philosophy, and his transformation throughout Traitor culminates in him becoming a Jedi unlike any other, an embodiment of the will of the Force, and even becoming more powerful than Luke just prior to TUF.
New Jedi Order: Traitor wrote:“Now, though--now, what are you, Jacen Solo?"
In an instant, it all flashed through him, from Sernpidal and Belkadan through Duro and Myrkyr to the Embrace of Pain, the Nursery, the Jedi Temple, and the cavern beast...
He was no warrior, he was certain of that. Not like Jaina was, or Anakin had been. He was no hero like Uncle Luke or his father, no great statesman like his mother or strategist like Admiral Ackbar or scientist like Danni Quee... He remembered that he didn't have to know what he was. All he had to do was decide.
"I... I guess..." he said slowly, frowning down at the weapon in his hand. "I guess... I'm a student."
"Perhaps you are." Vergere nodded. "Then you are also a teacher, for the two are one. But to be such, you must learn, and you must teach. You must live."
She was right. He knew she was right. He could feel it as surely as he'd ever felt anything.
Star Wars Insider 83, “20 Most Memorable Moments of the Expanded Universe” wrote:In Matthew Stover’s novel Traitor, Jacen found himself deep behind enemy lines, a Yuuzhan Vong captive and an experiment in terror. Driven by an uncertain purpose, goaded by an unusual mentor, and tortured by an uncommon alien adversary, Jacen is confronted by a symbolic death, descends into the physical and psychological rings of hell, and undergoes one of the more exciting Hero’s Journeys in Star Wars history. Granted a spiritual rebirth, Jacen makes a triumphant return, transformed into an avatar of the will of the Force. A Jedi Knight unlike any other, Jacen would challenge our definitions of the Force and challenge readers to question whether everything they had ever learned was a lie.
Starwars.com: NJO Finale: The Unifying Force wrote:Starwars.com: Another theme has been the natural process of life: birth, maturation, death. We've seen the deaths of Chewie and Anakin; we've seen the birth of Luke and Mara's son, Ben; we've seen the maturation of Jaina and, especially, Jacen, whose link to the Force seems to grow beyond even Luke's. At the same time, on a larger scale, the same processes have unfolded in personal relationships, in political systems, in the clash of races and of civilizations. The same thing, like a universal law, seems to be operating on all these different levels; is it the Force?
LUCENO: I feel on safer ground saying that it is different authors writing about the Force. Many an NJO plot point grew from the series outline itself; things were discovered along the way, as a kind of epiphenomenon of the creative process. As depicted in the films, the Force appears to operate in a similar fashion. I guess you could say that we were at least attempting to ally ourselves with the Force to write in harmony with it.
Another point, and a topic I’ll talk about briefly (because it honestly deserves a blog of its own) is Vergere’s Force philosophy. Vergere believes that the dark side does not exist. The Force is one, everything is the Force, and the Force does not take sides. Jacen learns this the hard way, believing it was a dark side nexus that caused him to succumb to the dark side, but it was in fact a lightside nexus (the old Jedi temple). Vergere believes Jedi fear the dark side and use it as an excuse to control others, and that there is no light or dark, but only the Force. This Force philosophy was approved by George, and grants its user a complete view of the Force in comparison to those in the movies. Use of the Force in this way is unlike any other seen before, and was concocted during Vergere’s 50 years among the Yuuzhan Vong. This philosophy was brought to the wider New Jedi Order by the end of the Unifying Force, and makes them more powerful than “dreamed possible.” Luke also famously uses this philosophy to overcome his fear of the dark side.
Starwars.com - First Look: Traitor wrote:He is now the ward of Vergere, a Yuuzhan Vong accomplice with mysterious motives. She has much to teach young Solo, including a new way of perceiving the Force, a method that unleashes tremendous energies -- but at what cost? Is the young pupil being turned into a weapon by those with devastating plans?
Starwars.com - First Look: Destiny's Way wrote:The Solo children are each armed with knowledge that may win the war -- one with military intelligence, the other with a new understanding (of) the Force.
Champions of the Force: Preview 7 wrote:Eventually, the war led Jacen down a very different path and to a new understanding of the Force.
