The Jedi Exile: Ahsoka Tano (Part 1)

“There is no emotion, there is peace. There is no ignorance, there is knowledge. There is no passion, there is serenity. There is no chaos, there is harmony. There is no death, there is the force.”

This meant everything to Ahsoka Tano once, nothing else mattered, her life was supposed to reflect this code. But now she has to create her own path, her own destiny.

The Jedi were an order comprised of many Knights and Masters, For over a thousand generations the Jedi were guardians of peace and justice, and now they were all gone.

The Jedi were once her family, but that all changed…It all changed so quickly. But it’s over now. The past is the past, and it should be kept there.

Ahsoka brought her mind back from the past to the present. The present being “Old Jho’s Pit Stop”, a small cantina located in a settlement called Jhothal in the middle of the outer rim planet Lothal.

The place wasn’t huge, but that was no surprise since it was after all a cantina. It was also darker than the cantina’s she had visited before. But one thing that caught Ahsoka’s attention was the recycled Clone Wars junk laying around.

Ahsoka wanted to stop thinking about the past, but here it was all around her. Perhaps that’s what drew her here in the first place.

“Would you like something to drink?” the Ithorian bartender asked.

“I’ll have a Talmog, if you don’t mind.” Ahsoka responded.

“Coming right up.”

While Ahsoka was waiting for her drink, she noticed that behind the bar sat a Clone Trooper’s helmet. As she looked at it, she began to think of Rex.

The Clone trooper captain was a close friend of hers…and her master, Anakin Skywalker.

The thought of her old master made Ahsoka feel depressed. Anakin was more than just her master, but her friend, almost like a big brother in a way.

When the Jedi had expelled Ahsoka from the order, Anakin was the only one who still believed in her. And the only one who was willing to help her in her time of need. Not because she was a fellow Jedi, but because he cared for her, as a friend or a family member cares for another.

The Jedi always discouraged emotion and attachment. But Anakin was different. He was caring, compassionate, sometimes to a fault. But even when he would admit that his emotion got the better of him, he never really changed.

She’d never forget the time Anakin had risked her life, the life of his soldiers, and his own life to save his astromech droid R2-D2.

And when he had saved that droid, there was no regret that she saw of. Because in Anakin’s mind, he didn’t save some tin can, he saved a friend.

At the time Ahsoka was upset with Anakin, but looking back at it now, it’s something that she admired him for.

The memories of Anakin brought more depression and anxiety on her when she remembered…that he was gone. That the entire Jedi order whom she had swore her life to was gone.

Anakin, Obi-Wan, Aayala, Luminara, and Master Plo Koon. The Jedi she had missed the most were now gone. And she didn’t know why.

The holoreports had claimed that the Jedi had attempted to assassinate the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic and had left him scarred.

But none of it made sense. The Jedi changed a lot during the war, after years of fighting, the peacekeepers were a shadow of what they once were. But assassins?

And then came what most call “The Great Jedi Purge”. Ahsoka hated that name. There was nothing “Great” about it and “Purge” made it seem like that the Jedi were a disease and that they needed to be wiped out.

The Jedi were fanatical in some aspects, but they weren’t the danger that the Empire led the rest of the galaxy to believe. And of course, all of this couldn’t be said out loud. For the very mention of Jedi would cause suspicion.

10 years.

10 years, and it seems that Jedi had become an ancient order in a past that no one wants to remember.

The Ithorian bartender finally brought the drink to Ahsoka. She didn’t even look at the glass to examine it’s color, it’s texture, or even the size of the glass itself.

The drink was strong, but good. Ahsoka sat for a few minutes, and after a while, the drink’s effect kicked in. Ahsoka’s heart felt like it caught on fire.

But she didn’t cough, or ask for something cool to drink to wash away the effect. Instead, she sat there and focused on the pain. She didn’t worry about a war that had long ended, an order that had abandoned her in her time of need, or friends that were long gone.

The pain she felt from distracted her from the pain that hurt worse. The pain that had sunk in for years and kept resurfacing. In this brief moment, the burning pain from the Talmog allowed Ahsoka to focus on something else, and for one minute, Ahsoka Tano felt at peace.