The Force seized his mind.

Awful visions flashed before his eyes, things he could not understand, cast in a sickly purple light. Jedi, many he knew, friends and colleagues, horribly mutilated, fighting battles they could not win against awful things that lived in the dark. Things that lived in the deep.

The Jedi, those who survived, were fleeing. Not retreating, but fleeing.

The visions spiked into his mind, the Force screaming some sort of warning or prophecy at him, shearing through his consciousness, and they would not stop.

Elzar fell to his knees, blood dripping from his nose. This did not feel like an unknowable, avoidable vision of the future.

This felt inevitable. Certain.

Evil, horror, sweeping across the galaxy like the tide.

He saw Jedi dying, screaming, and himself last of all, unable to escape what was coming.

Slowly, agonizingly, the vision receded. Elzar returned to himself. He gasped, and more blood spattered the deck.

What had he just seen? What had he seen?

The worst was not the chaos; the battles; the pain; the unknown, monstrous horrors surging out of the dark. It was what he had seen on the face of every single Jedi the Force had shown him.

The greatest enemy of all.

Fear.

For Hannah, Sam, Chris, and Jay, who love Star Wars as much as I do

Acknowledgments

Star Wars projects, of any type, are always a collective effort—from films to games to toys to this very novel…it takes a galaxy. That’s particularly true of Light of the Jedi, which is the result of literally years of work by the group of people first introduced to the world as a collective of five writers working on the mysterious Project Luminous. I didn’t know any of them personally when the project that would eventually become The High Republic began, though I knew their work. Now, though, it’s rare that a day goes by that I don’t talk to this incredibly talented group of writers: Claudia Gray, Justina Ireland, Daniel José Older, and Cavan Scott. They began as my colleagues and became my friends, and this book would not exist without their constant encouragement, vetting, and wonderful ideas.

Next, of course, the maestro who put Project Luminous together, and has sheltered his little group of writers from countless storms and kept us going since those first emails started circulating about what Luminous would become: Michael Siglain, creative director at Lucasfilm Publishing. He’s the best, and I guarantee no one who’s ever met him would tell you any different. He brought me in for this ride—brought all of us in—and I couldn’t be more thankful.