Vergere, New Jedi Order: Traitor wrote:"No. What you feel is the Force." Slowly, painfully, she lifted herself onto her elbows, and she met his blankly astonished stare. "This is the shameful secret of the Jedi: There is no dark side."
How could she lie here with smoke still rising from the shreds of her clothing, and expect him to believe this?
"Vergere, I know better. What do you think just happened here?"
"The Force is one, Jacen Solo. The Force is everything, and everything is the Force. I've told you already: the Force does not take sides.
The Force does not even have sides."
Vergere, New Jedi Order: Traitor wrote:"Light and dark are no more than nomenclature: words that describe how little we understand." She seemed to draw strength from his weakness, slowly managing to sit up. "What you call the dark side is the raw, unrestrained Force itself: you call the dark side what you find when you give yourself over wholly to the Force. To be a Jedi is to control your passion... but Jedi control limits your power. Greatness--true greatness of any kind--requires the surrender of control. Passion that is guided, not walled away. Leave your limits behind."
Jacen Solo, New Jedi Order: The Unifying Force wrote:"On Coruscant, at the ruins of the Jedi Temple, Vergere said that the Jedi had a shameful secret, and that secret was that there is no dark side. The Force is one. And since there are no separate sides, the Force can't take sides. Our notions of light and dark only reflect how little we know about the true nature of the Force. What we've chosen to call the dark side is simply the raw, unrestrained Force itself, which gives rise to life as easily as it brings death and destruction."
Starwars.com - Walter Jon Williams Interview wrote:"The discussion between Luke and Vergere is between two masters. Luke is a master but his ideas are derived from his life experience, which was focused on the war between the light and dark aspects of the Force as exemplified by his personal battles with Darth Vader and the Emperor. It's not so much that his view is wrong, but rather that it's incomplete. Vergere is the person who can add the missing component to Luke's knowledge."
Walter Jon Williams wrote:QUESTION: Matt Stover and yourself establish and described the new concept the new concept of the Force, the one envisioned by Vergere. How well did that concept be received by Del Rey and Lucasfilm?
WALTER JON WILLIAMS: Actually, that aspect was approved by George Lucas himself. So, [unintelligible] concepts of the Force were, you know, come from the guy whose in charge of the galaxy. What we've learned from his films so far isn't wrong, it's incomplete. That there is more to the Force than just light and dark.
Vergere, Master of Mystery (Wizards) wrote:During her time with the Yuuzhan Vong, Vergere learned to transcend the concepts of "light side" and "dark side." Studying in secret while serving her "masters" to the best of her ability, Vergere became a Master of the Force while surrounded by creatures who seemed completely disconnected from it.
Starwars.com - Troy Denning builds a Dark Nest wrote:And it seemed very clear to me that they would be effective. The Jedi's battles against the Yuuzhan Vong had instilled in them an iron will to win, and the new view of the Force taught by Vergere -- the mysterious Knight from the Old Republic -- had made them more powerful than they ever dreamed possible.
- Full passage(s):
- Vergere lay on the floor like a broken doll; her eyes were dull, glazed, empty, and her crest showed only dirty gray.
"Vergere..." he murmured. It had been so easy to hurt her. So simple.
Tears spilled onto his cheeks. "I warned you, didn't I? I warned you.
The dark side..."
"Don't... make excuses..." Her voice was even fainter now, breathier, more ragged.
"I wouldn't dare," he whispered. There was no possible excuse. No one knew the dangers of the dark side better than he; those dangers had haunted the depths below his entire life... Yet he had fallen so easily.
He had fallen so far... The wall of rubble closed off most of the chamber: tumbled hunks of duracrete, fallen in a steep slope from uncountable floors above. The only light in the much-reduced chamber was leakover from glow globes in the ruined hallway outside. The ceiling had collapsed, he remembered that much, remembered the roar, the pounding, the dust and flying splinters of stone. No, wait, it hadn't collapsed... He had pulled it down. He remembered swirling within the red tide, remembered feeling Vergere lose consciousness, remembered reaching for a new target, a new victim, reaching for Nom Anor with the lightning that had felled Vergere...
