Aldor's Eye - Part I

Chapter V - The Dream

At first, Din tried to ignore Aldor's lectures on the nature of the Force. He sat in on Grogu's lessons regularly, and the Force was always under discussion. For this fact alone, Din quickly realized he couldn't ignore the concepts, and did everything he could to dismiss them. Finally, after weeks of sitting in on Force lessons, he had to stop telling himself he was paying attention for the Kid's benefit alone.

Din wanted to understand this power the Jedi believed the Universe lived and died by. It sounded like some form of electromagnetism to him, and when he began to consider it in those terms, it started to make an alarming amount of sense. Before long, he came to appreciate the concept for its elegance, and found with some shock that many of the Jedi's core tenets lined up neatly with his own. Not those burned in his brain by the Mandalorians necessarily, but Din's own Creed, developed over thirty years of reflection and experience.

He certainly couldn't deny the effect it had on his boy either. The kid was stronger, and he'd grown at least four centimeters. He now preferred to hop along beside either or both of his humans when they were walking together, and left his pod in the YT. He used more words of Basic and engaged more with his companions and his surroundings. He'd grown braver. More confident. Under Aldor's guidance, Grogu finally learned not only how to bolster his own strength, but also how to focus it "through the Force."

When he began to see these results, Din's mind became more comfortable with the concepts he'd learned, and he found himself trying to think like a Jedi. In terms of connection and energy, light and dark. Electromagnetism and dark matter. The more he accepted these ideas, the more clearly he began to hear a faint, wordless voice from his son's head that opened up a world of communication between the two of them. In light of his new respect for the Force, Din embraced it, and used it with the new terms he'd learned when he couldn't help but listen to Aldor. This new educational strategy seemed to secure the boy's understanding of Mandalorian lessons and engineering exercises, and he had finally begun to advance in those studies as well.

Rather unexpectedly, it seemed Din had learned a few things through the Force as well. When he looked back on his disturbing experience with the Dark Saber within the context of the Dark side and the Light, he began to understand what happened to him at the Forge. How he sensed the Saber after he'd forced it out of the Armorer's hand. The power he felt flowing through him when he took her head off with it. How it tried to make him believe he wanted to be the Mand'alor. How he resisted it. He saw the wisdom of tempering Mandalorian severity with Jedi subtlety, and was surprised to discover he had done exactly that in his own way. Maybe not with the Force, but a force that was native to him. If nothing else, he could use this new perspective on his own experience to instruct his son's.

Among the many things Din learned over their first three months on the Eye, not the least of them was the nature of Jedi politics. Given what Aldor told him about the last days of the Jedi Order, it was clear the Jedi had lost their way as hopelessly as the Mandalorians. In recounting everything that led to their destruction, Aldor made no scruples in sharing her feelings on this subject. She had many differences of opinion with her former Masters. She confessed this was not a rare thing among wayward Jedi. Arrogance, ignorance, and blindness were the running themes in her displeasures with the Order she'd once belonged to. A carelessness some Generals displayed with the Clones. An uneasy understanding of where they should intervene and where they shouldn't. Betrayals of trust. Contradictions in belief. She would always bookend these grievances by claiming not to be an expert, but Din always found the sense in her perceptions. They were remarkably similar to his feelings about the Mandalorians.

This was under discussion often when he would join her on an errand to gather grass for fabric or when he helped her dress a forest roe one or both of them had taken down. When he came to offer his help in these instances when Grogu was napping or studying in the YT, Aldor spoke a bit more candidly about her reasons for rejecting the label of Jedi. She said power had taken precedence over knowledge among the Jedi Order, and the entire Galaxy had suffered for it. When they became too powerful and too big to see where they began and where they ended, they let evil worm its way into the Galactic government, and spent so long spinning their wheels they simply let it destroy them. "Fucking foolish." The common coda to these rants was always spoken softly, half under her breath. There was disappointment in it. Like she was frustrated with a stubborn child or irritated with a questionable command from a parent.