Davin Dor strode briskly through the temple gardens, drink in one hand, the latest trashy romance novel in the other. He was exhausted, three weeks of report writing had tired even his normally jovial nature to the point of snapping. He rounded the corner and sighed, his favourite tree was taken. A small girl wearing the normal mud brown and sand grey of the initiates was sitting cross legged under the tree, her face a picture of deep concentration. Even her hands were folded neatly on top of each knee, in a perfect copy of the pictures used in Jedi text books. This wasn’t the first day that Davin had come down to find this little girl sitting under the tree. In fact he was beginning to think that she wasn’t real at all, just a new garden ornament of Master Quillan’s. Swallowing his annoyance, Davin went to walk out of the garden. As he turned a twig snapped under his foot and the girls eyes flew open. She looked guiltily up at the Jedi Knight before her, her long, loose, brown curls bobbing as she did so. “Youngling.” Davin said using his “serious knight” voice as An-Lin liked to call it. He nodded his head briefly as a kind of greeting. The child squirmed. He knew that sort of squirm, she was obviously doing something wrong and had been caught. “Sorry” she whispered getting up. She brushed the front of her pants off and picked up the data pad that had been lying beside her. With a shudder Davin realized it was a shiny new copy of “Twenty-seven rules of the Jedi order”, he had a strong dislike of that book. Most probably from having it waved under his noise every second day while a master lectured him on which one of the twenty-seven rules he had broken that time. Last time he had counted he had broken a total of twenty-six of the rules, some a number of times. He realized the girl had been blabbering on at him and he hadn’t been listening. “I’m sorry…I was…I was meditating.” She said. “Meditating?” Davin raised an eyebrow inquisitively. “Master Yoda said that you have to meditate to become a Jedi Knight. So I was.” He nodded slightly in acknowledgement, “What else did Master Yoda say?” “Well, he said that you need to let go because holding onto things was a path to the darkside. He also said that…” It’s a wonder she managed to get Master Yoda to be so eloquent, Davin thought as the girl began to prattled on again. He listened nodding his head a couple of times and then bent down putting his drink and data pad on the grass and picking up a stone from the path. Slowly he began to polish the side of the rock against his pants. As the girl kept talking, Davin kept polishing only stopping every now and again to look at it. Finally the tiny initiate stopped and there was an odd pause where Davin stared hard at the surface of the rock he had been cleaning. “What are you doing?” She asked curiously. “I’m making a mirror.” Davin replied straight faced and serious. “You can’t make a mirror from polishing a rock.” The girls face was scornful. “And you won’t become a Jedi from meditating all day.” Davin replied back just as scornfully. The girl pouted and stared at the ground her soft brown curls framing her face. “Master Yoda said…” she began again. “Stop.” Davin held up the stone, he was beginning to think that Master Yoda had a lot to answer for if all initiates were like this. “Listen, all the Jedi order want from you is what you think up here,” he pointed to her head and then to her heart, “and temper that by what you feel in here. You need to be educated and you need to be focused but you always have to follow your conscience. Following what you know is the right path, that’s what makes a Jedi.” Davin poked at Tara’s database unable to bring himself to touch the reviled book. “And if you have to circumvent the rules to do so, then so be it.” “You mean break the rules?” The girl said unconvinced, “A Jedi shouldn’t break the rules. That’s rule number one.” Davin had to resist rolling his eyes at the little party pooper that stood in front of him. “No, I said circumvent, there is a difference,” he said patiently, “sometimes it takes someone their entire life to work that out.” The girl looked up at him her green eyes confused. Davin smiled, at her and tossed the stone up in the air and caught it again. The girl opened her mouth, but a voice from up the path stopped her from speaking. “Tara!” The voice sounded annoyed. A young crèche knight stormed up the path towards them, her arms crossed over her chest. Tara shrank looking chastised. “Tara Tarindae, you should have been in class. We’ve talked about that before. You won’t become a Jedi if you don’t know anything.” “Ahh, rule number six. So you already break rules.” Davin smiled at Tara oddly triumphant in his victory over the tiny brown haired initiate. She glared back at him, her eyes alight with indignation. Tara grasped her data pad tighter as the crèche knight approached. “I’m sorry if she was disturbing you.” The knight apologized to Davin. He shrugged. “She was teaching me about how to become a Jedi.” Davin smiled at the young knight and then at Tara. The crèche knight harrumphed and began leading Tara away by the elbow. “Hey Tara!” Davin yelled as she was led away. She turned and he threw the rock gently towards her. She caught it and looked at him with puzzled eyes, an expression that was beginning to become a bit too familiar. “Think about what I said, and when you make that rock into a mirror come back and tell me how.” She nodded and turned wearily trudging off after the crèche Master. As they rounded the corner, Davin gave a weary sigh, took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose before he sank down against the rough bark of the tree. He took a sip of his drink, still marveling at the turn of events and opened the holo novel. A wry smile lit his features as a stray thought flitted across his mind. Tree at last, he thought. Tree at last. *********** Three weeks later Davin Dor smiled to himself as he