And being unable to find him. He could see the Yuuzhan Vong executor, could hear him shouting orders to the warriors around them all, but he could not touch him with the lightning. There had been a circuit missing: the lightning would ground harmlessly into the floor or the walls or arc back to make Vergere's unconscious body spasm in convulsions.
The lightning of his rage could only span gaps between poles of the Force… neither Nom Anor nor his warriors could conduct that current.
Frustration had compounded Jacen's fury; he had thrown himself outward seeking power to do these creatures harm...
And the storm above the crater had answered.
He remembered the wild joy of release as the power of the storm had roared into him and through him and became a mad vortex within the underground chamber, lifting stone and brick and chunks of duracrete to whirl and batter and slash the Yuuzhan Vong, pounding the warriors with pieces of the planet that had once been Jacen's home. A shrug of wind had crushed the Yuuzhan Vong into one corner of the chamber, and he remembered bubbling laughter exploding with malice into a shout of victory as he had reached up his hand and brought down the building around them. He rocked back on his ankles, hands going to his face.
Was it possible? He had buried them alive. All of them. And he didn't care. No: he did care. That's what made it even worse. He had buried them alive, and he was happy about it. The dark side called to him: a shadow worm whispering promises of ecstasy as it ate into his heart.
It murmured infinite release, humming a song of the eternity that lies beyond all shadows of doubt and remorse. He shook himself violently and lurched to his feet.
"I have to get out of here."
"Jacen..." She lifted a hand as though to stay him, as though to ask for his help.
"No, Vergere. No. I have to go... I have to go right now. I'm sorry I hurt you, I'm so sorry, I am..."
Liar, the shadow worm snickered inside him. Just wait, and watch, and she'll give us an excuse to do it again. Vergere's eyes seemed to clear then, and a hint of a smile curved her lips.
"The dark side?..."
"It's... it's too strong for me here. I warned you. I warned you what could happen..." She raised her hand once more, reaching for his leg; he took a hasty step back to avoid her touch, and she let her arm fall limp to the floor.
"You see..." she whispered, "... but you do not see. Jacen... why would the Jedi Council... build its Temple upon... a nexus of the dark side?"
"Vergere, I..." He shook his head helplessly. "I have to go. I have to go before--before I..." hurt you again, he finished silently. He couldn't say it out loud. Not here. "I don't have time for guessing games."
"No guessing..." she said. "The answer is... simple. They wouldn't."
He went very, very still.
"What do you mean? I can feel the dark side here. I touched the dark side, and it, and it, it touched me..."
"No. What you feel is the Force." Slowly, painfully, she lifted herself onto her elbows, and she met his blankly astonished stare. "This is the shameful secret of the Jedi: There is no dark side."
How could she lie here with smoke still rising from the shreds of her clothing, and expect him to believe this?
"Vergere, I know better. What do you think just happened here?"
"The Force is one, Jacen Solo. The Force is everything, and everything is the Force. I've told you already: the Force does not take sides.
The Force does not even have sides."
"That's not true! It isn't..." The red tide surged into his chest, reaching for his heart. Everything I tell you is a lie. This was only another of her lies. It had to be. If it wasn't... He couldn't let himself think it. He shook his head hard enough to make his ears ring.
"It's a lie..."
"No. Search your feelings. You know this to be true. The Force is one."
But he could feel the dark side: he was drowning in it.
"Light and dark are no more than nomenclature: words that describe how little we understand." She seemed to draw strength from his weakness, slowly managing to sit up. "What you call the dark side is the raw, unrestrained Force itself: you call the dark side what you find when you give yourself over wholly to the Force. To be a Jedi is to control your passion... but Jedi control limits your power. Greatness--true greatness of any kind--requires the surrender of control. Passion that is guided, not walled away. Leave your limits behind."
"But... but the dark side..."
She rose, her smoldering garments wreathing her in coils of smoke.
"If your surrender leads to slaughter, that is not because the Force has darkness in it. It is because you do."
"Me?" The red tide turned black, poisonous, strangling, burning through his ribs from the inside. "No... no, you don't understand... the dark side is, it's, it's, don't you see it? It's the dark side," he insisted desperately, hopelessly. There were no words for the truth inside him; nor were there words for the horror that rolled into him, because he could feel the Force again. He could feel that she was right. But that would make me... does make me... His knees buckled, and he staggered to maintain his balance, stumbling, reaching for the wall, something stone, anything solid, anything certain, anything that he could lean on that wouldn't become smoke and mist and let him fall forever.
