Childhood on Koros Major and early days with the Jedi

The nights are quiet here on Batuu. Quiet in a way the Force no longer is. The stars above the outlands glimmer the same as they did over Koros Major — the planet of my birth, though no one calls it that anymore. Now it’s Empress Teta, though the bones of the old name still echo in the stone arches and forgotten catacombs beneath the cities. When I was a boy, it was simply “Koros,” and it was home.

I was born in the merchant district of Cinnagar, raised in a narrow apartment above a spice trader’s stall. My mother, Nira, was a slicer — one of the best in the mid-spires — and my father, Keryn, worked security for the Planetary Guild Exchange. We weren’t wealthy, but we had enough. Enough to keep the roof from leaking and the pantry full. Enough to keep me away from the spice trade and the gangs that ran the underlevels. Enough to dream.

Even now, I can still smell the iron-tinged rain falling on duracrete streets. I remember the thrum of repulsorlifts and the chatter of a dozen languages in the plazas. Koros Major was a crossroads of culture, of commerce, of ancient legacy. Before the Republic, before the Jedi even set foot in its spires, the planet bore the weight of kings and Sith warlords. You could feel it in the stone — old power, long buried.

I was five years old the day the Jedi came for me.
 

I had always known something was… different. When I was very young, I could feel people coming before they turned the corner. I would get headaches in crowds, feel surges of joy or anger that weren’t mine. One day, I stopped a cart from crushing a tooka kitten — not with my hands, but with a scream. The cart froze in mid-air.

Word reached the Temple on Coruscant quickly. Too quickly. One of the Order’s Watchers had been stationed in the sector, quietly monitoring for signs of sensitivity. Within a week, a Jedi Knight came — tall, wrapped in tan and brown, a lightsaber at his side and calm like still water in his eyes. His name was Master Denaro Vesh.

He knelt to me in our apartment, held out his hand, and asked me if I’d like to see the stars.

My mother wept. My father refused to look at me. I still remember his back as he walked into the other room.

They gave me a satchel, a blanket, and a worn stuffed bantha. I never saw them again.

The Temple on Coruscant was nothing like the cities of Koros. It was colder — even in the sunlit halls. Structured. Clean. Too clean. But beautiful, in its own way. Towering archways, endless libraries, gardens that whispered of serenity and stillness. I was assigned to the Beran Clan — younglings barely older than myself. We learned together. We meditated, played, trained with low-powered sabers until our arms ached and our feet blistered.

But the Force… the Force sang to me.

My first years were bright. I excelled in sensing and telekinetic disciplines. Master Vesh checked in occasionally, though he rarely stayed long. My clanmates called me “the Listener,” because I could feel emotions like ripples on a lake. I didn’t speak much — not because I was shy, but because I was listening. To the quiet pull of the Living Force. To the whisper of thoughts before they formed words.

And I missed my mother’s voice. The streets of Koros. The scent of rain on old stone.

I was eight the first time I had the dream.

A planet, cracked in half like a rotten egg. Fire and shadows. A black sun rising behind the spires of the Jedi Temple. I stood at the edge of a battlefield, lightsabers — blue, green, and red — littering the ground like fallen leaves. And in the distance, a face I couldn’t see, only feel: pain, betrayal, and fire. Always fire.

When I told the Temple Seers, they dismissed it as a symbol of fear and detachment — common for children taken from their homes. “Let go,” they said. “Embrace the now.”
 

But the dream never left me.
 

Now, what feels like a lifetime later, I wonder if that dream was not a warning, but a summons. A glimpse of the firestorm that would engulf us all.

The Republic is gone. The Temple is ash. The friends I trained beside, dead or hunted. And I, a ghost hiding in the wilds of Batuu, left to sift through the shards of memory and purpose.

But I hold on to those early years — not out of grief, but gratitude. I was loved. First by my parents, and then — for a time — by the Order. I learned the ways of peace. Of discipline. Of listening.

And in that listening, I still find slivers of the Force. Faint, fractured… but alive.
And sometimes, when the wind moves just right over the mesas, I swear I hear the stars again.

— Vall Juridian, Former Jedi Knight
Outcast. Survivor.
Batuu, Year 20 After the Purge

“We are not only shaped by the Force, but by the places we loved before we knew its name.”