nestled back against the tree. He was exhausted but at least the report for the senate was in on time and his book on the Narvian customs was coming along nicely. Taking off his glasses he closed his eyes and rested his head back against the tree reveling in the warmth of the sunshine on his face. It had been three weeks since the incident with Tara and although he had kept his eye out for the little initiate he hadn’t seen her. Davin let the warmth wash over him and tried to resist the urge to fall asleep. He knew he shouldn’t, knew that the data pad was waiting for him at home and that as part of completing his trials he had also sworn to finish writing that sith spawned thing, but leaning against the tree it was almost too hard not to just relax and go to sleep. Just as Davin was drifting off there was the crunch of booted feet on gravel. He hoped they weren’t looking for him, the last thing he wanted at the moment was to be found by a knight with an errand in the archive or an irretrievable data pad. The crunching noise stopped just in front of him and Davin sighed. It was a knight and an irretrievable data pad, he just knew it. Davin sighed again and went to pick up his glasses. Just as his finger tips brushed the ground a blinding light flashed across the back of his eyelids, turning his world into a swirling distorted pattern of red dots. Davin winced, even though his eyes were closed. The light flashed again and again rather erratically until it finally settled exactly on his right eye. Shading his eyes with one hand, Davin searched frantically for his glasses with his other. Finally he slipped them on and spent a few bewildering moments blinking furiously to combat the little red dots that were threatening to blind him. Finally the young Jedi Knight could mostly see again. Releasing his anger at the practical joker to the force, Davin looked around. Tara stood in the path, bouncing slightly on her toes her face an odd mixture of triumph, studiousness and excitement. “Davin Dae,” she intoned seriously, “first year knight of the Jedi Temple, studied under Master Nikkia. Spent most of his padawanship on the outer rim studying the Nician peoples. Was thought by some to be unsuitable for knightship due to the limited amount of time he spent within the Jedi Temple and worse his seeming inability to attend classes when he was here. Also has a bad reputation for breaking the rules, and a fondness for liquor and spicy food.” There was a slight grin on her face as she finished, a grin that Davin didn’t much like. “Who told you that.” Davin growled unbecomingly. “It’s amazing what you can find out from asking,” Tara said to him, the grin still firmly in place, “I wouldn’t have guessed that you would be responsible for that dint in the archive, that made for quite an interesting story. Master Yoda said…” “Are you here for a reason?” Davin snapped trying to push away his irritation but not quite succeeding. He didn’t want anyone to telling any curious initiate about the ‘library incident’ especially Master Yoda. “I was thinking about what you said and I realized that you don’t become a Jedi by meditation alone. You don’t become a Jedi by thought alone. You don’t become a Jedi because of your grip on the living force, because of your focus on the here and now. You become a Jedi because of your compassion for others and because you realize that there is a greater good outside of yourself.” “You grasped all that in three weeks by yourself?” Davin asked incredulously. “No, I researched it in the library and then made up my own mind.” Tara’s voice sounded like she was trying to explain something simple to a three year old initiate who was at least one bantha short of a herd. She threw what she had been holding to Davin, who caught it easily. He stared at it for a moment not comprehending what it was. “It’s a rock.” He said softly, not quite grasping the meaning. “It’s also a mirror.” Tara replied, “If you turn it over you can see yourself. It makes you look weird but it works.” Davin turned the rock over in his hands. It had been cut smoothly down the middle, revealing oddly formed blue and white crystals. Holding it up to his face he realized he could actually see himself in the stone. “It’s not the rock I gave you.” He accused Tara. She shrugged, an almost eloquent gesture. “I circumvented the rules.” She said smiling, "I saw it in the archive and I asked to borrow it." For the first time in many weeks Davin laughed, a throaty chuckle escaping from his throat. He had been bested at his own game by someone barely old enough to tie her own bootlace. “So Mistress Knight, what else do you want?” He asked her smiling. There was a long pause in which he got the idea she was summoning the courage to ask something momentous. “Well, I know that you don’t have a padawan.” She began. “No, I don’t. What does that have to do with the price of blue milk?” “I just thought…I thought….” She paused again, “I thought since I won your challenge that you might take me as your….as your…as your padawan.” She finally blurted out. Tara took a huge breath at the last word and stared at him, her eyes boring into him. Davin was amused at her forwardness. Closing his eyes he concentrated on the Force letting it fill him to the core. Releasing his emotions, he centered himself. He didn’t feel ready for a padawan, but the force assured him that it was the right thing to do. Davin opened his eyes and smiled at her, confident in his own decision. Despite his decision he couldn’t resist teasing her one more time. “What made you think that I’d chose you?” He asked, “What if I had another initiate in mind?” The girl wavered and for a moment looked like she was on the verge of tears. She swallowed a few times, before answering in a tremulous voice. “But Master Yoda said…” Yes,Davin decided, That small green Master had a lot to answer for. |
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| Lessons Learnt By Kit |