He whispered, "The dark side..."
She paced toward him, relentless, inexorable. "The only dark side you need fear, Jacen Solo, is the one in your own heart."
And in her eyes, he found that certainty, that solidity: the permanent, immutable truth he hoped would keep him upright--His reflection.
Distorted. Leering. Misshapen. An illusion of light, floating on a glossy curve of surface... above depths of infinite black. They say the truth hurts. A gasp of lunatic laughter bubbled wildly through his lips. They have no idea... The Embrace of Pain had been nothing but a scratch, the slave seed only a toothache...
His laughter choked itself to a smothered sob. He threw himself past Vergere into the hallway, and fled.
- Full passage(s):
- "On Coruscant, at the ruins of the Jedi Temple, Vergere said that the Jedi had a shameful secret, and that secret was that there is no dark side. The Force is one. And since there are no separate sides, the Force can't take sides. Our notions of light and dark only reflect how little we know about the true nature of the Force. What we've chosen to call the dark side is simply the raw, unrestrained Force itself, which gives rise to life as easily as it brings death and destruction."
Luke listened closely. Now I shall show you the true nature of the Force, the Emperor had told him at Endor. On Mon Calamari, Vergere had tried to lead him down the same path, by implying that Yoda and Obi-Wan were to blame for not telling him the truth about the dark side. As a result of their neglect, when Luke had cut off his father's hand in anger, he assumed he had had a close brush with the dark side. When he stood at the side of the cloned Emperor, he had truly felt the dark side. Ever since, he had come to equate anger with darkness itself, and he had passed that along to the Jedi he had tutored. But in fact, according to Vergere, Luke had been misguided by his own ego.
She had maintained that, while darkness could remain in someone by invitation, it could just as easily be jettisoned by self-awareness. Once Luke accepted this, he would no longer have to fear being seduced by the dark side.
"You're suggesting that I've held myself back by not wanting to incorporate this raw power into my awareness of the Force," Luke said.
"Vergere received years of formal training in the Force," Jacen said. "The things she told me must have been common knowledge among the Jedi of the Old Republic."
"Vergere was corrupted by the years she spent living among the Yuuzhan Vong," Luke said evenly.
"Corrupted?"
"Maybe that's too strong a term. Let's say strongly influenced."
"But she felt she hadn't been influenced by them."
"She can't be blamed. Each of us stands at a kind of midpoint, from which we're capable of seeing only so far in either direction. Our senses have been honed over countless millennia to allow us to navigate the intricacies of the physical world. But because of that, our senses blind us to the fact that we are much more than our bodies. We truly are beings of light, Jacen.
"The emphasis the Jedi have always placed on control operates the same way. Control blinds us to the more expansive nature of the Force. The Jedi of the Old Republic wanted only youngsters for this reason. Jedi needed to be raised in the light, and to come to see that light as unblemished, undivided. But you and I haven't had the luxury of that indoctrination. Our lives are a constant test of our will to exorcise any darkness that creeps in.
"In that sense, your instincts about me are correct, and so were Vergere's. The dark side has, in a sense, dominated my life. I've suspected for a long time that the fatigue I've sometimes experienced when drawing on the Force during combat owes to my fear of abusing the raw power you describe.
"It's true that the Force is unified; it is one energy, one power. But here's where I think you and Vergere are incorrect: the dark side is real, because evil actions are real. Sentience gave rise to the dark side. Does it exist in nature? No. Left to itself, nature maintains the balance. But we've changed that. We are a new order of consciousness that has an impact on all life. The Force now contains light and dark because of what thinking beings have brought to it. That's why balance has become something that must be maintained-because our actions have the power to tip the scales."
"As the Sith did," Jacen said.
"As the Sith did.
So this is to say, Jacen’s dark power, which could make him the greatest sword of the Force who had ever lived, is then expanded upon by his use of the light side, which makes him far more powerful than he had dreamt of prior to its use. Though one can say this is just Jacen’s point of view, let us not forget who wrote Traitor. Matthew Stover almost never writes his characters to be wrong about something like this. Anakin Skywalker believes himself to be the most powerful Jedi, and the OOU section of the Revenge of the Sith novel confirms this. Yoda is said to be the most powerful foe of the darkness, and most use that quote to say he is. Furthermore, if anything, Jacen underestimates himself. Jacen is fine with admitting his saber skills are below most of the main cast as of the Unifying Force (which is questionable given how he and Kyp compare based on their fights with Yuuzhan Vong slayers), and later on in Legacy of the Force, Jacen’s opinions on his powers aren’t at all misplaced.
New Jedi Order: The Unifying Force wrote:He sighed and sat down. He was a decent lightsaber master and sai acrobat, but nowhere near as skilled as Luke, Kyp, Mara, Corran-or Anakin. His heart just wasn't in it.
Starwars.com - Karen Traviss: Tracing Bloodlines wrote:How does a clever, morally aware man go down the path that Jacen does? By self-delusion and self- justification. Jacen already has a high opinion of his powers and judgment, and that's not misplaced: the man is good at his work.
- Revenge of the Sith:
- This is Anakin Skywalker:
The most powerful Jedi of his generation. Perhaps of any generation. The fastest. The strongest. An unbeatable pilot. An unstoppable warrior. On the ground, in the air or sea or space, there is no one even close. He has not just power, not just skill, but dash: that rare, invaluable combination of boldness and grace.
He is the best there is at what he does. The best there has ever been. And he knows it.
[...]
If anyone can save Palpatine, Anakin will. Because he's already the best, and he's still getting better. But locked away behind the walls of his heart, the dragon that is his fear coils and squirms and hisses.
Because his real fear, in a universe where even stars can die, is that being the best will never be quite good enough.
[...]
Finally, he saw the truth.
This truth: that he, the avatar of light, Supreme Master of the Jedi Order, the fiercest, most implacable, most devastatingly powerful foe the darkness had ever known... just-didn't-have it.
But the argument isn’t even that Jacen absolutely reaches this level. The argument is that based on the preponderance of evidence, we have strong reason to believe so. There is strong reason to believe that Jacen Solo in the New Jedi Order has the power to become the greatest sword of the Force there ever was, if he chose that path.
By the time Jacen takes up the mantle of Darth Caedus, he makes the switch and becomes more focused on combat. When recovering from his duel in Inferno, Caedus takes pride in the fact that he had waged his fight against Luke so well, and his dedication to combat is further evidenced by Caedus's decision to pursue Luke by killing him in the context of a fight.
Legacy of the Force: Fury wrote:And she was almost right. Caedus hurt everywhere. Mere days before, he had waged the most ferocious, most terrible lightsaber duel of his life. In a secret chamber aboard his Star Destroyer, the Anakin Solo, he had been torturing Ben Skywalker to harden the young man's spirit, to better prepare Ben for life as a Sith. But he had been caught by Ben's father, Luke Skywalker.
That fight... . Caedus wished he had a holorecording of it. It had gone on for what had felt like forever. It had been brutal, with the advantage being held first by Luke, then by Caedus, in what he knew had been brilliant demonstrations of lightsaber technique, of raw power within the Force, of subtle Jedi and Sith skills. For all his pain, Caedus felt a swelling of pride-not just that he had survived that duel, but that he had waged it so well.
At the end, Caedus had lost a position of advantage-Luke had slipped free of the poison-injecting torture vines with which Caedus had been strangling him-when Ben had driven a vibroblade deep into Caedus's back, punching clean through a shoulder blade, nearly reaching his heart.
That had ended the fight. Caedus should have been killed immediately. For reasons he did not understand, Luke and Ben had spared his life and departed. It was a mistake that would cost Luke.
Legacy of the Force: Invincible wrote:Mirta began to curse him again, and Caedus knew he had made all the progress he was going to that day. He motioned Tahiri to follow him, then left the room and started down the corridor toward his quarters, deep in thought as he puzzled over how Luke had really gotten into the room.
It always came down to Luke. It had been Luke's eyes into which he had been looking when his arm was taken, it was Luke's face that haunted his dreams, it was Luke who he saw in his visions. Sometimes Luke was chasing him through a desert landscape filled with spires and arches, sometimes Luke was driving a crimson lightsaber through his heart:sometimes Luke was wearing Caedus's black robes, sitting on his dark throne, ruling his Sith Empire.
"That was a lot of trouble," Tahiri said, finally tearing Caedus out of his thoughts. "If you were going to betray your promise, why bother justifying it? It's not like anyone there was going to talk about it."
Caedus stopped in the middle of the corridor. "I didn't betray my promise," he said. "Mirta was lying about something."
"Sure, after you started pressing her," Tahiri said. "But I didn't sense the lie the first time. If Luke was there, she didn't know how he got there."
"Luke was there," Caedus insisted.
"Sorry," Tahiri said, not quite cringing. "I didn't mean to suggest-"
"No-forgive me," Caedus said, finally realizing what he had overlooked-what the Force must have been telling him all along. "I was just coming to a decision."
Tahiri remained silent, waiting for his pronouncement.
"Have Mirta transferred to the Anakin Solo, and inform the Moffs that I would like them to place their assets at my disposal and select a command committee to accompany us."
"Very well," Tahiri said. "Shall I inform them of our objective?"
"My uncle." Caedus began to walk again. "I've been growing more and more convinced that killing Luke Skywalker is the key to winning this war-and I'm sure of it now."
As well as Caedus believing himself to be perhaps the best swordsman there ever had been, except for Luke.
Legacy of the Force: Fury wrote:But he was still the best lightsaber swordsman around-excepting possibly Luke, perhaps the best there ever had been.
Jacen's Knowledge and Mastery
What we know about Jacen by this point is that he is the hero of the Yuuzhan Vong war, leading the Jedi to victory. He has become the embodiment of the will of the Force from Traitor onwards, and his power is such that if he chose the warrior path he could be the greatest sword who’d ever lived, before joining his dark power with his light power, and becoming even more powerful than that. Jacen only gets better from here on.
During the 5 year stretch between the end of the Yuuzhan Vong war and the Dark Nest trilogy, Jacen went on a five-year search for the true nature of the Force, studying a hundred different ways of harnessing the Force from various Force sects, every arcane Force philosophy, and uncovering totally new avenues of Force study. It’s through this that Jacen perfected his use of the Force, becoming a “complete master.” By Legacy of the Force, the only threshold Jacen needs to reach to become a fully realized Sith Lord is not through knowledge or any technique, but through sacrifices.
Dark Nest I: The Joiner King wrote:
"I know you." Ben took the hand and shook it. "You went away when I was two. Did you find it?"
The question puzzled Jacen less than it did Mara. "Some of it," Jacen answered.
Ben's face fell. "So you're going back?"
"No." Jacen's tone changed to that of a person addressing an equal. "What I haven't found, I doubt I ever will."
Legacy of the Force: Betrayal wrote:"I know he [Luke] hasn't studied every esoteric Force discipline you have," Leia said, "but that doesn't mean he's wrong. His opinions shouldn't be disregarded."
Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines wrote:All his study in a hundred different ways of harnessing the Force had come to a single point of fruition now. The only gaps in his knowledge of the Force were those of the Sith.
Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines wrote:He thought of his five years of studying every arcane school of Force philosophy and wondered what more Lumiya could show him to bring him to the status of a Sith Master. He couldn't imagine it.
Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines wrote:If he didn't pull up in twenty seconds, he'd be dead. He was no longer aware of Jaina, or Zekk, just the rust-streaked ship with its band of white light that now filled his field of view. He became a pilot again: not a Sith Lord-in-waiting, or a Jedi with all the knowledge of generations, but a pilot at one with his fighter.
Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines wrote:Jacen sat down, careful not to touch any artifacts in case one had a use he didn't yet know. "This is what I don't understand. I spent over five years perfecting my use of the Force, learning techniques from all species-not just the Jedi way. What more can there be? Where does a Jedi adept end and a Sith begin? You see, I never really believed that it was purely a line between good and evil. Some days I can't even define those terms."
"It's acceptance," said Lumiya. "The willingness to surrender to what the Force asks of you. To stop denying it by rationalizing denial as self-discipline and avoidance of powerful emotions."
Legacy of the Force: Tempest wrote:And the first thing Alema wanted to take was Jacen, who was moving along the pedwalk toward the corner of an intersecting skylane. She had wanted to take him for a long time, since the day he had returned so mysterious and powerful from his five-year sojourn to study the Force. And now she would have him-perhaps not in the way she had once desired, but she would have him.
Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice wrote:"What about Jacen's destiny?" Alema asked. "Without you to guide him..."
"Jacen has the knowledge to complete his journey." Lumiya separated out an orange wire that ran from the detonator housing into a relay box on the head of the missile cylinder. "All that remains for him is to make his sacrifice."
Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice wrote:He'd spent five years learning the most arcane Force techniques in the galaxy, but-again-he didn't have to use a single Force skill to gain power this time.
Lumiya, Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice wrote:He was talking about timing. He had full mastery of the Force, but he seemed to enjoy using the limited tricks of ordinary people.
Jacen Solo, Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice wrote:Meanwhile, Mara was challenging him, pinpointing herself in the tunnels that ran deep under the Kavan countryside, thinking she was still an A-list assassin and that she could take someone who had complete mastery of the Force.
Starwars.com wrote:Jacen Solo has embarked on a journey to the dark side. Long out of step with the rest of the new Jedi order, the powerful son of Han and Leia has traveled to the ends of the galaxy, uncovering new and potentially dangerous avenues of Force study.
(https://web.archive.org/web/20071211095857/http://www.starwars.com/eu/lit/novel/news20061003.html)
Fate of the Jedi: Ascension wrote:They had learned much of what Jacen learned; skills that no other Jedi had known for centuries, if ever. And they had learned that his fall had been inevitable.
- More quotes:
- Dark Nest I: The Joiner King wrote:It was a rebuke to which Jacen had grown accustomed during his five-year search for the true nature of the Force. The Jen-saarai, the Aing-Tii, even the Witches of Dathomir had all said similar things to him-usually when his questions about their view of the Force grew too probing.
…
Jacen performed a quieting exercise he had learned from the Theran Listeners, then focused on the call.Dark Nest I: The Joiner King wrote:Jaina could not argue. During Jacen's five-year journey, she had felt him growing steadily stronger in the Force-but also more distant and isolated, like a hermit retreating to his mountaintop.Dark Nest III: The Swarm War wrote:Luke could sense that Tahiri was telling the truth, but even without the Force he would have believed her. While Jacen had returned from his five-year sojourn with remarkable skills, he had also returned a far more mysterious person, often deflecting or flatly refusing to answer questions about his experiences. It was as though he believed that no one who had not taken such a retreat for himself was entitled to share in the wisdom it yielded.Legacy of the Force: Betrayal wrote:Third, your specialized training in alternative philosophies of the Force makes you more versatile than many other Jedi-than some Jedi Masters, in fact-making it harder to stop you."Legacy of the Force: Betrayal wrote:"I know he [Luke] hasn't studied every esoteric Force discipline you have," Leia said, "but that doesn't mean he's wrong. His opinions shouldn't be disregarded."Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines Publisher's Summary wrote:Jacen, now a complete master of the Force, has his own plans to bring order to the galaxy. Guided by his Sith mentor, Lumiya, and with Luke's young son Ben at his side, Jacen embarks on the same path that his grandfather Darth Vader once did.Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines wrote:"Jacen plays fast and loose with his own powers. He projected himself into the future, and don't tell me that didn't worry you. I don't want Ben learning that kind of thing-and do we really know what skills Jacen learned while he was away? He's changed, Mara. I feel it."Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines wrote:Jacen shrugged, once again the thoughtful man who felt compassion for every living thing. "Mom was trying to hold the Falcon's hull together so-I suppose I added my Force-strength to it through her. Almost like we did against the Killiks to deflect their weapons."
"Almost," said Luke. No, they hadn't quite done that: channeling the Force was a new one to him. "You've developed some impressive skills lately."Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines wrote:"You knew my grandfather. Did he have to pass this way?"
"Yes."
"Then why didn't he succeed?"
"He wanted power. Not political power, but the power to shape reality for those he loved. It diverted him and it flawed a great man. He also lacked your breadth of education in the Force. That's my belief."Legacy of the Force: Tempest wrote:"I know what you were doing, Dad. You had to test me." Ben returned the lightsaber to his utility belt, then added, "But I'm not going dark. Anger has no control over me-and neither does fear."
Luke nodded. "I can see that, Ben. I still want you to take a proper Master."
"Then make Jacen a Master," Ben replied. "He knows more about the Force than anybody."
"That's not going to happen, Ben," Luke said.
Ben considered this a moment, then spoke in a resigned voice. "I guess that's your decision, Dad. You're the Grand Master."
…
Mara let out her breath in exasperation. "When could Jacen have prepared him?" she demanded. Luke had in-tentionally summoned Ben at a time when Jacen would be tied up in a meeting with Cal Omas and Admiral Niathal "And you'd better not be telling me you wouldn't sense an act in your own son."
"No, he wasn't acting." Luke stood and led the way toward the exit. "But I'd still like to see Ben apprenticed properly. His training is suffering."
"That's true," Mara said. While Ben's self-defense skills might be adequate, his sparring had shown a lack of confidence in his control. "But has it occurred to you that Ben might be right? Maybe you should make Jacen a Master."
Luke stopped at the door and scowled at her as though she were a fool or a traitor-or both.
"Come on, Skywalker," Mara said. "You can't dispute Jacen's Force knowledge. And being a Master might pull him back into the Jedi order. It might give you some control over him-at the least, you'd have a formal means to oversee how he's training Ben."Legacy of the Force: Exile wrote:"You're talking about battle meditation. You've mentioned it before."
"No. Battle meditation is something many very accomplished Force-users, Jedi and Sith, can do. Consider battle meditation to be the learner. The technique I'm talking about is the master. It is the capacity to sense, to coordinate, just by the power of the mind and the will. This is the ability that comes with the assumption of the title of Master of the Sith."
He continued to stare at her. "You aren't the Master. So you can't teach it to me."
"I'm not, but I can. A blind woman who was once sighted can still experience colors in her memory. I learned everything there was to learn about this power ... I can just never wield it." Lumiya stared down at her limbs. Her expression did not suggest that she felt betrayed by them, by their robotic nature-only that they were a bit disappointing.
Jacen considered it. "Am I ready?"
"In all other ways, yes. But you have to make the sacrifice of love. And then you must take your Sith name, to reforge yourself."Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice wrote:Jacen had learned patience and a dozen ways to calm his mind in crisis from as many esoteric Force-using schools. He didn't want to use any of them.Legacy of the Force: Revelation wrote:He was no fool, he wasn't mad, and he had explored more arcane Force techniques than any member of the Jedi Council. He did not fall prey to tricks.
There are many quotes detailing how one’s knowledge of the Force has direct impact on fighting prowess, but here are a couple.
Overall Force knowledge is said to have a direct impact on combat ability, even regardless whether any specific ability is being used. This makes sense, as the more you connect with the Force in its various ways, and the more knowledge you have of using the Force, the easier it is to streamline the use of the Force not only in a way that's generally better, but tailored to your personal preferences.
Star Wars: Mysteries of the Jedi wrote:Yoda's knowledge of the Force makes him just as powerful as Darth Sidious.
Star Wars: Jedi Battles wrote:When the most powerful Jedi battled against the most powerful Sith, the two sides of the Force clashed in spectacular style. The devastating fury of the Sith Lord was matched by Yoda's knowledge of the Force, making the two equally fierce.
CONCLUSION
Here are the main points:
1) Darth Caedus receives massive growth leading into Invincible
2) Luke's empowerment of Jaina (Juke) in her first fight with Caedus is to a degree that represents an actual fight with Luke vs Caedus. Luke is aiming to be as close as possible to the visions of Luke vs Caedus without him actually fighting Caedus, atleast not physically. This is further reinforced by both Jaina and Caedus independently reach the conclusion that Luke had really been there, Leia being unable to sense Luke's presence, Luke recalling every blow that Jaina sustained without even looking, as well as Saba's comments that Jaina is the Sword and Luke is the Jedi, making the Sword of the Jedi. Jaina lives up to this prophecy by the end of the book.
3) Caedus would be prepared for Luke's strength by the end of Invincible, and if Jaina is expected to win against Caedus, it'd have to be her own way.
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